African American Family Homicide

The high incidence of violence between family members has become increasingly well documented in the last decade so that it is now generally recognized that large number of individuals in the United States will experience some sort of violence at the hands of family members at some time in their lives (see, for example, Straus & Gelles, 1986; Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980). At the most extreme end of the continuum of this violence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reported that 14% of the 20,045 homicide victims in the United States in 1990 were murdered by members of their own families (FBI, 1990). As is the case with all types of homicide, African Americans are victimized by lethal violence at the hands of family members at rates that are many times higher than those for other racial groups in the United States (Mercy & Salzman, 1989; Plass & Straus, 1987). This article will present descriptive analysis of this special subset of family murders, namely, those that occurred among African Americans. There are number of reasons for an examination of family homicides occurring specifically among African Americans. First, although the inordinately high rate of homicide among African Americans has been observed and documented for many decades (Hackney, 1969; Hawkins, 1986a; Lottier, 1938; Shannon, 1954; Silberman, 1978), there has been what criminologist Darnell Hawkins (1986b) calls a lack of systematic detailed analysis of the phenomena, including attention to intra-group distribution and patterning