Article: Women far less likely to kill than men; no one sure why

Accused serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who was recently sentenced to death in Florida, is the exception that doesn't prove the rule.

The rule is that women, unlike men, don't kill strangers or even casual acquaintances, except in very rare cases of self-defense. When women do kill -- and they do so at astonishingly lower rates than men, who commit 85 percent of all homicides -- the vast majority kill family members, usually men who have battered them for years.

As many as 90 percent of the women in jail today for murdering men had been battered by those men. A much smaller number -- about 3 in 100,000 -- kill their children as a result of a post-partum psychosis that has gone untreated.

There ...

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