Homicide Victims and Offenders: An Israeli Study

Although criminal homicide has been the subject of numerous investigations, the number of empirical studies is limited.'The basic methodological assumption underlying this article is that the act of homicide cannot be explained by any simple, broad, unitary variable.Rather, it must be viewed as the consequence of involvement with and interaction of a variety of variables.The purpose of this study is to identify these variables and to assess the relative contribution of each to the resultant act of criminal homicide.The analysis is limited to several characteristics of the victim and the offender in a homicide.First, a brief description of the general findings of the study will be presented.Then, more detailed data will be presented relative to the sex and ethnic origin of both victim and offender, the victimoffender relationship, and the motives involved in the criminal homicide. 2 The subjects of this study were the 279 offenders' t This paper presents findings from a multivariate study on criminal homicide in Israel, parts of which were presented at the Sixth International Congress on Criminology, Madrid, September 1970.