Murder, She Said

The United States is the most gender-equitable nation in the world-homicidally speaking. For every 100 American men who murder their wives, about 75 women kill their husbands.

American women may kill their husbands almost as often as the reverse, but their motives and actions are far different from those of their male counterparts, report psychologists Margo I. Wilson, Ph.D., and Martin Daly, Ph.D., of McMaster University. Even so, these differences fail to explain why America's spousal "sex ratio of killing" or SROK, is more than double that of other Western countries.

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.

Women who are surrounded by matrilineal relatives may feel more empowered to take drastic action than if they live among their husband's kin. Women may also kill when they feel the need to defend the children of former unions against their current mates.

Conclude Wilson and Daly: A full understanding of marital violence won't happen until America confronts the differences in male and female conceptions of marriage and figures out when betraying this understanding leads to no other way out.

ILLUSTRATION: (RICHARD SALA)

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