The authors used narrative data from court and police records of homicides in Russia to compare alcohol-and non-alcohol-related incidents on victim, offender, and event characteristics. Binary logistic regression models were estimated for neither participant drinking, offender drinking, victim drinking, and both drinking. Consistent differences were found between alcohol-and non-alcoholrelated homicides across the models. Alcohol-related homicides were significantly more likely to occur overnight, to occur on weekends, and to result from acute arguments and significantly less likely to occur between strangers, to be profit motivated or premeditated, and to be carried out to hide other crimes. No significant differences between the drinking and nondrinking samples were found for victim's gender, primary weapon used, or event location. The authors place these findings into the literature on the situational context of crime and create a tentative typology of homicide events, grounded in the results of their inductive approach, based on alcohol use by homicide offenders and victims. Keywords alcohol; homicide; RussiaIn this study, we examined the contextual characteristics of alcohol-and non-alcohol-related homicides. Most studies of the alcohol-violence association are conducted at either the individual or the population level. In the former, individuals with different drinking statuses are compared with one another in terms of the likelihood of their involvement in violent events. In the latter, neighborhoods, cities, countries, or demographic groups are compared with one another (or within-unit comparisons are made over time) to determine if differences in aggregate consumption levels are associated with higher violence rates. Although some caveats are necessary (e.g., binge drinking vs. general consumption, type of beverage), studies at both levels of analysis have provided considerable evidence that alcohol consumption and aggression are related.The contextual setting of violent events has received considerably less attention when examining the alcohol-violence association. Although research on victim, offender, and event characteristics is important to our understanding of the causal links between alcohol consumption and violence (Meier, Kennedy, and Sacco 2001), relatively few studies have compared situational factors in violent incidents involving alcohol and those in which alcohol was not involved (Carcach and Conroy 2001;Pernanen 1991;Wells and Graham 2003), and fewer have specifically compared alcohol-and non-alcohol-related homicides (Lunetta, Penttilä, and Sarna 2001). In this study, we used a unique set of homicide narratives drawn from court and police records from Russia to compare alcohol-and non-alcohol-related homicide incidents with respect to victim, offender, and event characteristics. Aside from contextualizing our results within the existing criminal event literature, we also use them to provide a tentative grounded typology of homicide events based on the drinking status of victims a...
While hazardous drinking is known to be a leading cause of premature mortality among working-age Russian males, it is unwise to ignore other factors. Given the substantial social and economic impacts in Russia of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it is important to examine the health effects of SES and marital status and other social forces in the nation. Our results reveal that while Russia has a very different past in terms of medicine, public health and economic institutions, it currently faces public health threats that follow similar patterns to those found in Western nations.
Relatively little is known of the distributions of homicide event characteristics in non-Western nations in which women relative to men are involved. This article utilizes unique homicide narratives drawn from Russian court and police records to compare homicide victim, offender, and event characteristics by sex of victim and separately by sex of offender. Results from logistic regression show that homicides in which a female was the victim or offender were more likely to occur between intimates and to occur in the home, whereas homicides involving males were more likely to occur in a public place, to be alcohol-related, to involve a firearm, and to involve a victim and offender who did not know each other well. These results not only present an important first glimpse at women as homicide victims and offenders in Russia specifically, but also provide a point of comparison with findings from similar analyses undertaken in the West, and present further initial observations upon which to construct a cohesive theory about female involvement in serious violent events.
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