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The present research was conducted to investigate the psychosocial causes underlying the crime of murder in Pakistan. A total of 100 randomly selected convicts of murder were interviewed from the Central Jail Kot Lukhpat, Lahore. The typical personality profile of a murderer as shown by the data was a young, poor, unskilled, and uneducated man with no history of crime and imprisonment. The breakdown of psychosocial causes of the crime of murder into different categories showed that the greater number of murders were committed due to petty affairs, while old enmities and property disputes had also their major share among the causes. The findings revealed that most of the homicidal acts occur in interpersonal contexts. The use of guns as the most commonly employed weapon for killing others indicates that the license issuing authorities should be more vigilant in permitting the license. The involvement of otherwise normally functioning individuals in the heinous act of murder suggests that with proper education and counselling as well as social reforms many of the terrible acts may be avoided.
Homicide is the killing of one human being by another. Behaviourists, criminologists, and sociologists have multidimensional views about the homicides due to variations in the causes and the motives behind killing, the methods used to cause death of the other person, role of different social variables in promoting homicidal attempts, etc.
Homicidal attempt is the result of extreme aggression. Studies on homicides indicate that homicides often take place between the persons who have been in social interaction with each other, and usually at home of the either. Rogde, Hougen, and Poulsen (2000) studied homicide in two Scandinavian capitals, Oslo and Copenhagen. They concluded that 78% of women, and 49% of the men killed were murdered in their own homes, and the most common circumstance was family row. One of the main reasons of homicide was that many of the victims had actually irritated the social interaction that led to the homicidal response, in a direct or subliminal way. According to Wolfgang (as cited in Bartol, 1980) it is the victim who, by insinuation, bodily movement, verbal incitement, or the actual use of physical force, initiates a series of events that result in his/her own death. In his study,...