The Effect of Sex and Perpetrator–Victim Relationship on Perceptions of Domestic Homicide:

Previous research on how stereotypes affect perceptions of intimate partner violence and domestic homicide has found that violence committed by men is perceived as more severe and judged more harshly than violence committed by women. The present mock jury study investigated how perpetrator sex (male or female), crime type (familicide or filicide), and relatedness between perpetrator and child victims (biological or step) affect laypeople’s perceptions of the appropriate consequence of the crime, the reason for the offense, responsibility of the perpetrator, the likelihood of certain background factors being present, and the risk of future violence. One hundred sixty-seven university students read eight fictive descriptions of cases of multiple-victim domestic homicides, in which the sex of the perpetrator, the crime type, and the relatedness between the perpetrator and the child victims were manipulated. We found that participants recommended equally severe punishments to and placed the same amount of res...