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The present research contributes to the growing body of cross-cultural research on domestic violence. This is accomplished by answering the question of how severity of intimate partner abuse varies for (1) women incarcerated for the homicides of their male partners (2) abused women who sought domestic violence shelter, short of killing their intimate assailants, and (3) a group of South Korean females outside of domestic violence shelters or prison. The article concludes with a discussion of potential policy implications of the findings as well as promising directions for future research.

Serial murder is a genre of crime that has received a great deal of media and academic attention, yet, serial murder committed by women has only begun to garner a portion of this attention within the last 15 years. This study examines the reliability of Kelleher and Kelleher's classification rubric, the only classification system developed for female serial murderers, as well as considering Hickey's classification of serial offenders by location. Other variables associated with homicide research have also been examined to determine their roles in both these crimes and classifying offenders. The current research will demonstrate that offender motivation is not an ideal basis for the classification of female serial murderers, who tend to defy simple or singular classification within existing typologies. The other variables analysed indicate that victim–offender relationship and victim approach are important to understanding these female offenders and their crimes, as well as the possible development of more accurate classification systems. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Serial murderers are rare offenders, and this, coupled with challenges to accessing data about them, poses a significant challenge to empirical investigation. It is also true that female serial murderers are thought to be rarer than their male counterparts and have often been excluded from being labeled "serial murderers" due to narrowly constructed definitions. Thus, female serial murderers are an even more elusive population to study. The results of this exploratory analysis, using newspaper articles to gather data about the crimes of a subset of 10 female serial murderers in the United States, suggest that not only are these women different from men who commit serial murder but also that the scant information published about these rare offenders may have underestimated the female serial murderer in terms of both offender and offense characteristics.

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