Femicide is a large factor in intimate partner femicide, and worldwide firearms are used in one-third of all femicides. Intimate partner femicide, as reported in the media, often is presented sympathetically towards the male perpetrators. Males are seen as "being driven" to commit femicide due to a "breakdown in love attributed to the female". In defense trials, the defense of provocation is often used to reduce the time men serve in prison. This idea of provocation is that any "reasonable man can be provoked into killing by insubordination on the part of a woman." Conversely, women are not often able to
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