FBI Data and Sexual Homicide

Criminal Justice Issues

Since there is no official legal definition of sexual homicide, therefore sexual homicide cannot be truly characterized as criminal behavior.

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Although there is no specific legal definition for sexual homicide, homicides that are listed as "criminal" include the killing of humans by either murder or manslaughter, so a closer look at what "sexual homicide" really refers to is warranted. In the book Sexual Murder: Catathymic and Compulsive Homicides, Louis B. Schlesinger explains that there is a "blurred distinction between a sexual murderer and a sex offender who commits a murder" (Schlesinger, 2003, p. 6). The sexual offender who murders his victim may not have intended to commit the murder at all; the victim may have resisted and the offender responded violently and killed the person. Hence, Schlesinger writes that this was not a "sexually motivated" murder because murder wasn't on the mind of the killer at the start of the act.

However, a murder in which the offender kills a prostitute after he rapes her, and fully intended all along to commit the murder, would be considered a sexual murderer (Schlesinger, 7). Given that Schelsinger's book is eleven years old, some of the data he reports could be out of date, but it is interesting that the FBI "Behavioral Science Unit" has not (at least up to that point) estimated the number of sexual homicides in the United States. Likely this is because of the fine line between a sexual deviant who kills in a moment of rage or passion and a person that is psychologically bent on killing women and carries out his gruesome task.

The FBI may not wish to further muddy the waters when it comes to defining or categorizing sexual homicide. It seems strange though that the FBI would not work harder to establish motives in all homicides so that the public could understand the trends and be made fully aware of the kinds of hideous characters lurking out there in the shadows, waiting for a female to be available for slaughter.

Unlike the U.S., Canada does keep statistics on sexual homicides, but there is a question as to whether the 4% of homicides in Canada that are listed as sexual homicides are really sexually motivated. In other words, can the law enforcement in Canada be absolutely sure that when a woman has been found raped and killed that the offender was sexually motivated? The Canadian police indicate that without "expressions of genitality" (evidence that there was sexual intercourse and that semen was in evidence) the crime cannot be called sexual homicide.

In carefully reviewing why there is no legal definition of sexual homicide -- and what sexual homicide really amounts to -- a writer also comes across reasons why killers do what they do, and those reasons are very interesting and some of them predictable. A killer may experience "certain precipitating stresses" that he is not aware of, but they push him toward violence in any event (Douglas, et al., 2008). Would this help explain a sexual homicide? Not necessarily, because he may have simply found a vulnerable human who happened to be a prostitute and did the deed based on those hitherto mentioned stresses.