Lust murder

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Lust murder, also called sexual homicide, is a homicide which occurs in tandem with either an overt sexual assault or sexually symbolic behavior.^[1] Lust murder is associated with the paraphilic term erotophonophilia, which is sexual arousal or gratification contingent on the death of a human being. The term lust killing stems from the original work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his 1898 discussion of sadistic homicides.^[2] Commonly, this type of crime is manifested either by murder during sexual activity, by mutilating the sexual organs or areas of the victim's body, or by murder and mutilation. The mutilation of the victim may include evisceration, displacement of the sexual organs, or both.^[3] The mutilation usually takes place postmortem.^[4] Although the killing sequence may include an act of sexual intercourse, sexual intercourse does not always occur, and other types of sexual acts may be part of the homicide.^[2]

In 2019, Current Psychiatry Reports published a review of the recent findings on sexual homicide research and concluded that sexually oriented murderers should be viewed as a specific offender with distinct traits which requires an international reporting system.^[5] Earlier, the authors of the review reported on comparisons of offenders in the French national police database with the same conclusion.^[6]