ABSTRACT
Perhaps it is not unreasonable to wonder why a volume devoted to the topics of marital conflict-a phenomenon ubiquitous to marriage-and spousal violence-one that is all too frequent-begins with a chapter dealing with an event that, although occurring more often than anyone would desire, remains rather rare, namely spousal homicide. A reader may even wonder why psychologists who do not profess to be criminologists should choose to study homicidal violence between spouses and cohabiting partners at all. Is not wifekilling a horse of an entirely different color than nonlethal spousal violence and, especially, more runof-the-mill marital conflict? According to Wilson and Daly’s insightful evolutionary psychological analysis of lethal violence within legitimized and de facto unions, the answer to this query is clearly “not entirely,” and perhaps even “not at all.” In fact, these scholars convincingly argued that spousal homicide can be regarded as the tip of the family-violence iceberg which, from a scientific perspective, can serve as a window on much more frequent, but perhaps more difficult to study, nonlethal violence between couples, basically because homicide is so much more difficult to secret behind close doors.
