Submission Instructions

Background

Femicide, or the intentional killing of women and girls because of their gender (UNODC and UN Women 2022) is not a series of isolated incidents but the culmination of recognisable patterns of gendered violence. Research consistently shows that the vast majority of intimate partner femicides are preceded by histories of coercive control, abuse, and entrapment (Stark 2007; Monckton Smith 2020; Campbell et al. 2003). From the USA to Russia and Vietnam, the home is the most dangerous place for a woman or a girl. As a journal committed to both culture and sexuality, we are interested in how sexuality itself, including sexual violence, reproductive coercion, sextortion, and the killing of trans women, shapes pathways to femicide.

The concept of coercive control, first developed by Stark (2007), is increasingly central to understanding intimate partner violence as a condition of entrapment rather than a series of discrete violent incidents. There is broad agreement on three features: intentionality on the part of the abuser; the victim's negative perception of the controlling behaviour; and the abuser's ability to obtain control through a credible threat (Hamberger, Larsen and Lehrner 2017). Coercive control is effective partly because it is so thoroughly entangled with the taken-for-granted performance of male and female gender roles, that it is barely recognised as abuse (Arnold 2009).

The criminalisation of coercive control risks erasing women's agency. When legal actors rather than women themselves determine whether experiences constitute a crime, the cumulative, process-based nature of entrapment is reduced to a binary judgement (Walklate and Fitz-Gibbon 2019: 103).  Perpetrators are known to use the legal system itself as an instrument of control (Douglas 2018). Social science research is uniquely placed to document these processes as they unfold across time, relationships, and cultural contexts. It can capture the everyday texture of entrapment that incident-based legal and administrative systems are structurally unable to see.

The majority of studies of coercive control as a pathway to femicide have taken place in Western nuclear heterosexual households. Yet most people in the world do not live this way. Multigenerational households and extended kinship networks with mutual obligations such as found in Vietnam create more complex dynamics of complicity and silence than contexts in which couples typically live in nuclear families (Oosterhoff and Hoang 2025). Studies in India, Jordan, and Hong Kong show that in-law abuse and interference significantly increases women's vulnerability to intimate partner violence. In Gujarat, India, in-law abuse is strongly associated with intimate partner violence among women using community health services (Kamimura et al. 2017). In Jordan, a mixed-methods study found that family interference and abuse by extended kin increased women's risk of intimate partner violence, while family support could be protective (Clark et al. 2010). In Hong Kong, daily contact with parents-in-law and demands to obey them were significantly associated with in-law psychological aggression co-occurring with intimate partner violence (Choi 2022).

Digital technologies and online misogynist communities have enhanced women and girls' vulnerability: pro-abuse male peer support now operates in cyberspace, and many men who abuse women consume degrading content with their male peers online (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2013). Yet the role of masculinity among fathers, brothers, and uncles, who are also among the bereaved, and the conflicts of interest this creates, and the potential for a more protective masculinity that could prevent femicide and support healing in its aftermath, remain almost entirely untheorised.

Welcomed Topics

This special issue of Culture, Health & Sexuality invites papers that address these gaps. We focus on three interconnected themes: coercive control and culture; perpetrators and the social environments that sustain them; and the role of kin as protectors, bereaved, bystanders, enablers, and sometimes perpetrators.

Topics of special interest include:

• How does coercive control manifest in different cultural contexts where patriarchal control is culturally normalised and legally unrecognised?
• The implications for recognition and intervention when coercive control is exercised not by a lone intimate partner but distributed across kinship and familial lines through acts and a process that results in entrapment.
• The empirical and theoretical implications of recognising cultures as comprising multiple, intersecting signifying practices between different and unequal participants for research on femicide.
• Do digital coercive control, surveillance, stalking, and harassment through technology operate as a prelude to femicide?
• The role of male peer and kin networks such as fathers, brothers, uncles, fathers-in-law, friends and acquaintances in legitimating, emotionally supporting, and enabling intimate partner violence and femicide.
• Femicide prevention and response in nuclear, heteronormative and extended multigenerational and more fluid household compositions.
• The cultural aspects of femicide in contexts of rural-to-urban migration, seasonal labour, and transnational diaspora.
• Narrating, denying and justifying femicide across different cultural contexts.
• Witnessing, orchestrating and responding to intimate partner violence: what forms do individual, familial and social complicity take, including active reinforcement, strategic silence, warnings, and failed attempts at protection?
• What happens to extended families bereaved by femicide when the perpetrator is also a son or brother? How do conflicting loyalties shape access to justice and support for the victim's children?
• Sexual violence, including marital rape, and pregnancy or reproductive coercion as trigger points and risk factors for lethal violence, not simply one form of abuse among others.
• Transfemicide and the killing of trans women, including trans women engaged in sex work, and how these deaths are recognised, or rendered invisible, within existing femicide frameworks.

Approach

We seek papers engaging with intimate partner femicide from different parts of the world. As always with papers published in Culture, Health & Sexuality, a clear emphasis on context and culture is required.

We are looking for authors from different backgrounds. We welcome early career authors, and co-authorship of papers by senior and more junior authors.

We are looking for work that shows a rigorous and deep understanding of the intersections of culture and the three themes of this special issue. We wish to publish original research that has been completed with a preference for primary data, although the re-analysis of secondary data using a new perspective or different technique is also acceptable.

All papers included in the special issue will be peer reviewed in the normal way and only those papers recommended for publication following peer review will be accepted.

References

Arnold, G. 2009. "A Battered Women's Movement Perspective of Coercive Control." Violence Against Women 15 (12): 1432-1443.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801209346836

Campbell, J.C., D. Webster, J. Koziol-McLain, C. Block, D. Campbell, M.A. Curry, F. Gary, N. Glass, J. McFarlane, C. Sachs, P. Sharps, Y. Ulrich, S.A. Wilt, J. Manganello, X. Xu, J. Schollenberger, V. Frye, and K. Laughon. 2003. "Risk Factors for Femicide in Abusive Relationships: Results from a Multisite Case Control Study." American Journal of Public Health 93 (7): 1089-1097.
https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.93.7.1089

Choi, A.W.M. 2022. "In-law Psychological Aggression and its Impacts on Women's Health." Aggressive Behavior 48 (2): 163-172.
https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.22015

Clark, C.J., J.G. Silverman, M. Shahrouri, S. Everson-Rose, and N. Groce. 2010. "The Role of the Extended Family in Women's Risk of Intimate Partner Violence in Jordan." Social Science & Medicine 70 (1): 144-151.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2009.09.024

DeKeseredy, W. and M. Schwartz. 2013. Male Peer Support and Violence Against Women: The History and Verification of a Theory. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Douglas, H. 2018. "Legal Systems Abuse and Coercive Control." Criminology & Criminal Justice 18 (1): 84-99.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895817728380

Hamberger, K., S.E. Larsen, and A. Lehrner. 2017. "Coercive Control in Intimate Partner Violence." Aggression and Violent Behavior 37: 1-11.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2017.08.003

Kamimura, A., V. Ganta, K. Myers, and T. Thomas. 2017. "Intimate Partner Violence, Childhood Abuse, and In-Law Abuse Among Women Utilizing Community Health Services in Gujarat, India." Journal of Interpersonal Violence 32 (24): 3778-3796.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260515603973

Kuskoff, E. and C. Parsell. 2023. "Bystander Intervention in Intimate Partner Violence: A Scoping Review of Experiences and Outcomes." Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 25 (3): 1799-1813.
https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380231195886

Monckton Smith, J. 2020. "Intimate Partner Femicide: Using Foucauldian Analysis to Track an Eight Stage Progression to Homicide." Violence Against Women 26 (11): 1267-1285.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801219863876

Oosterhoff, P. and T-A. Hoang. 2025. Lethal Love: Femicide in Vietnam, An Analysis of Media Reports 2018-2024. IDS Working Paper 625. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies.
https://doi.org/10.19088/IDS.2025.065

Stark, E. 2007. Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

UNODC and UN Women. 2022. Gender Related Killings of Women and Girls (Femicide/Feminicide): Global Estimates 2022. Vienna: UNODC.

Walklate, S. and K. Fitz-Gibbon. 2019. "The Criminalisation of Coercive Control: The Power of Law?" International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 8 (4): 94-108.https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.v8i4.1205

 

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Authors are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 300 words for early feedback from the guest editors. Abstracts are welcome on a rolling basis and will receive feedback within six weeks of submission. This will help ensure balance across the three themes and across geographic and disciplinary contributions and give authors an idea if the proposed paper fits the scope and approach of the special issue before investing in a full article. This is not peer review and does not guarantee acceptance. All submitted papers go through the normal peer review process.

Deadlines

• The final deadline for submission of abstracts is 1 January 2027.
• Abstracts should be sent to Pauline Oosterhoff at: P.Oosterhoff@ids.ac.uk
• The deadline for submission of full papers is 1 June 2027.

Potential contributors should read the journal and author guidelines carefully before preparing their paper. Guidelines on the preparation of papers for publication in Culture, Health and Sexuality are linked below.

Final papers must not exceed 7,500 words in total (including all references, tables and figures and footnotes) and should be submitted via the journal's submission website linked below under "Submit an Article to Culture, Health and Sexuality".

Please indicate clearly in your online final submission that this is a contribution to the special themed issue on Lethal Intimacy by selecting this special issue option when submitting your manuscript.

Read the Instructions for Authors on Culture, Health & SexualitySubmit an article to Culture, Health & Sexuality