On understanding homicide.

There are many faces of homicide, and there are no simple preventive cures. There is scarce comfort in knowing the homicide is, in fact, rare (there being roughly 60 cases per year in Victoria), or that a person is several times more likely to die by his or her own hand than that of someone else. Our current research suggests that there are some consistent patterns in the form that homicide takes. Hopefully, the more we understand these scenarios, the better we will be able to recognise the underlying conditions that push people to the point where they will think the unthinkable, and knowingly take the life of another person.