We address the role of victim cooperation in the prosecution of domestic violence cases in a specialized court in Toronto, Canada. We first examine what factors predict whether a case will proceed to prosecution. We find that, even in a court designed to minimize reliance on victim cooperation through the use of other types of evidence, when prosecutors perceive a victim to be cooperative, the odds that a case will be prosecuted are seven times higher than if a victim is not perceived to be cooperative. In the second part of our analysis, where we seek to determine the correlates of victim cooperation, we find that the two most important determinants of victim cooperation are the availability of videotaped testimony and meetings between victims and victim/witness assistance workers. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research and policy.The last several decades have been marked by careful scrutiny of criminal justice responses to domestic violence. Considerable research has examined both the role of police discretion in responding to domestic violence calls and the effect of arrest on recidivism rates (Fagan 1995;Sherman and Berk 1984; for review of arrest studies, see Fagan et al. 1995;Garner, Fagan, and Maxwell 1995). This attention to police practices, however, has not been paralleled by * We thank the three anonymous Justice Quarterly reviewers for their helpful comments,
People who kill others rarely kill themselves afterwards. When they do, they are more likely to have killed someone with whom they were intimate. Two broad types of suicidal killers have been identified in research that presumes varying degrees of premeditation. Using data on over 700 intimate femicides, the role of premeditation in cases of intimate femicide-suicide compared to killings that do not culminate in a suicide was examined. My results show that premeditation is more likely to occur in cases involving the offenders' suicide, but that evidence of premeditation varies depending upon the type of suicidal killer.
News coverage of intimate partner homicide can reveal and reproduce societal assumptions and beliefs that may influence social and political responses to violence against women. This study analyzes all male-perpetrated intimate partner homicides reported in three daily newspapers in Toronto, Canada within two separate time periods (1975-1979 and 1998-2002) to explore if and how this coverage has changed over time. Results suggest that, in more recent years, news coverage is more likely to report a previous history of intimate partner violence and less likely to employ news that excuses or justifies the perpetrator’s actions. However, coverage continues to employ victim-blaming news frames and to portray intimate partner homicide as an individual event, in part, through the absence of the voices of violence against women organizations, researchers, and service providers as legitimate authorities in both time periods. Thus, news coverage fails to encourage social and political responses to violence against women in intimate relationships that emphasize the need for social structural changes focusing on gender equality.
I investigate whether the degree of intimacy between victims and defendants affects legal responses to violence and how this association has changed over time. Using data on homicides between 1974 and 1996, I examine court outcomes in more than 1,000 cases. I demonstrate that intimacy matters at three criminal justice stages: charging, mode of conviction, and sentencing. However, moving beyond the traditional conceptualization of intimacy, I show that defendants who kill intimates do not always receive the same treatment, nor are all defendants who kill nonintimates treated similarly. Finally, I show that criminal justice leniency toward intimate violence is less evident in recent years.
Femicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, has received an unprecedented rise in international attention in the past decade, prompting increased discussions about how to define and measure femicide. Following a review of definitions and indicators, this article examines the utility of numerous sex/gender-related motives and indicators (SGRMIs) for distinguishing femicide from other homicides as well as the accessibility of these indicators in data sources typically accessed by social science researchers. Specifically, using a comprehensive database whose primary focus is femicide, the presence of SGRMIs in male-perpetrator/female-victim homicide – those killings most closely aligned with the concept of femicide – is compared to other perpetrator–victim gender combinations. Results show that multiple SGRMIs are more common in male-perpetrator/female-victim killings than other homicides, meaning they are useful for distinguishing femicide as a distinct type of violence. However, accessibility to information is weak with high proportions of missing data. Implications of these findings for prevention are discussed, including how data biases may be putting the lives of women and girls at risk and the need to emphasize prevention as the priority for data collection rather than administrative needs of governments.
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