Intimate partner homicide in New Zealand, 2004–2019. Risk markers, demographic patterns, and prevalence
| Published date | 01 June 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/26338076231219271 |
| Author | Martin Daly,Gretchen Perry,Megan Gath |
| Date | 01 June 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Intimate partner homicide
in New Zealand, 2004–2019.
Risk markers, demographic
patterns, and prevalence
Martin Daly
Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster
University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
Gretchen Perry
Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Human Services, University
of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
Megan Gath
Child Well-Being Research Institute, University of Canterbury,
Christchurch, New Zealand
Abstract
Intimate partner homicide (IPH) is a worldwide scourge and a topic of great interest in New
Zealand, but its patterns and prevalence have not been quantified and compared to those in
other comparable countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United
States. Using a data set of the 187 IPH cases known to have occurred in New Zealand
over 16 years, 174 of which involved current or former marriage (including de facto marriage)
partners, we present analyses demonstrating the following. As in other comparable countries,
a large majority of IPH victims are women, and the wife’s youth, spousal age disparity, and de
facto marriage are all associated with elevated risk. New Zealand is also unexceptional with
respect to gross IPH rates, a very high incidence of recent marital separation as a trigger
for male violence, a substantial incidence of offender suicide when the perpetrators are
men but not when they are women and an overrepresentation of stepfamilies among the
spousal cases. Despite frequent claims that New Zealand is exceptional in the magnitude of
its intimate partner violence problem, the true picture is strikingly similar to that in other
comparable countries.
Corresponding author:
Martin Daly, Department of Psychology, Neuroscience& Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada L8S
4K1.
Email: daly@mcmaster.ca
Article
Journal of Criminology
2024, Vol. 57(2) 187–202
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/26338076231219271
journals.sagepub.com/home/anj
Keywords
Intimate partner homicide, male sexual proprietariness, marital violence, murder-suicide,
spousal homicide, stepfamily conflict
Date received: 24 March 2023; accepted: 22 November 2023
Introduction
Intimate partner homicide (IPH) is a major problem throughout the world. The United
Nations (UN) (2019) estimates that more than 36,000 people were IPH victims in 2017, and
this is surely an underestimate since only solved homicides reported to the UN were
counted. The UN further reports that IPH constituted 7.8% of all known homicides (whether
solved or not) in that year, and that whereas 81% of the world’s 464,000 homicide victims
were male, 82% of IPH victims were women.
For purposes of computing and comparing IPH rates, “intimate partners”(IPs) are custom-
arily defined as including current and former partners in both registered and de facto marriages,
as well as other non-marital relationships (e.g., Browne et al., 1999; Campbell et al., 2007;
Fairbairn et al., 2017). Mere sexual contact is no one’sdefinitional criterion of an IP relation-
ship: cases involving a prostitute and her client are never included, for example, nor are cases of
rape-murder except when there had been a prior consensual intimate relationship between killer
and victim. Analyses of IPH do include “boyfriend/girlfriend”and “dating”couples as IPs
where these relationships have been coded, but there is probably some inconsistency in the lit-
erature regarding the limits of an IP relationship with respect to such matters as whether part-
ners in extra-marital affairs and very brief consensual relationships qualify. The impact of these
definitional inconsistencies on estimates and comparisons has probably been relatively minor,
however, since a large majority of IPHs in all studies have been cases in which the victim and
offender were current or former marital partners. A more important threat to the comparability
of cross-national evidence is that former partners whose relationship was never a registered
marriage, and occasionally even partners in intact de facto marriages, have been omitted
from some IPH tabulations, perhaps especially in the United States, for want of appropriate
codes in police reporting forms (Campbell et al., 2007).
Graham et al. (2022) conducted a systematic review of purported “explanatory theories of
IPH perpetration”. Some of the theories they discuss (e.g., “social disorganisation theory”) are
not gendered and are arguably so general that they provide little insight into IPH as a specific
subcategory of killings that is distinct from homicide in general. Others (e.g., “gender inequal-
ity theory”) are primarily focused on society-level attributes that influence rates of IP violence,
with the result that the most appropriate empirical tests of their utility are comparisons across
cultures, nations, or jurisdictions; examples are analyses of the relevance of female labour force
participation (Avakame, 1999; Gartner, 1990) and of the sex ratio (D’Alessio & Stolzenberg,
2010). For our purposes, the most useful conceptual approach is that which Graham et al. have
labelled “feminist evolutionary theory”, citing Johnson (2012). This genre of theory treats con-
flict between partners as an inevitable consequence of evolved sex differences whereby men are
generally more concerned than women with sexual exclusivity and control of their partners’
social lives, notwithstanding the great cross-cultural variability in marital and sexual practices
and norms. This is the only type of theory in Graham et al.’s taxonomy that has specifically
addressed the demographic predictors and family-circumstance correlates of differential IPH
188 Journal of Criminology 57(2)
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