Lethal and Nonlethal Violence Against Wives and the Evolutionary Psychology of Male Sexual

Violence against wives occurs in all societies, but the rates at which wives are beaten and killed are enormously variable over time and place. The rate of uxoricide (wife killing) in the United States, for example, is currently approximately five to ten times greater than in western Europe. In some societies, wife beating is normative and allegedly almost universal; in others, it is apparently rare and aberrant (Counts, 1990; Counts, Brown, & Campbell, 1992; Levinson, 1989). But despite this variability, the studies of anthropologists, criminologists, historians, psychologists, psychiatrists, and other family violence researchers suggest that the contexts and ostensible motives of violence against wives exhibit considerable cross-cultural consistency. One aim of this chapter is to identify a level of abstraction at which