Femicide or feminicide is the intentional murder of women or girls in which they are exclusively targeted because of their gender or murder in which women or girls are disproportionately targeted. It is frequently committed as a method to control women and girls.Shalva Weil, "Femicide Across Europe: Research and prevention of femicide across Europe". Research Gate, October 2018. Causes of femicide include jealousy, general hatred, revenge, male entitlement, harmful gender roles, gender stereotypes, cultural phenomenons such as so-called "honor killings" or female genital mutilation (particularly Type 3), as well as coercive control, stopping a pregnancy, social beliefs such as sati, and masculine hegemony that perpetuates the unequal power between men and women.Shalva Weil and Nitri Misha, "Femicide of Girls in Contemporary India". Researchgate, January 2016
A spouse or a partner is responsible for almost 40% of femicides, or homicides of a female victim. Additionally, femicide may be underreported due to insufficient evidence. Femicide often includes domestic violence and forced abortions. Some cultures use gender-selective infanticide and geronticide to perform femicide.
Until recently, femicide was not considered a visible phenomenon, but awareness of it is gradually increasing.
History Development of the term The term femicide was used in England in 1801 by John Corry to signify "the killing of a woman". In 1848, the term was published in Wharton's Law Lexicon.The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989) p. 285
The current usage arose with second-wave feminism, which aimed to raise female class consciousness and resistance against gender oppression. The term has been used to call attention to violence against women. US author Carol Orlock is credited with using the term in her unpublished anthology on femicide.
Diana Russell publicized the term in 1976 at the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in Belgium. She wrote: "We must realize that a lot of homicide is femicide. We must recognize the sexual politics of murder. From the burning of witches in the past, to the more recent widespread custom of female infanticide in many societies, to the killing of women for 'honor,' we realize that femicide has been going on a long time. But since it involves mere females, there was no name for it until Carol Orlock invented the word 'femicide. She first implicitly defined the term as a hate killing of females by males, but then went on to redefine it as "the killing of females by males because they are female" in later years. Femicide remains understudied in scientific literature.
Femicide may also be 'intimate.' Intimate femicide can be identified as such by using "severity of violence, such as access to and threats with firearms, forced sex, threats to kill, and strangulation" to determine whether a case can be considered an act of femicide or not. The definition of femicide also relies on "inequalities in gender 'in terms of education, economic level, and employment'".
Female genital mutilation (FGM) is defined by the World Health Organization as "the removal of part or all of the external female genitalia and/or injury to the female genetic organs for cultural or other non-therapeutic reasons". Female genital mutilation results in femicide when women and girls die, due to unhygienic practices of FGM that result in infection or death, as well as the increased likelihood of contracting HIV/AIDS because of FGM.Russell, Diana EH. "AIDS As Mass Femicide: Focus On South Africa". In D.E.H. Russell and R.A. Harmes (Ed.), Femicide In Global Perspective. New York, NY: Teacher's College Press, 2001, pp. 100–114.
Contemporary definitions by feminists Definition by Diana Russell South African feminist author Diana Russell narrows the definition of femicide to "the killing of females by males because they are female". Russell emphasizes that males commit femicide with sexist motives. She replaces "woman" with "female" to include girls and infants. Russell believes her definition of femicide applies to all forms of sexist murdering, whether motivated by misogyny (the hatred of females), a sense of superiority over females, sexual pleasure, or the assumption of ownership over women.
Russell says: "Femicide is on the extreme end of a continuum of antifemale terror that includes a wide variety of verbal and physical abuse, such as rape, torture, sexual slavery (particularly in prostitution), incestuous and extrafamilial child sexual abuse, physical and emotional battery, sexual harassment (on the phone, in the streets, at the office, and in the classroom), genital mutilation (clitoridectomies, excision, infibulations), unnecessary gynecological operations (gratuitous hysterectomies), forced heterosexuality, forced sterilization, forced motherhood (by criminalizing contraception and abortion), psychosurgery, denial of food to women in some cultures, cosmetic surgery, and other mutilations in the name of beautification. Whenever these forms of terrorism result in death, they become femicides."
She includes covert murdering of women as well, such as the mass murder of female babies due to male preference in cultures such as India and China, as well as deaths related to the failure of social institutions, such as the criminalization of abortion or the prevalence of female genital mutilation.
Other definitions Diana Russell's definition is not accepted by all scholars. Jacquelyn Campbell and Carol Runyan use "femicide" to reference "all killings of women, regardless of motive or perpetrator status". They argue that motive cannot always be determined, and so must be removed from the qualification for femicide to gather data.
Feminists Desmond Ellis and Walter Dekesedery take a different approach, viewing the definition of femicide as "the intentional killing of females by males". They require that femicide be intentional, unlike the inclusion of covert femicide in Diana Russell's definition. Femicides are also identified "as 'slip-ups' in a power struggle in which men strive to control women and deprive them of their liberty and women struggle for autonomy".
South Asian feminists differ, stating that femicide is "the intentional killing of females by men, and of females by other females in the interests of men". Examples include neglect of female children in preference of males as well as dowry-related murder, where female in-laws murder women due to dowry disputes. Moreover, COST Action 1206 provides definitions of femicide.
These definitions distinguish femicide from non-gendered descriptions of murder and homicide. Instead, femicide exemplifies that women are murdered for different reasons and motives from those associated with typical descriptions of murder.Radford, Jill, and Diana E. H. Russell. Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing. New York: Twayne, 1992. Print. Globally, femicide has seldom been investigated separately from homicide, and the goal of many of these authors is to make femicide a separate category. In 2013, COST set up Action IS-1206 entitled "Femicide across Europe".Weil, S. 2015, "Combatting femicide in multiple ways: the COST Action IS1206 on Femicide across Europe". In: Filip A and Platzer M (eds) Femicide: Targeting Women in Conflict 3. Vienna: ACUNS, pp. 139–141. Link Weil, S. 2015 "Femicide across Europe". In: Dimitrijevic, M., Filip, A and Platzer M (eds) Femicide: Taking Action against Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls 4. Vienna: ACUNS, pp. 118–121. Link
Canada includes more than females under the term Femicide, including "women and girls, 2 Spirit, trans women and gender non-conforming individuals because of their gender"
From femicide to feminicide Feminicide is a variant for femicide that can be found in official documentation of the United Nations. This term was first introduced in Spanish, when Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos translated the term femicide as feminicidio in conversation with Diana Russell: Cuando traduje el texto de Diana Russell, me tomé la libertad de modificar el concepto, ella lo llama femicide y entonces yo lo traduje desde hace ya varios años como feminicidio, precisamente para que no fuera a confundirse en castellano como femicidio u homicidio femenino; no, yo quería que fuera un concepto claro, distinto, para que entonces viniera junto con todo el contenido del concepto, que es, como ya lo expliqué, muy complejo. Diana Russell me dio permiso de usarlo así, traducido como feminicidio. Ella dice estar muy asombrada porque en ningún lado ha tenido el éxito que está teniendo en México y en América Latina su propuesta...
[When I translated Diana Russell's text, I took the freedom of modifying the concept. She called it femicide and I translated it since a few years ago as femicidio, precisely to prevent the confusion with femicide or a feminine homicide; I wanted a concept that was clear, different, so that it could come along with all the content of the concept that is, as I have explained, very complex. Diana Russell gave me permission to use it in this way, translated as feminicide. She says she is very amazed because there is no other place where her proposal is having as much success as it does in Mexico and Latin America...]The Latin American feminist perspective added amplified the concept with the local experience. In her book Counting Feminicide, Catherine D'Ignazio summarizes how the term went from femicide to feminicidio and, later, to feminicide. The author points out that Julia E. Monárrez Fragoso was the first to introduce the concept of femicide to name the violence that was taking place in Ciudad Juarez and how Lagarde moved the term forward by introducing it into Mexican legislature in 2003 and working until creating a law against feminicide in 2012:In the process of her legislative work, Lagarde y de los Ríos built on the significant theoretical shifts introduced by Monárrez Fragoso in which feminicidio means both the killing of a woman or girl for gender-related reasons and also the linking of those killings to human rights violations and to the climate of impunity created by state inaction.In this way, Lagarde defines feminicide as a state crime, to point out the how authorities participate in this crime by neglecting and silencing the situation in different moments of the process. This variant and the theoretical contributions from Latin America have been later incorporated into English by diverse authors as "activists, journalists, and academics based in the United States and Canada have taken note of the work on femicide and feminicide by their Latin American counterparts and traveled some of these concepts back into the English language". For example, Judith Butler uses the term and talks about Ni Una Menos, and Lauren Klein and D'Ignazio include it in their book Data Feminism.
Causes As defined by Diana Russell, femicide includes intimate partner femicide, lesbicide, racial femicide, serial femicide, mass femicide, honor killing, dowry-related murder, and more. Any act of sexual terrorism that results in death is considered femicide. Covert femicide also takes form in the criminalization of abortion in cases where the mother's life is at risk, intentional spread of HIV/AIDS, or death as a result of female genital mutilation.
The most widespread form of femicide in the world is that committed by an intimate partner of a female. This accounts for approximately 38.6 percent of all murders of women globally, which may be an undercount.
Different areas of the world experience femicide varyingly, i.e., the Middle East and South Asia have higher rates of honor killing: the murder of women by their family, due to an actual or assumed sexual or behavioral transgression, such as adultery, sexual intercourse, or even having been raped.
Systemic criminal justice issues such error of impunity and low crime clearance rates have been associated with femicide.