Marital Separation & Lethal Domestic Violence (Routledge 2014), by York Professor Emeritus of Sociology Desmond Ellis, York psychology Professor Noreen Stuckless and York PhD candidate Carrie Smith, is the first book to investigate the effects of participation in separation or divorce proceedings on femicide (murder of a female), femicide-suicide, homicide, and suicide. Separation is one of the most significant predictors of domestic violence and the book is exclusively devoted to theorizing, researching, and preventing lethal domestic violence or other assaults triggered by marital separation.
The authors provide evidence supporting the use of an estrangement-specific risk assessment and estrangement-focused public education to prevent murders and assaults. This information is needed not only by instructors in criminal justice and sociology programs, but by researchers theorizing about or investigating domestic violence. In the world of practitioners, family court judges, divorce mediators, family lawyers, prosecutors involved in bail hearings, shelter staff, and family counsellors urgently need this resource. Marital Separation & Lethal Domestic Violence advocates for prevention of domestic violence.
Desmond Ellis
Ellis is a senior scholar based in the LaMarsh Centre for Child and Youth Research, a center he created in 1981. Since 1993 he has published books, journal articles, and research reports on the effects of participation in adversarial and collaborative separation/divorce proceedings on sublethal and lethal domestic violence. Ellis established the Certificate in Dispute Resolution at York University. Currently he is the principal investigator of a study of family-honor-related violence against women.
Noreen Stuckless
Stuckless is a contract faculty member at York University and a member of the Associate Scientific Staff at Mt. Sinai Hospital. She teaches psychology of women and gender-related courses at York University. She has co-authored publications involving gender role socialization, domestic violence, gender-related immigrant experiences, and the scale development of measures including those on attitudes toward revenge, functional bowel disorders, and the psychological effects of diagnoses of genetic mutations. Her current research is on inter-partner violence and, in particular, how the victims are affected by the violence.
Carrie Smith
Smith is a York PhD candidate in psychology specializing in Quantitative Methods. Quantitative methodologists in the field of psychology develop new statistical techniques, and evaluate and compare existing approaches to analysing psychological data.