A History of Murder by Pieter Spierenburg

Author:Pieter Spierenburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley

A View Toward the Present

The female share in preindustrial murder, as perpetrators and victims, continued to be modest. Women more often killed someone close to them than they did a mere acquaintance or stranger. Female honor played a role in almost every incident in which a woman was involved. In cases of intimate victimization, however, emotions were an equally prominent ingredient. Subtle changes regarding the family and marriage influenced the character of male-on-female as well as female-on-male violence. The spiritualization of female honor affected female-on-female violence, to the extent that it deprived women of the few acceptable methods for aggressively defending their reputation.

The proportion of female killers in total homicide figures remains low to the present day. Murders within an intimate relationship, on the other hand, are highly characteristic of modern fatal violence. Today, they usually belong to the tension-related category. Excesses from aggressive husbands have not died out, but anything like a socially accepted right of punishment by the master of the house has disappeared. All physical aggression against one’s partner, on occasion also against a male partner, is now defined as domestic violence and is actively combated. The right of chastisement by school teachers and other authority figures has been abolished, and that of parents severely limited. Hierarchy and economic cooperation have ceased to be constitutive elements of family life. In modern Europe, the ties between partners living together and the bonds between parents and children are largely of a psychological nature. At times, they give rise to peculiar problems, to which the modern frequency of divorce has contributed. Tension-related killings of intimates, which gradually emerged during the eighteenth century, have grown considerably in importance since then.

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