가족 구성원 간 살해에 대한 고찰

Abstract

Homicide is the most violent crime in human communities. Yet homicide cases do not rarely occur inside family members. This study will examine parricide, filicide, and spousal homicide under the perspectives of evolutionary psychology and feminism. In addition, we have tried to understand differential treatment between male and female offenders who kill their family members. Parricide and filicide offenders have been attributed by mental disorder mainly. However, evolutionary psychology perspective addresses some of etiological explanations on conflict between parents and children. On the other hand, husband and wife relationship according to evolutionary version gives a clue why spousal homicide happens. Wife killers do have proprietariness for adaptation while husband killers report that they experience pressure of performing sex role expectations, different understandings for duties of marriage, and continuous physical and mental abuse from their male partners. There is a different standard for sentencing to the female offenders according to their sex role expectation(evil women hypothesis, Nagel & Hagan, 1982) and role under evolutionary version against women in the criminal justice system. Moreover, this hypothesis has been proved by prison sample in Korea. As a result, female offenders who kill their family members may have harsher sentence than male offenders.