Domestic Homicide and Emotions from the Late Nineteenth Century to the 1920s

Abstract

Some scholars have suggested that a significant change in homicides and interpersonal violence occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This new type of violence was characterised by strong feelings between the offender and their victim, and the change was connected to modernisation, changes in power balance between men and women, and individualism. Based on the Court of Appeal documents, we deduced that the murder of one’s spouse, father, or brother were the most prevalent homicides within families in Finland at the time. The Court documents, in conjunction with newspaper accounts, captured the trend of troubled family relationships and demonstrated that lethal family violence was caused by complex, interconnected factors. Prolonged violence was a major underlying cause of homicides. One of the main characteristics of domestic male-on-male homicides was heated domestic quarrels that escalated to a homicide. We argue that the majority of domestic violence cases exemplify the traditional and persisting forms of family violence, as homicides and severe violence were closely related to questions of household authority or inconsistencies in property disputes. Modernisation did not only intensify these problems but also created new individualised expectations and pressures that could have erupted into homicide in close relationships and resulted in a suicide attempt.