The article “Lethal and Other Serious Assalts: Disentangling Gender and Context” seeks to address a lack of contextualization of female offenders, specifically in the realm of assault on intimate partners. Authors Carol E. Jordan, James Clark, Adam Pritchard, and Richard Charnigo seek to answer the research question: ‘under what circumstances do females kill or seriously assalt their intimate partners, and do the stereotypes surrounding female intimate partner violence have legitimacy?’.  Jordan, Clark, Pritchard, and Charnigo utilize the data collection method of public and private records to answer this question, taking data from the institutional records of an unnamed state’s Department of Corrections. This data was used to compare male and female inmates incarcerated for the assalt or murder or their intimate partners based on a number of different characteristics, such as race, marital status, and substance abuse history. Notably, some people were intentionally excluded  from the data, such as DUI or child-assalt cases, due to the fear that they might alter the data. Personally, I found the research question to be rather broad, and that equal numbers of men and women should have been analyzed. However, I also felt that the study was both interesting and thoroughly researched, and that the various conclusions drawn from the project were well analyzed and succinctly laid out. I particularly thought many of the trends discovered were very interesting. For example, women tended to be more likely to have a history of victimization or mental health problems, be more educated, be married and with children, and be unemployed. In contrast, men were more likely to have a criminal record, to have been employed, and to be considered violent offenders. Yet the authors emphasize the complex nature of this type of violence, and that reducing these women to a single stereotype can be misleading.

Crime & Delinquency, vol. 58, number 3, May 2012