Femicide is a relatively new area of study that was first introduced in 1976. Since then, there has been a push by many scholars to develop the field further, despite some arguments made that femicide is not as important of an issue given the relatively low rates of female homicides compared to male homicides. This article reviews three levels of analysis — micro, meso, and macro — and discusses culture and class as two contributing factors to femicide, illustrating that femicide is a complex global phenomenon that requires a multilateral and intersectional approach to be better understood. It concludes that by understanding and deconstructing certain social and institutional structures, we will be better equipped to understand femicide as a phenomenon and create more effective systems and legislation for a safer global society.
Includes Notes on contributors and Index ; The definition of the term 'femicide' has been historically constructed and debated. Femicide is the culmination of different forms of violence against women and failure by the state to protect women from violence (WAVE, 2017b). As opposed to the 'homicide of women', or 'uxoricide', the term femicide is politically charged to bring awareness to the killing of women due to their gender. Often, but not always, these murders occur within societies structured on and functioning within deeply rooted patriarchal beliefs. ; peer-reviewed
In the 1960s, gender concept and female role developed highlighting sexual inequalities in the relationship between male and female. In this perspective, there was a need to identify the violence perpetrated by men against women in order to gain awareness of the phenomenon. In 1990, Diana Russell coined the term "femicide" as a murder of a woman by a man because she is a woman. In this study, we analyze the features of murders involving male as authors and female as victims occurred in Turin from 1970 till 2012. Our goal is to determine whether the legislative and cultural changes that took place in Italy during that period had an impact on the rate of these crimes. Accordingly, we examined the archives of the Institute of Legal Medicine and those of the Central Morgue of Turin together with the stories reported in local newspapers to better understand the circumstances in which such crimes occurred. We focused upon the following items: the locations where crimes took place, the weapons used, the perpetrators' features (including their motivations), the victims' age and nationality. Then, we divided the crimes into femicides and homicides to compare the two categories. In our series, femicides were more frequent than homicides, and the frequency of violent deaths decreased over time. As regards to the victims' age, there was a discrepancy within the two groups: most of the homicides took place against women over the age of 65 years; while femicides were concentrated in the range of 25-50 years old. Most of the killings occurred against Italian women. Over 60% of homicides had a woman as the sole victim; while in 8.84% of cases, the homicide was followed by the perpetrator's suicide. Among femicides, 62.4% of cases concerned only one woman and 17.6% of them were followed by the perpetrator's suicide. With regards to femicide, in 64% of cases the perpetrator was the partner, in 10.4% of cases a former partner, and in 6.4% of cases a close relative. Finally, in 9.6% of cases the perpetrator was a stalker. There was not a prevalence of a particular weapon and the injuries were mainly inflicted on the victims' head. As regards to the place where the events occurred, there was a clear prevalence of the couple's home, followed by the victim's home. The analysis of the results shows that the introduction of divorce law (1970) did not alter the trend of "femicide", which decrease only after the ban of mitigating circumstances for "honor killing" (1981).
Includes Contents, Acknowledgements, Notes on editors, Figures and tables. ; Femicide is the intentional killing of women and girls because of their gender. Femicides are usually perpetrated by intimate partners (for example, husbands or boyfriends) or family members (for example, fathers, brothers or cousins), who are usually familiar males; on rare occasions the perpetrators can be women, either lesbian partners or kin. A global study of homicides carried out by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in 2012 showed that 79% of all homicide victims were male. The global average male homicide rate was, at 9.7 per 100,000, almost four times the global average female rate. However, the majority of homicides in the domestic field were femicides (which the authors called 'female intentional homicides') perpetrated by intimate partners or family members. Of 93,000 global femicides reported in 2012, 43,600 women – that is, nearly 50% – were killed by intimate partners or family members, as opposed to only 6% among male homicides (UNODC, 2014: 53). ; This publication is based upon work from COST Action IS1206 supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). Funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union. ; peer-reviewed
This thesis examines the issue of femicide in Brazil, which is the killing of women and girls based on their gender. I argue that the culture of machismo, a set of sexist social norms, is endangering women in Brazil. This is especially true for identities marginalized within the main women group, such as women of color and transgender and transsexual women. Even though Brazil has special legislation to tackle the issue of violence against women, the same is not as effective as it could be. It also fails to address the root cause of the problem, which is the machismo present both in the society and the State institutions. An intersectional approach was used to attempt to understand femicide in all its complexity, so at first Intersectional Theory will be addressed, followed by the methodology chapter. Then will be given a background on the Brazilian experience regarding femicide and violence against women, followed by the development of norms regarding the subject of this thesis, both international and domestic legislation. Lastly, femicide will be analyzed within the scope of this master's thesis.
Femicide/feminicide has become an increasing social concern for local communities, international organizations, and national governments. In 2007, Latin American countries began enacting legislation to prevent and punish femicide/feminicide; however, relatively few researchers have assessed the scope and depth of this legislation. Using Carol Bacchi's (2009) "what's the problem represented to be" approach, this study analyzes femicide/feminicide across Latin American countries. The goal of this approach is to assess concepts that are taken for granted within policies and uncover what has been silenced through problem representations. Results provide considerations for future legislative development in Latin America and abroad.
In recent years, the notion of femicide has expanded in social, criminological and epidemiological research to grasp the basic differences underpinning the killing of a female, as opposed to a male, victim. While femicide research in Australia and the US has been a consolidated trend in criminology and feminist studies since the 1990s (Stout, 1992; Mouzos, 1999; Campbell et al, 2003; Frye et al, 2005), its development in Europe has been much more recent and represents the outcome, primarily, of top-down social pressure. The combined effect of the recent proceedings of the 'Femicide across Europe' COST network (active in 30 European countries from 2013 to 2017), together with awareness-raising by the media in many countries and the Resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 11 February 2014 (United Nations, 2014), inter alia, have acted as catalysts for change, contributing significantly to fostering femicide research in Europe. An extensive analysis of the definition of femicide is presented in Chapter 2 of this book. ; peer-reviewed
The Inter-American Human Rights System has broken new ground in the field of violence against women (VAW) by delineating the concept of femicide, the principle of due diligence, clarifying the obligations of the States regarding violence and a adopting a gender perspective on reparations. In recent years, 'intersectionality', the study of the interconnections of race, ethnicity, religion, age, class, sexual orientation and other categories of difference in relation to inequality, has been promoted in human rights law for tackling VAW. This approach poses new challenges for the interpretation of cases. This article examines to what extent the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission have incorporated an intersectional view of violence against women into cases of femicide and discusses the potential of doing so in the future.
The purpose of this document is to guide to the best practice to record femicide. While various reference sources have been taken into account to develop this guide, adaptation and compilation is the sole responsibility of ILDA. As all these materials present a regional approach, this guide go beyond the legislation of a specific country or administrative unit, so references to any of them are not included.
The purpose of this document is to guide to the best practice to record femicide. While various reference sources have been taken into account to develop this guide, adaptation and compilation is the sole responsibility of ILDA. As all these materials present a regional approach, this guide go beyond the legislation of a specific country or administrative unit, so references to any of them are not included.
Against the trend of roll-backs of pro-feminist initiatives by right-wing governments, feminist-led reforms to the law of murder deserve accolades as hard-fought feminist victories. For three decades, feminist analysts have critiqued the operation of provocation defences in intimate partner femicide cases. Their work has been rewarded with the implementation of reforms in several anglophone jurisdictions that have abolished or curtailed that defence. This article focuses on the revolutionary impact of the reform implemented in England and Wales. It argues for the continuing purchase for feminist legal scholars of a methodology championed by Carol Smart in her seminal 1989 text, Feminism and the Power of Law. She counselled feminist law scholars to read law as a site for contesting law&rsquo ; s truth about gendered relationships. This methodology has not only been critical in exposing the misogyny and injustice embedded in traditional provocation by infidelity defences ; it also enables researchers to chart shifts in law&rsquo ; s discursive constitution of truth in the post-reform era.
In 2008, Guatemala passed the Law against Femicide and Other Forms of Violence against Women, establishing the gender-based killing of women (femicide) as a unique crime. Since then, over 9000 Guatemalan women and girls have died violent deaths. How do Guatemalan institutions and publics react to these women's murders, and what do these reactions reveal about the impacts of legislative reform for individual victims, Guatemalan society, and criminal justice institutions? To answer these questions, we analyze state, media, and public reactions to three high-profile femicides that took place after the 2008 VAW Law. We trace the criminal justice response and legal developments following each femicide, and couple this with an analysis of newspaper coverage and social media commentary about the case. We find that despite the passage of new legislation and the creation of new institutions, various weaknesses in the Guatemalan criminal justice system undermine the impacts of reforms. These weaknesses in the criminal justice system produce three types of injuries: (1) individual injuries by hurting victims and their families ; (2) public injuries by diverting public attention away from reflections about social norms and VAWG ; and (3) institutional injuries by reinforcing the public's distrust of the criminal justice system.
The author argues that commonplace sexist practices lay the conditions for femicide and the political discourses that surround it. She examines two case studies: the over five hundred femicides that have occurred in the border city of Juarez, Mexico since 1993 and George Sodini's murder of three women in a gym in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Since 1993, the term femicide has referred to a continuous wave of crimes committed to women due to gender or race, a structural feature of our societies. This paper inscribes the question on the limits of the representation of the unutterable in our local post-colonial genealogies. How could we write a feminist narrative symbolically able to inscribe the losses within it, and question the world outside? This shows that all efforts in favor of Politics of Memory must be founded in the recovery of silenced First People languages, and in the cross-disciplinary junction of Art and Social Sciences. ; Fil: Bidaseca, Karina Andrea. Universidad Nacional de San Martin. Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina
Exploiting high-frequency data from the Italian anti-violence helpline and a unique geolocalized dataset on killings of women, we show that the news coverage of a femicide triggers an increase in calls to the helpline. The effect is detectable in the week following the news and in the province where the femicide has occurred. These findings are consistent with a model in which the news of a femicide increase expectations about future intimate partner violence in case no call is made.
