Chapter 2: Change, Intimacy, and Relationships: Implications for Measuring Intimate and Non-intimate Femicide Available to Purchase

Non-intimate femicides, particularly ‘stranger’ femicides, spark exceptional public fear. However, there has been little study of what constitutes ‘non-intimate’ femicide and how to distinguish it from ‘intimate’ femicide. Combining scholarship on the sociologies of family and intimacy with femicide, this chapter interrogates change in how intimate relationships are expressed, lived, and practised, and considers the implications for distinguishing intimate from non-intimate femicide. The question that this chapter addresses is: What does it mean to be in a ‘domestic’ or ‘intimate’ relationship and why does this matter to how we measure femicide?

The chapter has three sections. The first section introduces the concept of non-intimate femicide and the problems that arise due to it often being defined by negation: that is, it is defined by the absence of an intimate relationship and therefore what it is not. The second section theorises change in intimate relationships: namely, how people organise their personal lives, how they make connections, and how they show and practise care for other people in their lives. The third section considers the implications of these debates for how non-intimate femicide is captured within data, either as ‘acquaintance’ or ‘stranger’ femicides; alongside the broader impacts upon understanding and preventing non-intimate femicide. This final section poses the question of whether certain femicides may be misclassified as they fall between dominant, heteronormative constructions of intimate versus stranger relations.