Homicide: Towards a Deeper Understanding

Homicide: Towards a Deeper Understanding offers an in-depth analysis into the phenomenon of homicide, examining different types of homicide and how these types have changed over time.

Based on original analysis on Scottish data, this book draws upon an international body of research to contextualize the findings in a global setting, filling an important gap in the homicide literature pertaining to the relationship between trends in homicide and violence. Examining homicide from gendered as well as Gothic perspectives, this book also relates homicide to novel, critical theory. The book covers a thorough description of different types of homicide, including sexual homicide, and provides an explorative approach to the identification of homicide subtypes. The book also explores how these findings relate to current homicide theory, and proposes a new theoretical framework to gain a deeper understanding of this crime. The main argument of the book is that if homicide and its relationship to wider violence is to be fully understood, theoretically as well as empirically, this crime needs to be disaggregated in a way that reflects the underlying data.

Overall, this book therefore fills an important gap in criminological literature, providing an in-depth understanding of one of the most serious violent crimes.

Sara Skott is associate professor in criminology at Mid Sweden University. Her research concerns different types and aspects of violence, including exploring violence through Gothic and gendered lenses. Her research also concerns the characteristics and offending pathways of sexual homicide, and the social construction of violence, shaped by different power orders. Some of her recent work has appeared in Critical Criminology, Games and Culture, International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, and in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.