Why Do Women Kill? An Empirical Typology of Homicides Committed by Women in Russia

Homicides committed by women have been studied much less than homicides committed by men, although it has been established that homicides differ significantly by gender and therefore should be studied separately. In recent decades, there has been an increase in interest in the topic: criminologists in Russia and abroad have classified the motives for homicides committed by women. Many of them came to the conclusion that self-defence is a key motive for women - it is also the most studied motive. A common shortcoming of these studies is that motives were classified either separately or with the killer's socio-demographic characteristics and a very limited set of circumstances. Since women mostly kill men from their inner circle with whom they have some history of relationships, this paper proposes to focus on the circumstances leading up to the homicide and consider them together with motives. The purpose of this study is to supplement existing knowledge by developing an empirical typology of homicides committed by women in Russia, based on both motives and circumstances. The study sample consisted of 300 randomly selected court sentences handed down to women in Russia from 2017 to 2021 under Article 105 “Murder” part 1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The texts of the court sentences were manually coded using content analysis, and the types of murders were determined based on latent class analysis. As a result of the study, four types of murders were identified and described: murders committed by women in a cycle of mutual domestic violence; murders committed by victims of domestic violence; murders committed by women as a result of prolonged mutual psychological violence; situational killings.