Domestic homicide in Maputo Province, Mozambique

Domestic Homicide is the most extreme form of domestic violence reported worldwide. Although in Mozambique there are public reports of domestic homicide, no research has been published that describes its pattern.

This study aims to describe the pattern of domestic homicides in Maputo Province, Mozambique.

A cross-sectional descriptive and quantitative approach study was applied using autopsy report data from 2016 to 2017 at the Forensic Medicine Services at Maputo Central Hospital. All cases of domestic homicide were captured in an Excel database and exported to Stata software for analysis. Descriptive statistics was performed for victim's age, sex, education level, relation to the offender, place of occurrence, and means of killing. Logistic regression was applied to investigate associations of intimate partner homicide with these independent variables.

From a total of 689 autopsies of homicide over the two years, 96 (13.9%) were victims of domestic homicide. Among them, 62 (64.6%) were males and 34 (35.4%) females, with the median age of 38.9 years (range 0-92). Forty (41.7%) victims had primary level education. The residence was the place of the homicide in 45 (46.9%) of the cases. As a means of killing, suffocation was used in 26 cases (27.1%), use of a blunt instrument in 24 (25.0%), and poisoning in 16 (16.7%) cases. Twenty-three (24.0%) cases were victims of intimate partner homicide. From 73 (76.0%) cases of non-intimate partner homicide, 32 (43.8%) were siblicide, 27 (40.0%) were filicide, and 14 (19.2%) parricide. From a multivariable logistic regression, intimate partner homicide was only found to be positively associated to the victim being female (OR = 6.17, 95% CI 1.28-29.79, p-value 0.024).

This research contributes to the understanding of the pattern of domestic homicide, which will be useful for the identification of preventive measures. More research is necessary to understand the social contexts that lead to domestic homicide.