ABSTRACT
Criminological and historical literature about women’s homicide offending has predominantly investigated women who were guilty of killing either a child or an intimate partner. Stereotypes about women as homicide offenders circulate – the post-natal depressive mother who kills a child due to her mental illness, the femme fatale who kills multiple men usually for financial gain, or a battered wife who kills her abusive husband. Missing from this research and these narratives are stories of women who kill other women. Recent research (Nagy 2021) has discovered that this form of homicide was not a rarity for women as either offenders or victims – in fact, it was the second most common form of homicide victimisation by female offenders, after infanticides, and filicides.
This chapter will investigate women’s intra-gender homicide offending in Victoria to examine the circumstances that these cases occurred in and what new information this can offer criminological understandings of women’s homicide offending today.
