Introduction: homicide, gender and responsibility

Debate surrounding legal responses to the crime of homicide has often centred on the perceived (in)adequacy of the law’s response to murder (particularly in high-profile cases), questions of culpability and divergent representations of victims and offenders. Within this debate, notions of gender, responsibility and justice have been focal. As important as these issues are, they have often been of immediate concern only when considering fairly circumscribed understandings of murder: those considered to be ‘domestic’. This book expands on this debate by examining these concerns not only in the context of the ‘private’ world of familial homicide but also in the more ‘public’ world of the state, the corporation, war and genocide. In so doing this book draws from key frameworks of criminological thought, legal analysis, empirical evidence and rigorous research to critically examine the relationships among and responses to homicide, gender and responsibility.