Introduction to the Special Issue

By almost any measure, Dr Margo Wilson was an extraordinary person. A glance through the works she published during her prematurely shortened lifetime (see Bibliography) shows the extent of her influence on researchers, theoretical thinkers, and practitioners worldwide and across numerous disciplines. Among these, her contributions to the field of lethal violence and its prevention shine out brightly. This edition of Homicide Studies is dedicated to and motivated by Margo and her foundational role in advancing the modern understanding of homicide. Many who share an interest in understanding the causes, dynamics, and possible methods of preventing homicide—especially domestic and partner homicide—readily recognize the significant and fundamental contributions of Margo Wilson. Newer researchers in this field, however, may not yet realize how critical her role was in shaping its theoretical and empirical contours. Those who worked together to create this Special Issue of Homicide Studies hope that the papers assembled here will speak to all of the people who were influenced by or who want to learn about the work of Margo Wilson.

Margo Wilson was exuberant and enthusiastic, a vibrant thinker who did not hesitate to thrust new ideas upon friends and strangers alike. She was truly interested in what both old and new acquaintances might think of ideas she was mulling over. She was generous with her time and encouragement to new scholars in the field, but she was also willing to challenge senior researchers whose ideas she thought did not stand up to logical analysis or statistical testing. She was capable of flights of intellectual curiosity, but ultimately wanted to subject all those new ideas to empirical scrutiny.

Many who knew Margo primarily through professional association were amazed to learn about her unusual background only after her passing. As her life partner and longtime research collaborator, Martin Daly, tells us in a short biography, “Margo Wilson, 1942-2009,” Margo had a unique upbringing that no doubt helped to shape her worldview and range of interests. Imagining Margo as a little girl growing up inside the Arctic Circle among Canadian aboriginal peoples may help explain her amazing ability to think about things in creative and novel ways. Still, the fact that her formal training was in behavioral endocrinology makes her later work on murder all the more remarkable. Those who were privileged to know her came to expect her to talk with equal enthusiasm about field observations of kangaroo rats and statistical analyses of spousal homicide. To be sure, homicide studies are highly interdisciplinary; indeed, the parent association for this journal (the Homicide Research Working Group) has members from all over the world and from a wide range of disciplines and practice. Nonetheless, Margo had an exceptional capacity to think creatively across disciplinary borders, and to prompt those around her to do likewise. At the same time, she demanded that those novel ideas be measured against rigorous and sound empirical research. As Martin tells us, Margo’s intellectual leaps from evolutionary psychology to spouse killings led to a series of pioneering scholarly articles that continue to influence the field. Their work together forms an impressive and still provocative body of research.

It was precisely the blending of her interests in evolutionary psychology and spousal killing that led to one of Margo’s Wilson’s most remarkable and challenging contributions to the field: the observation that “male sexual proprietariness” and other manifestations of male sexual ownership over women were often a precursor to violence against women. However, these ideas have posed seemingly impenetrable hurdles, particularly for feminist researchers. In “When feminism meets evolutionary psychology: The enduring legacy of Margo Wilson,” Holly Johnson demonstrates the kind of thoughtful analysis and capacity for interdisciplinary insights that Margo Wilson valued. In clear and logical steps, she explains how these two fields of inquiry can coexist in the search for understanding domestic homicide and how Margo Wilson provided the bridges that make that coexistence possible.

Exemplifying its importance to the field, two other papers in this issue focus on sexual proprietariness. In “The importance of ‘sexual proprietariness’ in theoretical framing and interpretation of pregnancy-associated intimate partner violence and femicide: Through the eyes of a junior scholar,” Rae Taylor shows how Margo Wilson’s writings sparked and nurtured her own research into pregnancy-related intimate partner violence and femicide, and prompted her intellectual growth as a relative newcomer to the field. Though Rae never met Margo and never saw her present her work, Margo’s thinking was a fundamental influence in the development of Rae’s choice of research questions and an inspiration in her quest for practical application. Rae describes her journey, and discusses one of the most interesting outcomes of her own research—the intersection of male power and control, stalking, sexual abuse, and physical abuse in pregnant women as shown in an analysis of the National Violence Against Women survey in the United States.

Taking sexual proprietariness a step further, Joanne Belknap, Dora-Lee Larson, Christine Garcia, Margaret L. Abrams, and Kelly Anderson-Block find that data gathered by a domestic violence fatality review team in a major metropolitan area suggest that women homicide offenders may also be motivated by sexual proprietariness. Such review teams, which have recently sprouted up all over the United States and in some other Westernized nations worldwide, endeavor to document and analyze domestic homicides in a specific local area with the hope of determining how such fatalities might be prevented in the future. In “Types of intimate partner homicides committed by women: Self-defense, proxy/retaliation, and sexual proprietariness,” the authors, a collaboration of academic researchers and local practitioners, take advantage of the depth of qualitative and quantitative information available to them in an attempt to understand intimate partner homicides by both male and female offenders. The qualitative data suggest that women intimate partner homicide offenders demonstrate a variety of motives, including sexual jealousy, more often attributed to men. They find, however, that the quantitative information typically collected by fatality review teams lacks enough specific motivation information to adequately explore sexual jealousy.

The analysis of both female and male intimate partner homicide offenders continues in research by Victoria Titterington and Jeanne Subjack, which focuses on another of Margo Wilson’s and Martin Daly’s fruitful ideas: the “sex ratio of spousal killing” (SROK), the number of women who kill their husbands per 100 men who kill their wives. In “Margo Wilson’s influence continues: A research note on the sex ratios of killing (SROKs) in Texas’ six largest cities,” they examine evidence from each of these cities over 30 years, controlling for relationship, age, and weapon, and compare patterns across cities and over time. Their city-specific analysis yields support for past SROK research but at the same time demonstrates a wide variation in results at the city level.

In “Cohabitation is no longer associated with elevated spousal homicide rates in the U.S.A.,” Bridie James and Martin Daly find that the widely documented large difference in spousal homicide rates between cohabiting couples versus those in registered marriages has now largely disappeared, at least in the United States. Taking the reader step by step through the evidence, they examine several possible explanations for the growing similarity between cohabitating and registered unions in the United States in recent years, and find that none of these explanations is successful. Their unblinking review of ideas that were provoked by empirical findings, but that may no longer be supported by new data, is illustrative of the scientific rigor Martin and Margo brought to their work.

Margo Wilson not only contributed challenging new concepts and an insistence on methodological rigor to the study of homicide, she literally contributed to one of the most important empirical datasets on homicide in the world. As Carolyn Rebecca and Richard Block tell us in “Margo Wilson’s contributions to the Chicago Homicide Dataset: Sexual rivalry and sexual jealousy,” Margo made significant improvements to the famous Chicago Homicide Dataset (CHD). These contributions were both theoretical and pragmatic, and served to change the way data have been both conceptualized and collected for the CHD ever since. Block and Block also remind us that homicide research can be dirty work—and that Margo was totally willing to manually search through decades of old police files for months at a time in order to collect the statistical data she needed to explore the ideas she put forth. One of the many enhancements Margo suggested for the CHD was to separate the commonly used and confusing “lover’s triangle” motive description into the more precise “sexual jealousy” and “sexual rivalry” categories. In this paper, the Blocks look closely at sexual jealousy and sexual rivalry, dividing sexual jealousy homicides into those in which the offender is accusing the victim of infidelity and those in which the victim is accusing the offender. They find that, as Margo Wilson and Martin Daly predicted, these three types of homicide vary considerably.

The unique scholarly and collegial relationship between Margo Wilson, Martin Daly, Rebecca Emerson Dobash, and Russell Dobash gave rise to important scholarly contributions to the field. In “Increasing understanding of violence against women: Honoring Margo Wilson through reflections on the work of Wilson and Daly,” the Dobashes give readers a feel for the excitement and challenges of interdisciplinary collaborative work in this field, and provide advice from their experience to others embarking on collaboration. The rest of us may envy the idea of a “research vacation” in Italy, but there is little doubt that the discussions, debates, and even heated arguments that took place during those scholarly salons were also enormously intellectually productive. The ideas generated during those collaborative visits fundamentally changed the field of intimate partner violence.

In “Risk factors for intimate partner homicide: The importance of Margo Wilson’s foundational research,” Jacqueline Campbell brings this collection of papers to a close with an example of the importance of Margo Wilson’s work to practical applications in the field. Margo was not only dispassionately interested in the empirical analyses that could be done on homicide data; she was fervent about trying to figure out how understanding the dynamics of homicides could be used to prevent them. Sharing that passion for prevention, Margo and Martin supported and encouraged Jacqueline Campbell’s efforts to create tools for the diagnosis of risk factors for intimate partner homicide over many years. This paper outlines the influence of Margo Wilson’s ideas on the initial development and the perfecting of the Danger Assessment, and concludes that “Margo Wilson’s work is living on in many tangible ways.”

Sadly, it was Margo Wilson’s premature death that prompted many of her friends and colleagues to come to terms with how important her contributions really were, and how wide her impact really was. Many of the authors in this special edition are notable homicide scholars in their own right, especially in the field of domestic homicide. Their fondness, and praise, for Margo Wilson testifies to the importance of her contributions to this field and the unmitigated sorrow with which we all responded to her untimely death. For younger researchers, even those not yet born, and for the larger field as a whole, this tribute special edition affirms that Margo Wilson ranks as one of those “giants” upon whose shoulders we all stand.