Intimate Partner Homicide – Women are Being Murdered More Than Ever in the United States. What Research Is Needed to Reduce the Carnage?

This brief opinion outlines the increase in homicide of women by intimate partners, primarily with guns. I make the case that more than half of abused women want to stay with their abusive intimate partners for many complex reasons and that they want to stay safely. They are not being controlled by abusers but rather making rational decisions based on their observations of, and love for the abuser, and concerns for their children. In order for women to stay safely, we need to get more of the abusers into interventions that have been shown to be effective, like Strength At Home and also store guns safely. We need to pay attention to the contemporary brain science that shows us how abusers grow up to use violence against partners and move away from assuming that abusers are motivated by power and control. But we need more and better research to show the efficacy of these approaches.