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Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Homicide and Human Nature -- A brief introduction to "selection thinking" -- Evolutionary psychology -- Self-interest and conflict -- Why homicide? -- What's a homicide? -- 2. Killing Kinfolks -- Who kills whom? Some American data -- Do relatives pose a lesser risk? -- Collaborative killing in 13th-century England -- Some other studies with higher proportions of blood kin -- Fraternal strife -- Kinship and collaborative homicide revisited -- 3. Killing Children: I. Infanticide in the Ethnographic Record -- Desperate decisions -- Women's life histories -- Discriminative parental solicitude -- A cross-cultural review -- Female-selective infanticide -- Other interests -- 4. Killing Children: II. Parental Homicide in the Modern West -- Infanticide and maternal age -- Infanticide and maternal marital status -- A brief history of infanticide in England -- On maternal "bonding" -- When a defective child is born -- The child's changing risk of homicide at parental hands -- Mothers who kill older children -- Fathers who kill -- Substitute parents -- Risks to children living with stepparents -- Stepparents and offspring age -- 5. Parricide: Killing Parents -- The logic of parent-offspring conflict -- Killing parents -- An asymmetry of valuation -- Factors associated with the risk of parricide -- Oedipal conflict and the primal parricide -- Oedipus overextended -- Conflict over what? -- Father-daughter conflict -- Toppling the patriarch -- Intrasexual rivalry or parent-offspring conflict? -- 6. Altercations and Honor -- Friday, September 5, 1980 -- Trivial altercations -- Status, reputation, and the capacity for violence -- A question of variance -- What do men want? -- 7. Why Men and Not Women? -- Sexual selection and "parental investment

A hitherto unremarked peculiarity of homicide in the United States is that women kill their husbands almost as often as the reverse. For every 100 US. men who kill their wives, about 75 women kill their husbands; this spousal "sex ratio of killing" (SROK) is more than twice that in other Western nations. Our analyses of spousal homicide samples from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Great Britain indicate that this contrast cannot be attributed to greater gun use in the United States, nor to a domain‐general convergence of the sexes in their uses of violence. Significant predictors of the spousal SROK include registered versus de facto marriage, coresidency versus separation, ethnicity, and age disparity, but the impacts of these variables are not sufficient to explain the differences between US. and other nations'victim sex ratios.

AbstractPeople readily make attributions about the likely behavior of others, based on very limited information. We exploited this tendency to assess people's sensitivity to personological and social‐circumstantial evidence of risk of coercive control in romantic relationships, by unobtrusively varying information about a fictitious couple in a between‐groups design and asking viewers to make predictions about the feelings and behavior of the three characters–a man, his girlfriend, and his sister. Key features of the story were systematically altered to elicit attributions of the man's aggressive and jealous inclinations to see if people are sensitive to the psychological link between sexually proprietary inclinations and risk of violence. The story manipulations were effective in eliciting attributions of the man's aggressive inclinations, of the woman's polyandrous inclinations, and of the man's likely jealousy. As expected, people predicted that an aggressive and jealous man would be likely to use violence and other controlling actions against his girlfriend.

SummaryThe incidence of child abuse and neglect resulting in validated case reports to the American Humane Association in 1976 was determined in relation to household composition, family income and age of the victim. Abuse and neglect were both maximal in father-only homes and minimal in two-natural-parent homes. Mother-only households exceed those with one natural and one step-parent in neglect incidence, but the reverse is true for abuse incidence. Poverty is more strongly associated with neglect risk than with abuse risk, and probably cannot account for the high risks of abuse and neglect in father-only and step-parent families. Evidence that the presence of an unrelated adult filling a parental role exacerbates the risk of physical abuse is presented and discussed.