Theories of Homicide

It is my belief that the last decade has witnessed significant advances in both the quality of data sets available for the study of homicide and the analytic strategies for estimating model parameters in quantitative studies. It is still true that the Chicago Homicide Data Set provides the most detailed information on homicide offenders, victims, and incidents for any jurisdiction in the United States, but the enhanced coverage and increasing use of National Incident-Based Reporting System data from the FBI has expanded the range of possible inquiries by homicide researchers. Similarly, advances in linking data from law enforcement and medical sources, exemplified by the National Violent Death Reporting System, allow for checks on the quality of data from single sources and offer new avenues for more nuanced investigations of homicide. Improvements in data analysis are highlighted by the usage of GeoDa to model interdependencies between geographical units and the widespread adoption of Poisson-based regression models, particularly negative binomial regression, in homicide research.

Perhaps my perspective is unduly pessimistic, but similar evolution in the area of homicide theories over the first decade of the current century is not as evident. Smith and Zahn’s classic Homicide: A Source Book of Social Research, published in 1999, included three chapters on theories of homicide that reviewed social structural, cultural and subcultural, and evolutionary psychological perspectives, respectively. In the handful of texts written for use in undergraduate courses on murder, brief discussions of no more than two or three pages are typically devoted to a potpourri of theories; some developed to explain crime in general, others focused more specifically on violence, and one or two that are focused only on homicide. Attempts at theory integration have also been sparse.

Undoubtedly, a major reason for the relative lack of homicide theory development compared with the methodology for its empirical investigation is a lack of consensus over the scope of behaviors that these theories should attempt to explain. At the most basic level, a homicide involves the death of an individual through the actions of one or more other individuals. It has long been recognized that homicides are heterogeneous, however, and there are important differences in offender motivation and other basic characteristics of killings. In fact, David Luckenbill and several other investigators have argued that a traditional focus on the offender can be counterproductive and should be replaced with the concept of a violent, or homicidal, encounter involving interactions between two or more actors bounded by space and time. From this perspective, homicides are one possible outcome of interpersonal violence, and the emphasis is on determining offender, victim, and situational (e.g., the presence of a firearm) characteristics that influence the potential lethality of violent transactions. Nevertheless, homicide per se will undoubtedly remain a major focus of future research efforts.

Following from the brief discussion above, it is likely that a stronger consensus needs to be reached on the contours of preferred homicide theories before sustained progress is possible. This goal will involve forging answers to some basic questions that have received attention in the field and within the pages of prior issues of Homicide Studies. Does femicide require a different theoretical explanation than the killing of adult men or children? Is serial homicide amenable to the same theoretical approach as murders that are not linked through the same offender? Can social structural and cultural explanations at the macro level be integrated in a way that permits their application across space and time? My personal attraction to serving as a special editor for this issue of Homicide Studies was to have the opportunity to publish work by different scholars that address some of these fundamental questions in a single volume. Fortunately, although the topics of the four articles in the issue differ, each of the authors approaches questions of theoretical integration and divergence.

The first article by Lee adopts Ann Swidler’s concept of “culture as a tool kit” as a way of explaining high levels of homicide among Whites in the rural South and Blacks in inner-city areas. Diverging from the long dominant perspective of culture as values, Swidler changes the focus to how people use cultural resources in solving or attempting to solve daily problems. Building from the foundation provided by Swidler, Lee blends work from several authors, including Elijah Anderson and William Wilson, to suggest that the common link between high levels of violence in the Southern countryside and the urban ghetto is a defensive, or honor-based, subculture that offers cultural scripts conducive to violence when reacting to affronts to personal or family honor. Within this context, violence is often used in the pursuit of identity creation or maintenance. Forming a bridge with social structural theories of violence, Lee proposes that high levels of poverty are conducive to cultural scripts supportive of violence and that the more general level of homicide among inner-city Blacks is likely the result of an institutional breakdown that removes controls on interpersonal violence. Lee’s article is an exemplary example of theoretical integration that bridges the often illusory gaps that have separated social structural and cultural explanations of homicide and empirical research on the Southern subculture of violence and the oppositional subculture of the inner city.

In the second article, Taylor and Jasinski analyze the success of the feminist perspective, or feminist theory, in providing a framework that explains femicide occurring in the intimate partner (IP) context. Although feminist theory has attained a dominant position in investigations of IP homicide, it has recently come under attack from some researchers, notably Richard Felson, who argue that there is no need for a specific theory in relation to IP homicide. The critics’ position is that the killing of women by men is an extension of a more generalized pattern of male violence that requires no specific theoretical explanation. Taylor and Jasinski provide an exhaustive review of the feminist perspective, including empirical research, and the critics’ challenge before concluding that alternative theoretical formulations are less successful in explaining the overall pattern of IP homicide. Importantly, they recommend extensions of current research from a feminist theory foundation, including increased focus on integrating micro and macro perspectives, same-sex relationships, urban–rural and regional differences, and the role of firearms.

Winton’s article is an interesting extension of Lonnie Athens’ violentization theory, an individual-level perspective for explaining the development of a violent criminal identity to the cases of genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda. Through a qualitative content analysis of court transcripts and other documents, Winton outlines the parallels at the individual and group levels between the stages of brutalization, defiance, violent dominant engagement, and virulency that form the core of Athens’ theory. Furthermore, he suggests that the addition of a fifth stage, termed extreme virulency, is needed to understand the excessive violence, for example, mass killings, that are often a fixture of genocidal movements but have no counterpart at the individual level. Winton’s examination of the media’s role in legitimating the systematic killing of persons who are of the “wrong” ethnicity or religion is enlightening and extends our understanding of genocide, an understudied area in homicide research specifically and criminology in general. Theoretically, the article offers an example of how a theoretical explanation developed to explain violence at the micro level can be usefully applied to understand killing at the macro level.

In the final contribution to this special issue, Thomas evaluates the role of social disorganization, cultural, and strain theories in providing understanding of the findings from the recent renewal of interest in the impact of immigration on crime, including homicide. Along with other recent authors, he acknowledges that the initial models developed from the experiences of European immigrants in the early 20th century must be updated to reflect the modern era through inclusion of the theoretical insights offered by the segmented assimilation and immigrant revitalization perspectives. Reflecting the growing importance of multilevel models in homicide research, Thomas emphasizes that the neighborhood context is an important factor shaping immigrants’ involvement in crime. Highlighting the mutual dependency of theory and methods, he offers a series of hypotheses for empirical testing and evaluates the strengths and limitations of available data sets for furthering our understanding of the intersection of immigration and crime.

Although they differ in several ways, each of the articles in the current special issue offers important advances in the development of theoretical explanations of homicide. Given the contributions offered in this collection, they should provide inspiration for other scholars to pursue similar goals.