Why Women Kill: Comparative Analysis of Typologies of Homicides Committed by Women Based on Texts of Court Verdicts and Internet Media

• In Event: Media and social construction of crime II

Abstract

In almost all societies, women commit significantly fewer crimes than men, which is also true for homicides. Perhaps it is the low proportion of homicides committed by women that explains the fact that those have been studied much less than homicides committed by men. However, the very nature of homicides differs significantly by gender, which is why direct extrapolation of the characteristics of “male” homicides to “female” homicides is impossible. In order to fill the above-mentioned research gap, a typology of “female” homicides in Russia was previously developed based on 300 court verdicts. Court verdicts as a source of data, undoubtedly, have a number of shortcomings, but they allow us to identify somewhat objective patterns related to the socio-demographic characteristics of the women who killed, as well as the motives and circumstances of the homicides.
At the same time, it is known from the literature that social events are represented in the media asymmetrically. One of the most famous cases is the missing white woman syndrome revealed in the United States. As for homicides committed by women, it is found that the media prefer to report more often on “female” homicides in cases where something out of the ordinary occurs, violating gender stereotypes.
This study proposes to build a typology of “female” homicides based on Internet media, in order to further compare this typology with the previous one, based on court verdicts, and to find biases in the representation of homicides. As a result, it will be found by what criteria the bias in the representation of “female” homicides in the media occurs. It is expected that “unusual” “female” homicides, e. g. in which there were several victims, atypical methods of committing murder, will be covered more often, while “normal” murders will remain outside the attention of the media.

Author

• Anna Lulikian, Higher School of Economics