Theories of Murder
This theory was proposed by Gastil to explain high levels of violence in the South.
What is “regional culture of violence” theory?
This type of murder, defined as the killing of an infant within 24 hours of birth, is a subset of infanticide.
What is neonaticide?
This term refers to the killing one's mother.
What is matricide?
People who live in this area of the country are most likely to be murdered.
What is the South?
These groups are overrepresented among murder survivors.
Who are women and African-Americans?
Loftin and Hill tested Gastil’s regional culture of violence theory and found little support for it. Instead they found these factors to be better predictors of homicide rates.
What are poverty and income inequality?
The Bureau of Justice Statistics includes children under this age in their infanticide statistics.
What is 5?
This term refers to the killing of one's father.
What is patricide?
Most murders are committed with this.
What is a firearm?
Some studies have found higher rates of this in parents who lost children to murder compared to parents who lost children to accidents.
What is PTSD?
The idea that people can learn from TV and movies is consistent with this concept developed by Glaser which says that personal contact is not necessary for the transmission of behavioral guidelines.
What is differential identification?
These are reasons that it’s hard to have reliable figures on the numbers of infanticides that occur each year.
What are 1) there are rarely any witnesses and 2) because infants are not usually killed with a gun or knife, it's hard to determine whether infant's death was accidental or intentional.
Heide identified several types of parricide offenders. She found this type to be most common among adolescent parricide offenders.
What are severely abused children?
In terms of victim/offender relationship, most murders are committed by this group of people.
What is someone the victim knows?
Examples of this type of coping include denial and substance use. This type of coping has been found to be associated with higher levels of PTSD.
What is repressive coping?
Luckenbill’s situated transaction model argues that murders are the result of this type of contest.
What are character contests?
In terms of marital status, most of the perpetrators of neonaticide are this.
What is unmarried?
Heide argued that parricides cannot be predicted because of this reason.
What is they are such a rare event?
Based on data from 2019, most murder victims are of this race.
What is black?
The pattern of recovery is not the same for all murder survivors. Both the type and quality of this seem to influence the pattern of recovery.
What is the relationship to the victim?
Wolfgang found that this percentage of the murders in his study were victim-precipitated.
What is 26%?
With this type of denial, a woman has an intellectual awareness that she is pregnant but no emotional or physical preparations are made for the baby’s arrival. (So she basically feels and behaves as if she’s not pregnant.)
What is affective denial?
A juvenile who kills his parents because they have too many rules would fit into this category identified by Heide.
What is a dangerously antisocial parricide offender?
The risk of being murdered is highest among this age group?
What is late teens/early twenties?
Studies have found that the more of these experienced (e.g., people acting uncomfortably around them, having to move, not having enough money for a funeral), the greater the psychological distress.
What are secondary stressors?