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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   22004 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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Just today read a story in the news about a guy who poured boiling water on his sleeping wife and hit her over the head with a claw hammer. No further details as to why he did that, and he's awaiting a psychiatric report, but the general rule of thumb is: if you see a story about "partner attacked by current or ex-partner", it's female attacked by male. Women seem to attack children (see that murder of a child by the stepmother I mentioned on here before). Sometimes yes, it's the woman attacks the man, but mostly it's man attacks woman.

And it's hard to tell! Forty years married, then one night he pours boiling water on top of you! Very few people can foresee this happening if the person has otherwise been normal all their life.

Your link is interesting, thanks for providing it. Reminds me of the golden age of British murders, where women were as likely to bump off husbands as husbands to bump off wives.

On the other hand, this data set claims that for intimate partner homicide, it's majorly women:

American homicide victims are mostly men, except when the killer is an intimate partner.

Almost 20,000 Americans were murdered in 2023.

The chart shows the homicide rates among male and female victims. Men were 2.7 times more likely to die by homicide than women.

We can see that for men, most of these murders were committed by friends, neighbors, acquaintances, or strangers (shown as “Other” in the chart) rather than a partner or family member. The opposite is true for women: intimate partners are the biggest threat.

Because the risks are different, the most effective responses may differ too. For women, reducing intimate partner violence is a key priority. For men, prevention is more often tied to crime, gangs, and violence among acquaintances or strangers.

The potential explanation for the difference in American spousal homicide sounds untested:

The team examined police files of spousal homicides occurring over the past three decades in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. The sleuths found that while husbands kill in response to revelations of wifely infidelity, women rarely do - even though their spouses are usually more adulterous. Men will also kill their wives as part of a carefully planned murder-suicide or a familicidal massacre.

Women, on the other hand, murder in self-defense. "Unlike men, women kill male partners after years of suffering physical violence, after they have exhausted all available sources of assistance," say Wilson and Daly in Criminology (Vol. 30, No. 2).

So why are women so much more likely to murder their spouses in the U. S. than anywhere else? Contrary to the so-called "old equalizer" hypothesis, which suggests that the availability of guns in U.S. homes neutralizes men's size and strength advantages in lethal marital spats, American SROK rates tend to be lower for shootings than for other spousal homicides.

Nor has the abolition of traditional sex roles led to increased male-like crimes by women. The peculiar symmetry of male and female spouse-killing in America existed 40 years ago, before such social changes.

The spousal SROK is higher in de facto unions than in registered marriages, more prevalent among blacks than among whites, and more common among couples who lived together than apart. Wilson and Daly also discovered that homicide rates increased among couples with significant age differences. And while they can't explain why these factors give wives more than husbands murderous clout, they have a few ideas about what does.

EDIT: [Another](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/104398629401000303 paper has an interesting hypothesis - class and race:

Abstract Wilson and Daly (1992) examined spousal homicide samples from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Great Britain and concluded: "For every 100 U.S. men who kill their wives, about 75 women kill their husbands; this spousal 'sex ratio of killing' (SROK) is more than twice that in other Western nations" (p.189). In this paper we examine the SROK for the United States using data obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) to determine if Wilson and Daly's conclusion can be supported. While confirming Wilson and Daly's summary findings, our results show that the SROK is an elastic measure, varying over time, race, and ethnicity. In many segments of the U.S. population, the SROK is comparable to the sex ratio of killing for other Western nations. Moreover, the differences between various racial groups in the United States are greater than the differences between the U.S. and Canada, Australia and Great Britain, respectively. We suggest that socioeconomic factors and family structure are the major reasons for the disparity in the SROK for different racial groups in the United States and abroad. The implications of our findings for future research are discussed.

...The White SROKs are 48 and 36 for ex-spouse and girlfriend, respectively, and the Black SROKs, 99 and 99 for ex-spouse and boy/girlfriend, respectively. For those couples legally married, the SROKs are 48 and 111, Whites and Blacks, respectively. (Note: The sex ratio of killing for White ex-spouse and those legally married are identical).

That might also explain the number of trans people killed by ex-partner/current partner in the list I posted before; the majority of the trans people on that list were BIPOC. If there are higher intimate partner rates of homicide among black Americans, that translates over for trans as well as cis.

I don't think we disagree, as from what I found men do kill women in relationships anywhere from 2 to 5 times as much, and in fact Wilson and Daly is one of the sources I cited; but given such a low base rate...

Which leads me to think that it might be one (or more) of men under-responding to the danger they're in, women over-estimating the danger they're in, or the self-defence clause is largely true and men really are astronomically less likely to be killed as long as they aren't violent.

For what it's worth, I think the third is almost definitely true to some extent, but I can't imagine it being the entire story, given that intimate partner violence in general also follows a similar trend, at least going by mainstream org press releases (something like 1:3 to 1:4 with likely significant male under-reporting); though there is an interesting part of the literature that contends that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and cases with unilateral domestic violence usually have the woman as the perpetrator, but still finding that violence causing injury (esp. severe injury) is still generally male-dominated, though again not to the extent that we usually assume it is. That aligns with my perception that murders and homicides aside, women are still more likely to be injured purely from biology.

(The review by Straus seems to suggest that actual cases of violence in self-defence are actually quite low:

Self-defense is a motive for only a small proportion of PV perpetrated by women (or men). Using a variety of samples and assessment techniques, these studies find that self-defense characterizes less 20% of female violence. Moreover, in general population samples, men and women are equally represented as using violence in self-defense by both victim and perpetrator report. For example, using a college student population, Follingstad (1991) found that victims of violence reported their aggressors' motivation was self-defense in 1.4% of cases if the offender was a male, and 4.8% of cases if the offender was a female and perpetrators reported that their motivation was self-defensive about 18% of the time (17.7% for men, 18.5% for women). As violence becomes more severe, there are greater gender differences in the use violence in self-defense; however, self-defense is still a motivation for a relatively small proportion of violence. In a sample of couples presenting for marital therapy, Cascardi and Vivian (1995) found that 20% of wives and no husbands attributed their use of severe aggression to self-defense. In cases of homicide, which make up a tiny fraction of PV, it is estimated that 9.6% of homicides perpetrated by women meet legal criteria for self-defense, compared to .5% of homicides perpetrated by men (Felson & Messner, 1998). Other homicide studies use different criteria and estimate higher rates of self-defense (e.g.Mann, 1988; Mann, 1992), though no study has found self-defense for a majority of cases.

so I wonder how the >50% self-defence stat for women comes from. Maybe self-reporting?)

Someone could probably do a systematic review on this. I can't imagine that the studies are generally high quality, though.

the self-defence clause is largely true and men really are astronomically less likely to be killed as long as they aren't violent.

That is the question that remains to be answered. Along with what sounds like "things we don't want to contemplate" about 'greater chance of women killing men in domestic violence if they're poor, black and cohabiting not married" which is the kind of explanation that will ruffle one hell of a lot of feathers. It would be very racist to point out "white women don't kill white men in the same proportion as black women kill black men", for instance.

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