Femicide occurs in the Southeast and Southwest areas of the country. The perpetrators of femicide are most often the husbands of the murdered woman, followed by boyfriends and male paramours on the side. They tend to be of the same race as their victim, but generally older. The act is most often carried out with firearms, followed by knives and beatings. Feminists view the American attitude towards love as one of the reasons these intimate partner femicide occur. Feminist Hildegard Peplau states that Americans are sentimental about love and that they de-emphasize the cultural forces that shape whom you love and
Femicide motive is not always empirically possible to be determined, and so must be removed from the qualification for femicide in order to gather data. On the other hand, authors Desmond Ellis and Walter Dekesedery take a different approach by viewing the definition for femicide as "the intentional killing of females by males". These feminists require that femicide always be intentional unlike the inclusion of covert femicide in Diana Russell's definition. Most of these definitions imply that the perpetrator of femicide is a man, but South Asian feminists differ in their definition stating that femicide is "the intentional killing of females