Overview
Throughout this course, we discuss trends and patterns in homicide locally in our own world region, but we also emphasize the importance of locating our experiences in the global context. The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with the opportunity to learn about homicide in another country or world region to better understand how homicide in Canada differs (or not) from other regions of the world and why this might be the case. It will also provide you with the opportunity to demonstrate what you have learned in the first 5 units of the course by incorporating course materials where appropriate and relevant to your discussion. Course materials may include required readings, lecture notes, videos, news links and so on.
The main question you are addressing in this assignment is, in what way do trends and patterns in, and explanations for, homicide in Canada differ from other parts of the world? Are trends and patterns similar in some respects but different in other characteristics? How might these similarities and differences be explained? Do explanations vary cross-nationally?
By this stage, you have now read Chapter 20, Homicide in Canada (required reading in Units 2 and 3).
In the next two weeks, you will be introduced to various theoretical understandings or explanations for why homicides occur (required readings in Units 4 and 5).
This assignment asks you to use this new knowledge and understanding to examine how homicide in Canada compares to other world regions.
Instructions
By the end of Week 3, you will select one of the four countries/world regions listed below to compare and contrast similarities and differences in trends and patterns, as well as explanations, between that country/world region and Canada. You will make your selection by self-enrolling in the relevant group using the Groups tool in CourseLink. There will be an equal, but limited, number of spaces available for each country, available on a first-come-first-served basis, beginning in Week 2.
Chapter 28 South Africa
After introducing your basic thesis statement about whether trends/patterns/explanations for homicide are more similar or more different and why between Canada and the country/world region you are focusing on, your paper may include the following to expand on this thesis statement:
A comparison of the reliability and validity of data sources in each country and how this compares to what you now know about homicide data;
A comparison of victim, perpetrator and incident characteristics in each country and how this compares to what you now know about homicide in general;
A discussion of the social and political context in each country that may contribute to levels of homicide (currently and/or over time), who perpetrates these killings, their primary victims, and what these homicides look like (e.g. cause of death, location of killing, etc.).
A reflection on whether explanations or theories of homicide differ in each country and why this might be the case; and/or,
A reflection on what the authors identify as future research priorities and how they are similar or different in each country.
These are meant as suggestions only. You may identify other elements that are important for comparison.
Important Caveat: Please note that your ability to address the above points will depend on the country you are comparing to Canada and what information has been included by the author. Remember, often what an author focuses on in describing homicide in their country underscores what they see as most relevant or pertinent to understanding the phenomenon in their part of the world. As such, you might also identify what is missing from their discussion that was highlighted in the chapter on Canada and vice versa.
Assignment Expectations
You are expected to incorporate course materials where possible and appropriate from Units 1 through 5 inclusive to support your statements or discussion points. Note: You are not expected to use external resources – those outside course materials – to do this assignment and you will not receive credit for doing so.
Proper referencing style is expected when referring to any course materials. Use the referencing style that is most familiar to you and be consistent throughout.
You must submit your assignment in Times New Roman, 12 pt., double-spaced (and, yes, we can tell the difference 😊), using standard 8 x 11 format.
The assignment must be 4-5 pages in length(1250 words exaclty and should be double spaced apa-7 style owl purde (not including references)
Warning: Papers longer than specified or those that do not follow guidelines will be returned to you and late penalties will apply until a revised paper is resubmitted.
Tip: Please keep in mind that it may take several readings to pinpoint the areas that you wish to discuss and decide how you will support your statements using the knowledge gained in this course so far. Therefore, give yourself time to engage with both chapters and think about what you wish to highlight in your assignment.
Grading Expectations
Table 2 – Rubric for Assessing the Comparing Homicide Locally and Globally Assignment
Component
Level 1 (Excellent)
24-30 (A-range)
Introduction/Thesis statement
Main finding/thesis statement of paper accurately introduced
Evidence
Provides significant evidence to support the main argument(s); draws significantly from course materials
Grasp of Sources Cite
Demonstrates strong understanding of the course materials cited
Conclusion
Clearly synthesizes and reframes key points from paper
Organization
Organization and structure of paper flows smoothly with clear transitions between points/arguments made
Clarity and Writing
Language is accessible and clear; correct grammar and clear writing throughout
READING-1 (DOCX-1 ATTACHED IS)
Chapter 20, Homicide in Canada
READING-2 (DOCX-2 ATTACHED IS)
CHAPTER -28
Homicide in South AfricaREADING -3 BOOK THE HANDBOOK OF HOMOCIDE.
Reading from unit-1to unit-4
Canadian Trends in Homicide
Being new to this topic, it is important to first understand our own situation and experiences with homicide. To give you a broad overview of homicide in Canada, you should first finish reading my chapter, Homicide in Canada, to which you were introduced in the previous unit. In this chapter, I describe some of the historical and contemporary trends in homicide in Canada. We also learn about some of the key sociodemographic characteristics of victims and perpetrators as well as situational characteristics of the homicides. You will be introduced to some theoretical explanations that have been used to explain homicide patterns in the Canadian context which will be expanded on in subsequent units. You will also learn what is known about our criminal justice responses to homicide, an issue we will come back to in more detail towards the end of the course.
The Homicide in Canada chapter is an important source of information about trends and patterns in homicide in our country and a concise introduction to some of the issues we will cover in this course. However, to be really informed about homicide and its prevention, we often need to know what is happening from year to year as well. To that end, we will begin to familiarize ourselves with an annual publication produced by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, a branch of Statistics Canada, using data collected through the Homicide Survey since 1961, a data source introduced in the previous unit.
You can access this Juristat series online for information on homicides from 1995 to 2022. Throughout the coming weeks, we will draw your attention to various issues in this series.
For this unit, you are only required to read the most recent publication, Homicide in Canada, 2022 on Ares, which can also be found at the Statistics Canada page, Homicide in Canada, 2022.
When reading Homicide in Canada, 2022, please note that the goal is to understand the trends and patterns in homicide not the actual statistics (e.g., raw numbers, rates, etc.) unless they are flagged as important, which may occur from time to time.
While it may be interesting to know that only two homicides occurred in Guelph in 2022 (see page 8), this is not crucial information required to be an informed member of the public (so would not be an exam question, either!)..
You would also not be expected to remember the exact percentage of male and female homicide victims in 2022, but you would be expected to know that males are typically killed more often than females albeit in different circumstances and what those different circumstances are. You would also be expected to know that regardless of the sex of the victim, males are the majority of accused. Both these patterns are also discussed in the Homicide in Canada chapter.
As another example, you would not be asked to remember what the homicide rate was in Nunavut in 2022, but you would be expected to know that homicide rates continue to be higher in the western and northern parts of the country – a trend also discussed in the Homicide in Canada chapter.
Numbers, rates, or percentages will change from year to year whereas trends and patterns typically cover longer periods of time and change less often. Therefore, it is the trends and patterns that researchers typically focus upon to develop homicide prevention initiatives and they are most important for informed members of the public as well.
Recall that we have underscored how much of our common knowledge about homicide comes from movies, television dramas, true crime stories and news content. It’s important to note that much of this content originates from the United States and this impacts our knowledge about homicide in Canada or what we think we know. As such, it should come as no surprise that there are common misunderstandings about homicide and homicide law in the Canadian context. These misunderstandings arise because we believe our situation is the same as our neighbors south of the border. Even within academia, most homicide textbooks are U.S. based, drawing primarily from research conducted in that country (which is why there is no textbook assigned to this course), so there is little information out there to combat these misunderstandings.
Why is there so much focus in the U.S. on violent crime and homicide?
It is likely due, in part, to the fact that the United States does have one of the highest homicide rates in the Westernized world (see chart, p. 346, Homicide in Canada chapter). As a result, the large body of research conducted there may stem from their desire to understand why this is the case, with the goal of reducing or preventing homicide in their country. It may also be that U.S. researchers have access to various data sources from which to conduct research on homicide. In contrast, what we know about our situation in Canada draws primarily from annual reports published by Statistics Canada using data that are not being made widely available to researchers. However, you should also notice in the chart provided that our rates are higher than many other countries so homicide prevention should also be a priority concern for Canadians as well.
After reading Homicide in Canada, 2022, discuss if any of the trends and patterns surprised you. If so, why? If not, why not? [See Unit 03 Activities at the end of this unit for instructions.]
While the above explanations may sound strange to us today, at one time these types of explanations represented dominant theories of homicide. Today, our explanations or theories of homicide are more sophisticated; at least we think they are, but who knows how they will look to homicide researchers a century from now. However, the origins of our theories can be traced back to some of these early explanations or, in the case of early biological and psychological explanations which the above represent, what is referred to as positivism.
As indicated at the start of the course, we adopt a sociological criminology framework and, by now, you should have read Barkan’s (2015) description of this approach to the study of crime, including homicide. However, in examining theories of homicide, it is important to remember that there is no single explanation (another word for ‘theory’) for homicide and that explanations can be pitched at different and multiple levels of analysis. Therefore, we often look at a combination of factors at the individual, relational, familial, community or societal level to help us explain various types of homicide. This is the approach adopted by the public health perspective which was also introduced in previous units and specifically in the reading by Pridemore (2003).
In other words, theories can focus on individual (e.g. sex, age, race/ethnicity) or situational factors (e.g. presence of firearms, role of alcohol) which may explain why certain individuals are at an increased risk of homicide victimization or offending or in what circumstances homicides typically occur (sometimes referred to as micro-level analyses). Alternatively, theories might focus on community- or societal-level factors that explain why different towns, cities, regions or countries have varying homicide rates (e.g. levels of poverty, presence of armed conflict) or why homicide rates have varied over time (sometimes referred to as macro-level analyses) such as improved medical responses or the evolution of targeted and more effective homicide prevention initiatives. Finally, theoretical approaches may integrate these various levels of analysis to provide a more comprehensive understanding of homicide through a multi-level framework. This is the ultimate goal of the public health approach because again those who adopt this approach recognize that no single factor can explain homicide and, therefore, so single legislation, policy or program can prevent homicide either.
We will also learn that there are different types of homicide and so explanations may also vary by homicide sub-type. For example, while certain groups of individuals may be more likely to commit homicide, an individual’s social background, their current social situation, the environment in which they live, both locally and globally, or the immediate circumstances surrounding a potential conflict will likely influence their response to particular situations – whether they respond in a lethal manner or not. This fact was driven home for me when I was working as a young reporter in New Brunswick in the mid-1980s.
Professor Dawson’s Story: Reporting Homicide
In the late 1980s, as a young reporter in my first job at a newspaper in New Brunswick, I covered my first murder trial. At the time, I was working in a town that just happened to be experiencing a series of homicides, not all of which were perpetrated by the same offender. My interest in violent crime was also likely sparked during this time although I did not yet fully appreciate the value of theory and research in understanding human behaviour or how complex the processes can be when attempting to explain or understand violence.
The trial that I covered was that of Earl Lewis who had been charged with the second-degree murder of Raymond Patrick Murphy on October 13, 1986. After covering the daily activities of his 1987 trial, I reported that Lewis had been convicted of second-degree murder. Second-degree murder, as you now know, comes with a mandatory life sentence, but the parole eligibility period can range from 10 to 25 years. Sitting in court on the day that Lewis was sentenced, I heard the Crown prosecutor request the maximum parole eligibility period of 25 years. When Lewis was asked by the judge if he had anything he wanted to say before being sentenced, Lewis responded, “I agree with Mr. Ferguson (the Crown prosecutor), I probably do deserve 25 years in my opinion, and if that’s the case, I guess I’ll have to do it.” The judge sentenced Lewis to life with no parole eligibility until 20 years had been served. (Review Professor Dawson’s newspaper article, or the transcript.) Later, as Lewis was leaving the courthouse, he was asked by a reporter if he was disappointed that he did not get the 25 years and he replied, “It wouldn’t have mattered too much.”
I recall thinking to myself that it should matter (wouldn’t it matter to you?) and wondered why it did not matter to him. I began to understand why Lewis responded that way when I received a letter from him several weeks later in which he complimented me on the coverage of his trial and, in part, to explain some of his behaviour. He told me in his letter that he had spent 29 of his 41 years in one institution or another, including some of his early years, which were spent in reform schools. When he was released from prison in 1985 after spending about 12 years incarcerated for an earlier manslaughter conviction, he said he had $500 in his pocket and was not prepared to live again on the outside. He concluded his letter by writing, “I think of a poem I seen one time…walls and bars do not make a prison. How many people in the community are in their own self-made prisons on the outside? Be it self-made or a way of life they cannot seem to change out of. I think if you took a poll, it would be quite a few.”
After reading his letter, I had a better understanding as to why it did not seem to matter to him how long his sentence was because he did not distinguish a great deal between his life on the outside and the one he was returning to as a result of his sentence. I also realized that despite hearing the trial details of the circumstances that lead to the killing, which focused on the role of alcohol and his anger, I still had little understanding about the multitude of factors that likely contributed to his actions at that point in his life. Regardless of his reasons for writing this letter, it made me realize that the stories I and other journalists wrote when covering these events did not provide society with much context with which they could try to understand why homicides or other types of crime occur or why some people kill.
The knowledge that I have today is extensive compared to what I knew when I was reporting on some of these same issues in the mid-1980s. At that time, I knew nothing about offenders, their motivations, their situations, or their lives when writing these stories. I also knew nothing about the lives of victims even though I had written stories about those who had suffered child abuse and domestic violence. I realized, then, that my stories were totally without context or even a minimal understanding of the complexity of the issues I was reporting on. Yet my stories were reaching a large audience and helping them to construct what they knew about these issues. While there are many reporters out there who try to provide the needed context, the constraints reporters work within often prevent this from occurring in any meaningful way.
In summary, an understanding of why homicides occur cannot be achieved by reading newspapers or watching television broadcasts that cover these events. Such an understanding may not even be possible by studying this phenomenon for years as I have done because, as you will see, there are many competing explanations for violence. The difference between my early years as a reporter and me now, however, is that I now have more knowledge about homicides and those who perpetrate them. I know that to say someone is psychologically unstable or sick is not an adequate explanation for the fact that they took another human life. Nor is it enough to say that someone lived in poverty to explain their violent actions. The fact that I know these things means that I am part of a better-informed public—a public that is required for effective violence prevention. In the mid-1980s, I was not. Are you? Hopefully, by the end of this course, yes, you will be.
The oldest explanations for homicide are supernatural in their origins and focused on demonic possession or inherent evilness captured by the first quote above. As explanations, they certainly hold some fascination and continue to represent a never-ending source of plots for both movies and television, but there is little evidence to support such explanations today. However, with the rise of positivism in the 18th century, biological and psychological explanations for crime and violence became popular and continue to vie with or complement sociological explanations, expanding criminology’s interdisciplinary focus within sociological criminology.
Again, the emphasis in this course is on sociological explanations or those that focus more on factors outside the individual to explain why homicides occur and why particular groups are more at risk than other groups. This approach helps to counteract the common perception in popular culture and the media that continue to focus on individual explanations for homicide, rarely drawing our attention to how social factors play a key role in understanding this phenomenon. Despite this, a well-informed public need to understand all potential explanations, so we will learn about biological explanations first followed by an overview of psychological explanations before we turn to the more sociological-focused theories in the next unit.
Topics covered in this unit include:
Biological Explanations
Psychological Explanations
Biological Explanations of Homicide
The first set of explanations for homicide are biological and the second quote in the introduction to this unit is based on explanations from one of the founding fathers of the distinct discipline of criminology, Cesare Lombroso.
Fiona Brookman, the author of the text from which Chapter 3 – Biological Explanations comes, highlights in a clear and concise manner the classic biological theories, beginning with Lombroso, and moving to twin and adoption studies that sought to understand the relationship between inheritance and criminality. More recently, she brings our attention around to neurobehavioral research that focuses on the role of hormones (e.g., testosterone, pre-menstrual syndrome, or PMS as it’s more commonly known) as well as recent work by Adrian Raine on brain abnormalities and Debra Niehoff on stress and its effects on the brain. Brookman closes the section with key criticisms of these explanations, which are important to understand as an informed member of the public on this topic.
The last section of this chapter focuses on other biological factors that may be associated with homicide risk and that may be more within our control than those discussed earlier in the chapter. These include environmentally-induced biological deficiencies such as those caused by the use of drugs and/or alcohol, poor nutrition, and exposure to lead.
Psychological Explanations of Homicide
This set of explanations are perhaps the most common among the general public; that is, variations of the person being ‘crazy’, ‘mentally ill’, ‘not in their right mind’, ‘delusional’, ‘sick’, and so on. What most of these adjectives are pointing to, is the state of the homicide perpetrator’s mind and how that mental state led to the killing.
Similar to biological explanations in their origins from positivism, psychological explanations focus on individuals’ psyche, personality structure, personality type, and so on, sometimes focusing only on the individual, but often looking to the social context in which the violence occurred to understand how and why people react differently to different cues or environments.
Brookman’s Chapter 4 – Psychological Explanations clearly lays out the various traditions within psychology and their contributions to the study of violent crime, including homicide, beginning with perhaps the most famous name associated with psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. The chapter then moves onto what is referred to as evolutionary psychology or socio-biology which emphasizes the way in which our behaviour has evolved to emphasize or ensure our continuing existence and to enhance our fitness for future generations.
Discussed in this chapter are two well-known proponents of this theory, Dr. Martin Daly and the late Dr. Margo Wilson, psychology professors at McMaster University, whose book Homicide published in 1988 continues to influence researchers today. In their book, Daly and Wilson cover various types of homicide and their evolutionary origins, including infanticide (the killing of infants), femicide (women killing), parricide (the killing of one’s parent), and male-on-male homicides.
Finally, Brookman covers personality theories, including the role of mental illness, as well as social and cognitive psychology as further major areas of this set of explanations.
We learned earlier in the course that the Homicide Survey began to collect information on the role of suspected mental or development disorders in homicide incidents in 1997. To date, these data show that disorders cover a wide range of problems, including schizophrenia, psychotic disorder, depression, and fetal alcohol syndrome. However, it’s important to note that these diagnoses are not necessarily medical in origin but based on information that arises through police investigations.
Introduction
For many, the idea of committing a homicide is so ‘out there’ that we cannot comprehend what drives those who do kill. However, it is often stated that we all have the capacity to kill when faced with a specific set of circumstances. Regardless of whether we believe this or not, it is easy to imagine that our relative capacity or likelihood to take someone’s life would, in part, be shaped by our past and current social relationships, interactions, and sometimes rapidly changing environments (for example, during a global pandemic such as COVID-19).
You now have a broad understanding of the various biological and psychological explanations that have been used to explain or understand homicide. This week, we turn our attention to explanations for homicide whose origins are in sociology or sociological criminology. Recall that Barkan (2015) argues that “people are social beings more than mere individuals” (p. 3). What he means by this is that the society in which we are born, raised, and live significantly shapes our behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, and future life outcomes. In the same way, our potential for criminal behaviour, or more pertinent for this course, our likelihood of homicidal behaviour, is also shaped by society and the social institutions or social structures that determine, to some extent, who we had or have relationships with and how we interact with those around us. Therefore, sociological explanations often look to factors outside of the individual to explain homicide – facts located in the society in which we live.
Topics covered in this unit include:
Sociological Explanations of Homicide
Homicide Mechanisms & Contributors
Sociological Explanations of Homicide
As in the previous unit, the first required reading is by Brookman who provides a detailed overview of the various theories— both historical and contemporary— that fall under the umbrella of sociological explanations of homicide, including structural, cultural and interactional perspectives.
Brookman’s chapter refers to multiple names and theories, all of which are important, but some key ones that you should take note of are as follows:
Chicago School of Criminology and the concept of social disorganization
Robert Merton and strain theory
Edwin Sutherland and differential association theory
Wolfgang and Ferracuti’s subculture of violence theory
Elliot Leyton’s emphasis on the role of culture (which we will return to below)
Matza and ‘drift’ theory
Study Tip
It is often helpful to make a chart of theories, their key concepts, as well as contributions and critiques for easy reference.
As you read, think about the factors or variables being emphasized by the theorists and how they are distinct from, or similar to, those identified by the biological and psychological explanations discussed in the previous unit. You should also pay attention to the criticisms of these theories because they are not without their limitations and part of being able to critically assess the utility of a theory is to understand both its strengths and weaknesses in explaining phenomenon in the real world.
Explaining homicide is not only about understanding the perpetrator, which is the focus of many theories, including biological, psychological and sociological explanations. It is also about understanding the victim. Therefore, the rise of a new branch of criminology— referred to as victimology— is a significant development in the study of homicide and this is also discussed in the chapter assigned this week.
In previous units, we have already discussed the importance of the victim-perpetrator relationship in the study of homicide and this includes the interactions between victims and perpetrators that may take place prior to, and just before, a homicide. Brookman discusses the work of various individuals in victimology, but research by Marvin Wolfgang and his concept of victim precipitation was a key development (but also with critiques). Building on groundwork laid by Wolfgang, increasing emphasis has been placed on the situational aspects of homicide – which would be the focus of micro-level analyses we discussed in a previous unit – in work by Luckinbill and Goffman, for example, as described near the end of the chapter.
Integral to the situational dynamics discussed in the work above, including whether or not they lead to homicide, are what the Global Study on Homicide 2019 refers to as homicide ‘mechanisms’ such as the availability or accessibility of firearms or ‘contributors’ such as the role of drugs and/or alcohol, which we will turn to next. These factors may be situational and are often determined by the individuals involved, but their potential role or the likelihood that they will be a factor is often impacted by macro-level factors. For example, gun control policies – a macro-level condition – will determine, to some extent, the availability or accessibility of firearms in various jurisdictions and, in turn, impacts on communities as well as at the individual micro level during interactions.
Homicide Mechanisms and Enablers
Inherent in our quest to understand why people commit homicide is the identification of precursors or motives that lead to homicides. At times, these pre-cursors or motives perplex us as we try to figure out how a simple matter could lead to the killing of one person by another person.
People have killed over cereal, a $5 debt, tickets to a concert, a dispute over chopsticks, a knock-off Rolex, hair extensions, and the list goes on. Two comments about the pre-cursors or motives for the killings portrayed here:
First, these identified motives should be considered the ‘surface’ motives for the homicide; in fact, the circumstances and events leading up to the killings as well as the background of the victim, the perpetrator and their previous relationship and interactions (if any) may all be relevant to understanding what on the surface appears to be inexplicable.
Second, while the above examples may seem ‘lame’ to you, they were not to those involved. It is often the case that killings arise out of seemingly innocuous interactions. Why is that? Why do some interactions that would never give rise to violence in most cases, suddenly turn lethal in specific instances?
In the previous and current units, we learned that there may be a variety of biological (e.g., hormones, brain abnormalities) and/or psychological factors (e.g., mental illness) that may interact with social structural factors (e.g., poverty, inequality, strain, socialization, cultural norms), but it is often the case that the presence or absence of particular ‘homicide mechanisms’ or ‘contributors’ will, in part, determine whether an interaction ends in a homicide.
One of the most common homicide mechanisms used to perpetrate a homicide is a firearm which accounted for more than half (54%) of the homicides worldwide in 2017, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in their most recent Global Study on Homicide. One of the most common contributors, according to the same study, are drugs and alcohol. The role of these two factors – firearms and drugs/alcohol – in violence and homicide also represent two key debates in sociological criminology, and society more generally, about what exactly their role is in the occurrence or production of homicide.
Regardless of whether one believes that guns cause violence or homicide or that drugs/alcohol cause violence or homicide, it is difficult to provide evidence of a direct causal link. However, homicide researchers have demonstrated that there is at least a correlation between these factors and the incidence and prevalence of violence in society. You likely learned in first year that a correlation is a relationship by which two (or more) variables change together. For example, in this case, availability of firearms – referred to as the independent variable – may increase in a community and the number of homicides – referred to as a dependent variable – also increases. This may mean these two variables are correlated, but not necessarily that the increase in firearms’ availability caused the increase in the number of homicides. This distinction is very important both for understanding the relationship between homicide mechanisms and contributors as well as for the development of homicide prevention initiatives. That is, of course, because not all people who have guns commit homicide and not all people who drink or use drugs kill.
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