ABSTRACT
Intimate partner homicides go back to as far as Shakespeare’s tragedy, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. Historical studies on intimate partner homicide go back to the Middle Ages. In a typical punishment-related homicide, a man acts from the belief that he has the right to punish his wife for something she did or did not do. In the United States, for example, intimate partner homicides constitute about 6 per cent of all homicides. The majority of intimate partner homicides take place in heterosexual couples, in which males kill their female partner in the context of pending estrangement using a knife or a firearm. The most prevalent type of intimate partner homicide is that motivated by jealousy. Jealousy is an extremely common emotion, but at the same time, heterogeneous and complex in nature as jealousy can range from normal to pathological, with different degrees of intensity, persistence and insight.
