Verkko’s Laws: Explaining Violence Against Women

Picture two lines on a chart. The first, labeled men, swings wildly across a century: up through wars and recessions, down through better policing and quieter streets, up again in a bad decade. The second, labeled women, barely moves. It drifts along at the bottom of the graph like a flat river under a stormy sky. Anyone who has watched crime statistics long enough has seen this picture, and a Finnish statistician named Veli Verkko noticed it back in the 1930s. He spent years trying to explain it. The question he left behind is a hard one: why do killings of women stay so steady when other violence rises and falls?

That regularity became known as Verkko’s laws, and they’re quoted often in discussions of femicide and violence against women. They are also misquoted often. Some people treat them as proof that violence against women can’t be reduced; others dismiss them entirely. Both readings go too far. Whenever a statistic gets stretched to fit a slogan, the actual women behind the numbers quietly vanish from the conversation, and that’s a poor way to build policy. The laws are statistical regularities about homicide, not explanations of why men harm women, and the gap between those two things is where most of the confusion lives.

So what do the laws say, and what don’t they say?

This article explains Verkko’s laws and what they reveal about violence against women: the evidence for them, the criticism of them, the real risk factors behind intimate partner violence, and what prevention looks like in practice.

What are Verkko’s laws, in plain English?

There are two. The static law says that the higher a country’s overall homicide rate, the lower the share of female victims. The dynamic law says that changes in the overall homicide rate over time are driven mostly by changes in male-on-male violence, while violence against women stays comparatively stable.

Think of it as a story with two chapters. The first compares places: in countries with very high homicide rates, nearly all the extra killings involve men as victims, so women make up a small slice of the total. In countries with low homicide rates, where male-on-male violence is rare, women make up a much larger slice. Note that this is about proportions, not about whether women are safer. A country can have a high female share of victims and a low risk for everyone.

The second chapter compares times. When homicide rises in a society, whether from gang conflict, economic upheaval or a war, the increase typically shows up among men killing men. When homicide falls, the drop shows up there too. Meanwhile the number of women killed tends to move much less, because the kinds of killings that affect women most often, mainly those by partners or family members, don’t respond to the same forces.

Taken together, the laws predict something counterintuitive. As a society becomes less violent overall, women’s share of homicide victims should rise, even if the number of women killed doesn’t increase. And that’s what you see in much of Europe today.

A tiny example helps. Suppose a town sees 50 men and 10 women killed in a decade of unrest, so women are one in six victims. Then peace returns, men’s deaths fall to 10, and women’s deaths hold at 8. Now women are almost half of all victims. Nothing got worse for women in that story, yet the headline “women make up nearly half of homicide victims” would sound alarming. Verkko’s laws help explain why.

It’s also worth being clear about scale. Globally, roughly four out of five homicide victims are male, according to UN figures cited in a recent European review. The laws describe patterns in aggregate statistics, and they say little about any individual relationship or any single woman’s risk.

Who was Veli Verkko, and where did the laws come from?

Veli Verkko (1893 to 1955) was a Finnish sociologist, statistician and criminologist who worked at Finland’s ministry of justice before becoming a professor at the University of Helsinki. He was a pioneer in using official statistics to compare crime across countries, which was unusual in his day.

The laws appeared in his work on violent crime in the 1930s and reached English-speaking readers through his 1951 book Homicides and Suicides in Finland and Their Dependence on National Character. The title tells you where his head was. Veli Verkko believed that Finland’s high homicide rate stemmed from a national character, and he linked it to drinking patterns, a view that later researchers have not supported. It’s an awkward irony: his theory about Finns faded, while his statistical regularities about women and men survived and keep being tested.

Why Finland? Because it offered a natural laboratory. Historically, Finland had one of the highest homicide rates in Western Europe, mostly among men, often in rural areas and often connected to alcohol. That made the contrast with female victimization unusually visible. When you have a lot of male violence, you notice how little the female number changes.

Verkko wasn’t studying “violence against women” as modern researchers do. He was studying sex differences in homicide victimization as part of a broader attempt to understand why some societies were more violent than others. The framework of femicide, coercive control and gender inequality came decades later. That matters for how we read his work. His laws are descriptive observations, created with the statistical tools of the early twentieth century, and they were never meant to explain why a man kills his partner.

Finnish scholars have kept the tradition alive. The criminologist Janne Kivivuori and his colleagues at the University of Helsinki have used long historical homicide datasets and the European Homicide Monitor to test whether the patterns Verkko saw still hold. Their general finding, which later sections describe, is that the broad outlines survive, but with important qualifications.

It’s rare in social science for an observation from 1951 to stay in active use. That longevity says something about how robust the underlying pattern is, and also about how few competing frameworks there were for a long time.

What does the static law look like in real numbers?

Look at three places with very different homicide levels, and the pattern is immediate: the higher the male homicide rate, the smaller the share of victims who are women. Women aren’t safer in the high-violence countries. They just make up a smaller fraction of a much larger number.

These figures come from WHO mortality data as reported in a 2024 study of female homicide in Western Europe. The shares are my own rough arithmetic, treating men and women as equal halves of the population, so take them as illustrations and not official statistics. In that European study, female homicide rates in Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland all sat close to 0.5 to 0.7 per 100,000.

Notice the contrast within the numbers. Women’s rates vary by a factor of about three to four across the three places (0.99, 2.8 and 3.5), while men’s rates vary by a factor of about twenty (2.2 to 41.9). That is the static law in action: male violence is the dial that moves, and female victimization is the part that moves far less.

Why would men’s rates swing so much? Researchers have long linked high male homicide to street violence, organized crime, firearms, alcohol, poverty and weak institutions. The criminologists Janet Lauritsen and Kristin Carbone-Lopez have examined how individual, family and community factors shape gender differences in violent victimization, and work in this tradition suggests that male overrepresentation reflects lifestyle and exposure, such as time spent in risky settings and association with violent peers. Those factors bear heavily on male-male violence and much less on a woman killed inside her own home.

Consider an illustrative pair of towns. In one, a gang conflict doubles the number of men killed in two years. In the other, no such conflict exists. The rate of women killed by partners could be nearly identical in both, since the gang conflict doesn’t change what happens in kitchens and bedrooms. The static law is basically a statistical echo of that situation.

Two cautions are worth keeping. First, a share isn’t a rate, and a high share doesn’t equal a high risk. Second, the table covers three places and one time slice. A fair test of the law needs dozens of countries and many years, which later researchers have run, with mixed results.

Does the dynamic law hold up over time and across history?

Broadly yes, with caveats. Over the long term, falling homicide has been mostly a story of fewer men killing men, while homicides of women, particularly by partners and family members, have declined much less. That’s what the dynamic law predicts.

The strongest evidence is historical. Janne Kivivuori drew on the Historical Homicide Monitor to compare early modern homicide in regions of Denmark, Sweden and Finland (1608 to 1699) with the present (2007 to 2016). The overall homicide rate in the early modern regions was about 6.4 per 100,000, compared with roughly 1.0 in the modern comparison. Women were only around 15 percent of homicide victims in the early data, versus well over a third of victims in contemporary Denmark and Sweden. In other words, as male-on-male violence collapsed, women’s share of victims climbed. Finland was the partial exception, with a female share that stayed closer to stable across the centuries. Kivivuori notes that this relative increase reflects a huge absolute decrease in male violence, not an increase in violence against women.

Switzerland offers a similar picture. Data there reach back to 1850, and according to a review of European evidence, homicides against men and children fell strongly over 150 years while homicides against women stayed relatively stable. Recent European monitoring points the same way: a study of homicide drops across seven countries found that the biggest declines occurred among male victims, while female victimization fluctuated at low levels and fell only slightly, mostly through fewer intimate partner and family killings.

Why would women’s rates be stickier? Part of the answer lies in the context. Research by Janne Kivivuori and Martti Lehti on Finnish intimate partner homicide found that victims and offenders were often socially marginalized and that substance abuse was common across homicide types. But compared with male-on-male homicide, intimate partner homicide against women had weaker links to socioeconomic disadvantage and offenders’ criminal history. In plain terms, the men who kill their partners are more varied than the men who kill in street conflicts, and the forces that reduce street violence (policing, economic improvement, changes in nightlife) do less to reach them.

Something else shows up in the numbers. UN data cited in a European Parliament briefing indicate that about 60 percent of female homicide victims are killed at home, compared with 11 percent of male victims. If a large share of lethal violence against women happens behind closed doors, between people who know each other, then it’s not surprising that changes in street crime hardly touch it.

The same briefing notes that the data on female homicide in EU countries show no consistent downward trend despite recent policy efforts. That should temper any celebration of falling overall homicide. The headline may improve while the experience of women in violent relationships stays unchanged.

So the dynamic law is best read as a description of where change tends to come from. It identifies male-male violence as the engine of fluctuation, not as an inevitability for women.

Have researchers challenged Verkko’s laws, and are they too simple?

Yes, and the criticism is fair. Verkko’s strongest version, that the female homicide rate stays constant across countries and across time, has not survived testing. Later work found that female rates vary and that the laws work better as tendencies than as rules.

A 1981 study that tested the static and dynamic laws using United Nations homicide data concluded that the basic premise was false: the female rate did not remain stable across countries or over time in a single country. The overall homicide rate did turn out to be a good predictor of the female-to-male ratio, though it wasn’t the only predictor and not the best one. That’s a mixed verdict: the share pattern holds up, but the claim of a fixed female rate doesn’t.

Other researchers took up the question of whether women’s and men’s rates move together. Thomas Marvell and Carlisle Moody compared trends and predictors of female and male homicide victimization in a 1999 paper, a piece of work often cited in debates about whether the two rates respond to the same social forces. A broader comparison of 166 countries, cited in a recent European review, found a strong positive correlation between male and female homicide rates, which suggests that the same social conditions, including inequality, affect both. At the same time, some variables, such as women’s labor market participation and teen fertility, were more closely tied to female homicide.

Put those pieces together and you get a more careful claim than Verkko’s original. Female and male homicide rates are correlated, but male rates are more variable, and women’s rates respond partly to different factors. The laws are statements about relative variability, not about stability.

Other limits are methodological. Homicide statistics differ across countries in how they count cases, classify motives and record the victim-offender relationship. Early data are patchy. And the laws say nothing about non-lethal violence, which is far more common: most intimate partner violence doesn’t end in death, and its patterns can differ from homicide.

A deeper conceptual problem is that “female share of homicide victims” mixes together very different events. Women are killed by partners, by relatives, by strangers in robberies, in sexual homicides and in criminal-milieu conflicts. A study of six Western European countries found that between a third and two-thirds of female victims were killed in an intimate partner context, with the rest in other settings. Lumping them together hides what’s happening inside the category.

If you’re writing about this topic, here’s a safe summary: Verkko’s laws describe a real tendency in homicide data, they’ve been refined and partly corrected, and they should never be used to claim that violence against women is natural or unchangeable.

Why does violence against women stay stable when other violence falls?

Because much of it happens in a different place, between different people, for different reasons. Violence among men is often public, group-driven and tied to markets, status and alcohol. Violence against women is frequently private, personal and tied to control and relationship breakdown.

The sociologist Marvin Wolfgang documented this contrast in his classic 1958 study of homicides in Philadelphia, Patterns in Criminal Homicide. His analysis of the victim-offender relationship found that women who were killed were far more likely than men to have been killed by a spouse or intimate partner. That finding has been repeated in many places since. UN data show that across all world regions, women and girls are disproportionately likely to be killed by a current or former partner or by a family member, whereas men are more likely to be killed by someone outside the family.

Take Nadine, an illustrative composite. She left a partner who had controlled her money and her phone for years, and the weeks right after she left were the most frightening of all. Her story wouldn’t show up in a chart of street violence, and it wouldn’t change if a neighborhood got a new police patrol. Her risk came from one person, in one relationship, at one moment of separation.

Several features help explain the stability:

First, privacy. Domestic settings are shielded from the informal social control that reduces public violence, such as witnesses, bystanders and cameras. Second, the motives are often relational (jealousy, separation, possession) and do not respond to economic cycles the way market-based violence does. Third, reporting is limited: fear, shame, economic dependence and distrust of authorities mean that abuse often goes unreported before it becomes lethal. A European Parliament briefing notes that lethal violence is frequently preceded by repeated episodes of domestic violence, some of which are reported and some not, and that stereotypes treating gender violence as a private matter can lead authorities to under-respond.

It’s also worth stressing the high clearance rate. In a six-country European analysis, female homicides were solved at rates between about 93 and 99 percent. That suggests that the perpetrator is usually known to the victim, often a current or former partner, which is consistent with the picture of violence rooted in close relationships.

That leads to the key policy insight. If the engine behind women’s homicide is intimate-partner violence, then the tools that cut male street violence, like hot-spot policing or reducing gang conflict, will do relatively little. A different toolkit is needed: risk assessment, protection orders that are enforced, safe housing, firearm restrictions and early intervention in abusive relationships.

Do Verkko’s laws explain why men harm women?

No. They describe patterns in who gets killed and how the mix changes; they don’t explain motives. To understand why some men use violence against women, researchers turn to different concepts: gender inequality, coercive control, jealousy, ideas of entitlement and the dynamics of separation.

Consider the term femicide. The feminist scholars Diana Russell and Jill Radford brought the word into wide use with their 1992 book Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing, framing killings of women by men as a political phenomenon rooted in misogyny and unequal power and not as isolated private tragedies. Today, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and UN Women define gender-related killings of women using indicators such as the victim-perpetrator relationship and the context of the killing. The European Institute for Gender Equality defines femicide as the killing of women and girls because of their gender.

Verkko’s framework cannot make that distinction. It counts every homicide of a woman the same way, whether she was shot in a robbery or strangled by a partner who controlled her life. A concept like femicide asks something different: was gender part of the motive? Researchers disagree on how to measure that, and definitions remain debated, but the question is the one that matters for prevention.

The fact that female homicide is stable doesn’t tell us it’s normal, inevitable or acceptable. A stable number can be a stubborn problem. If anything, the data that Verkko highlighted point to something uncomfortable: as many forms of violence recede, lethal violence against women, particularly in the home, becomes the most visible remainder.

Think of a parallel in public health. If a hospital cleans up most infections but one ward keeps having the same outbreak, nobody says the outbreak is natural because its numbers haven’t dropped. They ask what’s different about that ward. Verkko’s laws, read properly, ask the same question of the private sphere.

Another caution about misuse. Some commentators cite the laws to argue that feminist or policy efforts can’t work because women’s numbers don’t change. This misreads both the evidence and the logic. Stability over time in aggregate data doesn’t show that interventions fail; it could mean that social change has been too weak, too slow or too poorly targeted. Where specific interventions, such as risk assessment programs and firearm restrictions, have been evaluated, some have reduced intimate partner homicide.

The better lesson is humility. The laws tell us where the variation is and where it isn’t. Explaining and preventing violence against women requires theories of power and relationships, not just statistics of sex ratios.

What are the real risk factors for the killing of women by partners?

The best evidence comes from studies that compare women who were killed by a partner with women in similarly abusive relationships who survived. These point to a cluster of warning signs that tend to appear before lethal violence, especially a partner’s access to firearms, escalating control and recent separation.

The nurse and researcher Jacquelyn Campbell and colleagues ran a landmark multisite case-control study in the United States, published in 2003, comparing women killed by intimate partners with abused women who survived. Their findings underpin widely used risk assessment tools such as the Danger Assessment. Factors that raised the odds of intimate partner femicide included:

• Access to a gun by the abuser, one of the strongest and most modifiable risk factors.
• A previous threat with a weapon or a threat to kill.
• Leaving or separating after living together, a period of particularly high danger.
• Controlling and jealous behavior, including monitoring, stalking and restricting a woman’s contacts.
• Forced sex within the relationship.
• Abuse during pregnancy.
• The abuser’s unemployment and the presence of a child who isn’t the abuser’s own in the home.

Later research added non-fatal strangulation as a strong predictor of later lethal violence, and clinicians take it very seriously. A European briefing summarizing the literature also lists factors such as escalation of repeated abuse, economic dependence on the abuser and social isolation as markers of risk.

Behind many of these signs sits a pattern the sociologist Evan Stark called coercive control. In his 2007 book Coercive Control, Stark argued that abuse is better understood as an ongoing strategy of domination, using intimidation, isolation, surveillance and regulation of everyday life, than as a series of separate violent incidents. On this view, physical violence is one tool among many, and the loss of a woman’s freedom is the central harm. That explains why some women who are killed never had a documented history of physical assault: the control was there, but it left no bruises.

Imagine Sofia, an illustrative composite, who has to send her partner a photo of every receipt, can’t see friends without his permission, and apologizes constantly for things she hasn’t done. He has never hit her. From the outside, her life looks normal. Stark’s framework would treat her situation as serious, and so do many legal systems that have begun to criminalize coercive control.

A practical point for friends and professionals: risk is highest when the pattern is changing. A woman who announces she’s leaving, a sudden escalation in threats, a new weapon in the house, or a partner who starts saying “if I can’t have you” are all signals to take seriously, not to explain away.

No checklist predicts everything. Many women who face several risk factors survive, and some who show few are killed. These factors guide safety planning; they aren’t verdicts.

What does prevention look like if the laws point to the home?

It looks like targeted, relationship-focused measures aimed at intimate partner violence and coercive control, alongside broader efforts on gender equality. Because overall crime-reduction strategies mostly affect male violence, protecting women requires approaches built for the settings where they’re actually at risk.

Recommendations from the European Parliament’s research service, drawing on UN and EU work, and similar expert bodies, include the following core measures:

• Structured risk assessment by police, health and social workers, using validated tools, so that high-risk cases get fast, coordinated responses.
• Enforceable protection orders and restrictions on abusers’ access to firearms, since guns appear repeatedly among the risk factors.
• Shelters, helplines and housing support, because economic dependence and nowhere to go are major reasons women stay.
• Training for professionals in recognizing coercive control, strangulation and the signs of escalating danger.
• Better data, with sex-disaggregated, relationship-specific records of homicides, so patterns like Verkko’s can be tracked with more precision.

Legal recognition is another strand. Research by the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law team found that only 29 of 190 economies had laws addressing femicide as of 2023, with most of them in Latin America. In Europe, several countries have moved in recent years to recognize femicide, either as a distinct offense or as an aggravating factor in murder. Experts quoted in the European briefing caution against relying on harsher penalties alone and urge comprehensive approaches that address root causes. The evidence that naming femicide in law reduces killings is still thin, so it should be seen as one tool and not a cure.

Prevention also happens upstream. Programs in schools that teach respectful relationships and challenge rigid gender norms, workplace policies, and engagement of men and boys in questioning ideas of dominance all aim at the beliefs that make control seem acceptable. Their evidence base is mixed and varies by program quality, so it makes sense to favor approaches that have been evaluated.

Finally, use Verkko’s laws sensibly in prevention planning. A falling overall homicide rate shouldn’t be mistaken for progress on violence against women. Monitor female victimization separately, break it down by relationship type, and evaluate whether policies are changing the numbers that the aggregate hides.

Which brings us to the part that matters most for individuals.

What should you do if you’re worried about your own safety, or someone else’s?

Treat it as serious, prioritize safety over confrontation, and reach out to people trained to help. If there is immediate danger, call emergency services right away: 911 in the US and Canada, 999 in the UK, 112 or 999 in Ireland, 000 in Australia and 111 in New Zealand.

If you are in a relationship where you feel afraid, controlled or unsafe, a few steps can help. Think about a safety plan: a safe place to go, a bag with essentials and documents, a trusted person who knows, and a code word to signal danger. Be careful with devices, since a partner may monitor phones, messages and location. Contact a local domestic violence service, a primary care doctor (a GP in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand), a licensed counselor or a trusted friend. Domestic violence organizations in your country can talk through options confidentially, help with protection orders and arrange shelter. Leaving can be the most dangerous time, so planning with an expert matters.

If you are worried about a friend, family member or colleague, a few principles help:

• Listen without judgment and believe what she tells you. Avoid “why don’t you just leave?”
• Don’t confront the abuser, which can increase danger.
• Offer practical help: a place to stay, a ride, childcare, or help finding services.
• Keep in touch, since isolation is part of coercive control and a steady connection counters it.

Take Priya, an illustrative composite, who noticed that a colleague had stopped joining lunch, flinched when her phone buzzed, and always had a reason to leave early. Priya didn’t ask a pile of questions. She said, “I’ve noticed you seem stressed. I’m here if you want to talk, any time.” Three weeks later, her colleague did.

If the distress is overwhelming and you are having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please reach out now. In the US, call or text 988; in Canada, call or text 9-8-8; in the UK and Ireland, Samaritans is on 116 123, and in Ireland Pieta is on 1800 247 247; in Australia, Lifeline is 13 11 14; in New Zealand, call or text 1737.

A final word. Statistics can make violence against women feel like a law of nature. It isn’t. The figures show where change comes slowly, which is a reason for more attention to the home, not less. Behind each number is a person who might have been helped by someone noticing sooner.

FAQs about Verkko’s Laws and Violence Against Women

What are Verkko’s laws in simple terms?

They are two statistical regularities about homicide, proposed by the Finnish criminologist Veli Verkko. The static law says that the higher a country’s overall homicide rate, the lower the proportion of victims who are women. The dynamic law says that changes in overall homicide over time are driven mostly by changes in male-on-male violence, while killings of women stay comparatively stable. They describe patterns in aggregate data. They don’t explain why individual perpetrators commit violence, and they don’t say anything about risk to a specific woman.

Do Verkko’s laws prove that violence against women can’t be reduced?

No. That is a misreading. The laws show that female homicide is less variable than male homicide, and that falling overall homicide mostly reflects fewer male victims. They don’t show that interventions fail. Stability can reflect weak or poorly targeted policy, and some measures, such as restricting abusers’ access to firearms and structured risk assessment, are linked to fewer intimate partner killings. The stability of the numbers is better read as a call to focus on the home and on intimate partner violence, where the risk for women is concentrated.

Are Verkko’s laws still true today?

Broadly, as tendencies, yes, but not in their strongest form. Recent European data show that falling homicide rates are driven mostly by declines among male victims while female rates stay low and relatively steady. Historical studies from the Nordic countries show the female share of victims rising as male violence fell. However, a 1981 test using United Nations data found that the female rate is not truly constant across countries or over time. Researchers now treat the laws as useful approximations, not rigid rules.

Why are women more likely to be killed by someone they know?

Because the most common forms of lethal violence against women arise within close relationships. UN data show that across world regions, women are disproportionately killed by a current or former partner or by family members, and that about 60 percent of female homicide victims are killed at home, compared with 11 percent of men. Marvin Wolfgang’s classic Philadelphia study found a similar pattern decades ago. Motives such as jealousy, control and separation operate in private settings, with little informal oversight, which is why the perpetrator is usually known and is usually identified quickly by police.

What is the difference between homicide of women and femicide?

Homicide of women counts every killing of a woman regardless of motive. Femicide is narrower and refers to killings of women because of their gender, often in the context of intimate partner violence, family control or sexual violence. Scholars such as Diana Russell and Jill Radford brought the term into wide use. Definitions still vary between countries and agencies, and measuring gender motive is hard, so statistics on femicide are often estimates. UN bodies commonly use the relationship between victim and perpetrator as a practical indicator.

What are the warning signs that a partner could become lethal?

Research led by Jacquelyn Campbell identified several signs associated with intimate partner femicide, including the abuser’s access to a gun, previous threats with a weapon or threats to kill, separation after living together, extreme jealousy and control, forced sex, and abuse during pregnancy. Non-fatal strangulation is also treated as a serious red flag. None of these predicts an outcome with certainty, but together they justify urgent safety planning. If you recognize several, contact a domestic violence service or emergency services if danger is immediate.

Is violence against women increasing?

The answer depends on what you measure. Homicide of women has stayed relatively stable in many countries, with slight declines in some and no consistent downward trend in the EU, while male homicide has dropped sharply. That means women’s share of victims has risen. Non-lethal violence is harder to track because of underreporting and changes in how it is defined. Increased reporting after awareness campaigns can make numbers look higher even when underlying levels aren’t. Reliable conclusions require consistent, sex-disaggregated data over time.

Where can I find help if I’m experiencing abuse?

If you’re in immediate danger, call your local emergency number: 911 in the US and Canada, 999 in the UK, 112 or 999 in Ireland, 000 in Australia, or 111 in New Zealand. For non-emergency support, look for a domestic violence service in your country, speak to a trusted doctor or licensed counselor, or contact a friend you trust. These services can help with safety planning, protection orders and shelter. If the stress is leading to thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 in the US, 9-8-8 in Canada, 116 123 in the UK and Ireland, 13 11 14 in Australia, or 1737 in New Zealand.

Bibliography

• Campbell, J. C., Webster, D., Koziol-McLain, J., Block, C., Campbell, D., Curry, M. A., Gary, F., Glass, N., McFarlane, J., Sachs, C., Sharps, P., Ulrich, Y., Wilt, S. A., Manganello, J., Xu, X., Schollenberger, J., Frye, V., & Laughon, K. (2003). Risk factors for femicide in abusive relationships: Results from a multisite case control study. American Journal of Public Health, 93(7), 1089-1097.
• Kivivuori, J. (2025). Familial, femicidal, and intimate partner homicide in early modern Nordic societies. Finnish Journal of Social Research, 1-10.
• Kivivuori, J., & Lehti, M. (2012). Social correlates of intimate partner homicide in Finland: Distinct or shared with other homicide types? Homicide Studies, 16(1), 60-77.
• Lauritsen, J. L., & Carbone-Lopez, K. (2011). Gender differences in risk factors for violent victimization: An examination of individual-, family-, and community-level predictors. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 48(4), 538-565.
• Marvell, T. B., & Moody, C. E. (1999). Female and male homicide victimization rates: Comparing trends and regressors. Criminology, 37(4), 879-902.
• Russell, D. E. H., & Radford, J. (Eds.). (1992). Femicide: The politics of woman killing. Twayne.
• Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press.
• Verkko, V. (1951). Homicides and suicides in Finland and their dependence on national character. G. E. C. Gads Forlag.
• Wolfgang, M. E. (1958). Patterns in criminal homicide. University of Pennsylvania Press.