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RISK FACTORS AND RELATIONSHIPS IN MURDER
4. Risk factors and relationships in murder
The next part of the analysis considers whether the results are consistent when
different relationships between the offender and the victim are considered
separately. Unfortunately, there was no equivalent national database that permits
the relationship between offender and victim to be examined for the SSA cases, so
what follows is limited to murder cases only.
The HI gives details of the relationship between the murderer and his victim (or
main/first victim where there is more than one). For this analysis each murder has
been categorised to one of four ‘types’: family murders, acquaintance murders,
murders of males by strangers and murders of females by strangers (see Table 3). The
main question to clarify here was whether different convictions emerged as
important risk factors for particular types of murder. While the focus in this study
was principally on offenders with previous convictions, it is possible that the
likelihood of a murder being committed by someone without previous convictions
differs according to the victim-offender relationship. While the proportions of those
with previous convictions were slightly lower when the victim was a family member
or a female stranger, as Table 9 shows, these differences were not found to be
statistically significant. A particular kind of offence or previous conviction may, of
course, have a different kind of impact according to the type of murder.
Table 9: Murderers, by victim-offender relationship
N % with previous convictions
Family 119 62.2
Acquaintance 218 69.7
Stranger – male victim 195 70.3
Stranger – female victim 31 61.3
Total 563 (a) 68.0
(a) This excludes the six cases where the relationship is unknown.
Test of whether percentage of murderers with previous convictions differs according to
relationship: x 2 = 3.23 on 3 df; p = 0.36
Of 386 male murderers with previous convictions, 74 killed a family member,
152 an acquaintance, 137 a male stranger, and 19 a female stranger. There were
four cases where the relationship was unknown. The small numbers involved in
the female stranger classification makes drawing firm conclusions from this
analysis difficult.
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