Intimate Femicide in Italy: A Model to Classify How Killings Happened

Abstract

Women's homicide (femicide) is the most serious form of violence againstwomen. The aim of this paper is to propose a method to classify theunderlying mechanism of killing. We analysed 1,125 cases of femicides inItaly from :2000 to 2005, 764 of these occurring in a domestic setting.The most important information about the mechanism of femicide istextual data, referring to newspaper articles. We propose a method todescribe the killer profile on the basis of the analysis of crimescenes, possible suspect information and killer's modus operandi.