A third of Australian men who kill their female partners are high functioning elsewhere in their lives and had not previously come to police attention. Their partners were also middle-class, employed and may not have recognised themselves as victims.
Such killers are in many cases “typically middle-class men who were well respected in their communities and had low levels of contact with the criminal justice system,” new research by the Australian Institute of Criminology has found.
It challenges common stereotypes that the overwhelming majority of family violence perpetrators and victims are from seriously disadvantaged backgrounds and have regular contact with police. The findings shed light on how non-physical forms of family violence can turn fatal in any part of society.
A second report to be released on Tuesday found men committed more than three-quarters of 311 intimate partner homicides between 2010 and 2018. In most cases where the offender was female, she was also the primary violence victim in the relationship and killed her male abuser.
The Australian Institute of Criminology report identified three groups into which most men who kill intimate partners fall, including the “fixated threat” group who seem functional in public but who use forms of violence, stalking or monitoring to maintain or regain control of a partner, and whose violence escalates quickly.
There was consistent evidence that the motivation to kill for men in all three groups was “associated with a perceived violation of gendered norms associated with femininity, which challenged the offender’s masculinity”, the report said.
NSW lawmakers vowed to criminalise coercive control in December 2021, but in Victoria debate continues over whether this would lead to female victims being falsely identified as perpetrators, and if current laws are sufficient.
Source: One-third of family violence killers are ‘very functional’, middle-class: research