The doctrine of the partial defence of provocation is one of the most controversial doctrines in the criminal law. This chapter provides an overview of the feminist literature that has examined the law in relation both to women who kill their violent abusers and men who kill their current or former partners. It traces the trajectory of debates about the need for reform of the controversial partial defence of provocation and arguments that it should be abolished. The chapter considers that the provocation defence has been abolished in a number of different jurisdictions. The social context of intimate partner homicide Men are the overwhelming majority of victims of homicide, a consistent finding in both research conducted by the National Homicide Monitoring Program at the Australian Institute of Criminology and research internationally. Accordingly, Allen argued that the supposedly gender-neutral reasonable person standard in provocation cases is couched in sex-specific terms.