What Is Femicide?

Running head: TITLE OF YOUR PAPER 1
Gladys Stackhouse, Stackhouse Consulting Services
What is Femicide:Femicide and its Origin until Present
Femicide is usually perpetrated by men, but sometimes female family members may be
involved. Femicide differs from male homicide in specific ways. For example, most
cases of femicide are committed by partners or ex-partners, and involve ongoing abuse
in the home, threats or intimidation, sexual violence or situations where women have
less power or fewer resources than their partner.(apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle)
#femalehatred #femalegendermurder
#women #girls Femicide #crisis #hatre CivilRightsviolated #DomesticViolence #Female #fenist
#transgender #male #census #ShanquellaRobison #DianaRussell #USA #borgenproject
#theguardian #Womenempowered #Respectwomen
Gladys Stackhouse, MLS

TITLE OF YOUR PAPER 2
Stackhouse Consulting Services LLC
Femicide
Image Credit: Printerval.com
Fem·i·cide
/ˈfeməˌsīd/(noun)
● the killing of a woman or girl, in particular by a man and on account of her gender:
● "we are very concerned with
● in of Femicide
● THE ORIGIN AND IMPORTANCE OF THE TERM
FEMICIDE
● December, 2011
● (For a video of Diana presenting this speech, please visit her Audio and Video Page.)
● I first heard this word 37 years ago in 1974 when a friend in London told
me that she had heard that a woman in the United States was planning to write
a book titled "Femicide". I immediately became very excited by this new word,
seeing it as a substitute for the gender-neutral word "homicide."
● I first used the term femicide in public when I testified to the
approximately 2,000 women from 40 countries who attended the first
International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, in Brussels, Belgium, in 1976.
Here is a photo of the female-only participants attending this groundbreaking
global speak-out, some of whom also testified about other crimes against
women. We, the organizers, used the term "crimes" to refer to any and all
forms of patriarchal and sexist oppression of females.
● Belgian feminist Nicole Van de Ven and I compiled a book about this
event, including all the testimony, which we titled Crimes Against Women: The
Proceedings of the International Tribunal, which was published in 1976. Used
copies of this book are still available on Amazon.com.
● Incidentally, when I finally discovered that Carol Orlock was the author
who had planned to write a book on femicide, but had never done so, she told
me that she couldn't recall how she had defined femicide. She also expressed
delight that I had succeeded in resurrecting this term that now promises to
eventually raise global awareness of the misogynist character of most murders
of women and girls, as well as mobilizing women to combat these lethal hate
crimes against us.

● When I testified about femicide at the International Tribunal, I defined it
implicitly as a hate killing of females perpetrated by males. For example, I
stated that:
● "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
so-called honor, we realize that femicide has been going on a long time."
● Just as murders targeting African Americans and/or other minority
groups, are differentiated by those that are racist and those that are not, so
must murders targeting females be differentiated by those that are femicides
and those that are not. When the gender of the victim is irrelevant to the
perpetrator, the murder qualifies as a non-femicidal crime.
● After making minor changes in my definition of femicide over the years,
I finally defined it very simply as "the killing of females by males because they
are female." I'll repeat this definition: "the killing of females by males because
they are female." I use the term "female" instead of "women" to emphasize
that my definition includes baby girls and older girls. However, the term
femicide does not include the increasingly widespread practice of aborting
female fetuses, particularly in India and China. The correct term for this sexist
practice is female feticide.

● Examples of femicide include the stoning to death of females (which I
consider a form of torture-femicide); murders of females for so-called "honor;"
rape murders; murders of women and girls by their husbands, boyfriends, and
dates, for having an affair, or being rebellious, or any number of other excuses;
wife-killing by immolation because of too little dowry; deaths as a result of
genital mutilations; female sex slaves, trafficked females, and prostituted
females, murdered by their "owners", traffickers, "johns" and pimps, and
females killed by misogynist strangers, acquaintances, and serial killers.
● There is a continuum of femicides ranging from one-on-one sexist
murders, e.g., a man strangling his wife because she plans to leave him; to one
or more males killing a group of women for, say, refusing to wear the correct
attire in public; to the other end of the continuum, for example, mass
femicides such as when preference for male children results in the killing, or
death from neglect, of millions of female babies and girls, as in India and
China.
● My definition of femicide also includes covert forms of the killing of
females, such as when patriarchal governments and religions forbid women's
use of contraception and/or obtaining abortions. Consequently, millions of
pregnant women die every year from botched attempts to abort their fetuses.
And when promiscuous AIDS-infected males continue to feel entitled to have
sex with their wives, girl friends, and/or prostituted women and girls, their
sexist behavior causes the death of millions of these women and girls. So do
AIDS-infected males who refuse to wear condoms to protect their female sex
partners and the females whom they rape, including the common practice in
parts of Southern Africa where many males rape babies -- including their own
daughters -- believing that these barbaric acts will cure them of AIDS. Hence, I
consider AIDS resulting in the deaths of females to be a form of mass femicide.
● Some people might wonder why I decided to use the invented word
femicide instead of some other term like gender-discriminatory-murders. First
of all, gender discrimination is not specific about which gender is a victim of
discriminatory murder. In addition, the prefix "fem" connotes female, and
"icide" connotes killing -- as in terms like homicide, suicide, genocide,
patricide, matricide, infanticide. More importantly, the excitement I felt when
I first heard the new word femicide caused me to intuit that other feminists
would likely share my response.
● Just as U.S. Professor Catharine MacKinnon's invention of the new
feminist term sexual harassment was necessary before laws against these
crimes could be formulated, so I believed that inventing a new term for
sexist/misogynist killings of females was necessary for feminists to start
organizing to combat these heretofore neglected lethal forms of violence
against women and girls. Still today in the United States, where rates of
violence against women are extremely high, most feminist organizations set up
to combat violence against women, continue to ignore the most extreme form
of it, that is, the murder of women.
● *****************************
● When I was invited to speak at a seminar on femicide in Juarez, Mexico,
in December 2004, I discovered that well-known Mexican feminist scholar and
Congresswoman Marcela Lagarde who is the shorter woman on my left in this
photo, had been inspired by my co-edited book published in 1992, titled,
Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing to adopt this term. However, she
chose to translate the term femicide into Spanish as feminicidio.
● I believe that it was largely thanks to Lagarde's determined efforts that
the terms femicide and feminicidio -- which is more often shortened to
feminicide, became widely adopted in Mexico, and then spread to several other
Latin American countries. Adoption of this term typically motivated feminists
in these countries to create anti-femicide organizations to try to combat these
lethal misogynist crimes. Thanks to the activism of many of these feminists,
eight countries in Latin America have succeeded in pressuring their patriarchal
governments to pass laws against femicide.
● Lagarde specifically asked my permission to translate my term femicide
into feminicidio. She also requested my permission to arrange for Spanish
translations of both of my co-edited books on femicide -- the second one of

which was published in 2001, and which is titled Femicide in Global
Perspective. I was delighted at that time to grant Lagarde's requests.
● However in 2005, Lagarde decided to change her definition of
feminicidio. Because virtually all the femicides perpetrated in Juarez were,
and still are, treated with impunity by the Mexican government and police, she
added this factor to her definition.
● While Lagarde is certainly correct about the impunity issue, I am critical
of her adding this factor to her definition of feminicidio.
● Why? you may be wondering.
● Here are my main reasons:
● First, because it means that in those cases where femicide perpetrators
are arrested and imprisoned, these crimes are no longer considered
feminicides.
● Second, because while this impunity may also be common in many other
countries, this is not always the case. Many femicides in the United States and
England, for example, are prosecuted, and many of the prepetrators are
sentenced and incarcerated. It is preferable to define femicide or feminicide
in a way that can be used globally.
● Third is that I dislike using a term that resembles the oppressive concept
femininity. While this criticism may only apply to English speakers, this
includes massive numbers of individuals in the world, including those for whom
it is a second language.
● Fourth is the unfortunate fact that intense conflicts have developed
between many of the feminists in Latin America who have adopted the term
feminicide and those who have adopted the term femicide. For example, when
I delivered several speeches at a conference on feminicide in El Savaldor in
2008 after the director swore to me that her organization used my definition of
femicide -- I subsequently learned that while the members of other
organizations in this country that used the term feminicide had been invited to
attend, the members of another organization that used the term femicide had
not been invited. This experience highlights how the solidarity that should
ideally exist between feminists working to combat the same misogynist
murders of females has been destroyed by the competition that has developed
in Latin America between feminists who have chosen to use one or the other of
these terms.
● Ever since this disappointing experience, I have become distressed when
the term feminicide is used rather than femicide. And I become even more
distressed when Lagard claims that she coinded the term. If I hadn't used and
deceminated the term femicide by speaking and publishing books about it,
there would be no such term, including feminicide!

● **********************
● I'd like to begin my conclusion by quoting a slightly edited version of a
paragraph of the testimony on femicide that I delivered at the International
Tribunal in 1976. These words followed my reading descriptions of 17 examples
of femicides that had occurred recently in San Francisco, in the Unites States --
where men's murders of their wives are by far the most frequent form of
femicide.
● Men tell us not to take a morbid interest in these atrocities. The epitome of
triviality is alleged to be a curiosity about "the latest rape and the latest
murder." The murder and mutilation of a woman is not considered a political
event. Men tell us that they cannot be blamed for what a few maniacs do. Yet
the very process of denying the politics of this form of terrorizing women helps
to perpetuate it, keeps us weak, vulnerable, and fearful. These are the
twentieth century witch burnings. The so-called "maniacs" who commit these
atrocities are acting out the logical conclusion of the woman-hatred which
pervades all the patriarchal cultures in the world.
● More recently, increasing numbers of male leaders in several countries
order their armies and supporters to perpetrate mass rape-and-mutilation
femicides as a deliberate strategy in their patriarchal wars. If increasing
numbers of women and our male allies don't succeed in organizing effective
strategies against femicide, the already epidemic prevalence of femicides in
almost all countries will escalate even more.
● We must demand that the United Nations recognize that large numbers
of males are engaged in a war against women and girls in which many of us are
terrorized into submission. National and international efforts must be made to
assist feminists in ending this war -- including by implementing severe
punishments for the millions of perpetrators of femicide, just as the
perpetrators of genocide are prosecuted for their murderous acts.

FEMICIDE IN ECUADOR: BACKGROUND,
CONTROVERSIES AND THE NEED TO
ESTABLISH PUBLIC POLICIES.
Authors:
Durán Ramírez, Andrea Lisseth1
Zamora Vázquez, Ana Fabiola2
Source:
Journal of Language & Linguistics Studies. 2022, Vol. 18 Issue 2, p348-364.
17p.
Document Type:
Article
Subject Terms:
*Government policy
Femicide
Violence against women
Crime
Geographic Terms:
Ecuador
Author-Supplied Keywords:
crime
femicide
violence
women
Abstract:
Violence against women has been recognized as a legal-social problem until
today. This research collected one of the most extreme forms of gender
violence called femicide, composed by a legal part, as well as by
criminological statistical data on this criminal type within the Ecuadorian
legislation. The results demonstrated the alarming impunity and the lack of
prevention and public policies to help mitigate this form of criminality. The
research also demonstrated the ambivalence between the terms femicide and
feminicide, which although it works as a positive element in the denunciation
and allows the visualization of the murders of women that occur for gender
reasons, it does not solve the problem. The type of research of this work is
non-experimental, based on the qualitative approach with descriptive level.
The methods used were inductive-deductive, analytical-synthetic,
historical-comparative and legal dogmatic. Through this research the authors
considered the need to establish public policies to allow prevention, as well
as the effective application of recognized rights and the existence of effective
judicial protection and legal certainty within the crime. [ABSTRACT FROM
AUTHOR]
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Author Affiliations:
1Lawyer of the Courts of Justice of the Republic. Master's student of criminal
law and criminal procedure at Universidad Católica de Cuenca.
2Lawyer of the Courts of Justice of the Republic. Master in Civil Law and Civil
Procedure. Doctoral candidate at the Universidad Castilla La Mancha.
Research professor at the Catholic University of Cuenca.
ISSN:1305-578X, Accession Number:157195189
What is the femicide census?
● The Femicide Census is a unique source of comprehensive information about

women who have been killed in the UK and the men who have killed them. Data
for 2019 and 2020 is now available. Men’s violence against women is a leading
cause of the premature death for women globally but research in the UK and
Europe is limited and unconnected.
The History of Fecimicide
The History of the term ‘Femicide’

[All sources used to compile this information are listed at the end of the document.]
The first documented use of the term ‘femicide’ was in a book by John Corry (1801) called A
Satirical View of London at the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century where it was used to refer
to the killing of a woman. It was not until 1976, however, that the term was reintroduced publicly in
the modern age by violence against women feminist pioneer, expert and activist, Diana Russell, at the
International Tribunal of Crimes Against Women to bring attention to violence and discrimination
against women.
In its early iteration by Russell, femicide was defined as “the murder of women by men motivated by
hatred, contempt, pleasure, or a sense of ownership of women” and “the misogynistic killings of
women by men.” Most recently, this definition evolved to its most commonly-used form as “the
killing of one or more females by one or more males because they are female” as stated by Russell in
her introductory speech presented to the United Nations Symposium on Femicide on November 26,
2012.
The term as well as its accepted meaning often varies, however, depending upon whose perspective is
being examined or where it is being examined. As such, the phenomenon of femicide and its scope,
content and implications continue to be the subject of discussion internationally in academia, policy
and grassroots activists’ arenas as well as regional, national and other legislative processes. For
example, in some world regions, such as Latin America, the term feminicidio (or feminicide in
English) is preferred to capture the way in which states or governments are often unresponsive to the
killings of women.
Internationally, a broader definition of femicide is often used that includes any killings of women and
girls. This is often done for ease of international comparisons, but also to acknowledge that, in some
cases or types of femicide, female family members or females in other contexts may sometimes be
involved. Keeping this in mind, it is still recognized that men are the primary perpetrators of femicide
and that most femicides are committed by current or former male partners – a pattern that exists
worldwide although proportions vary across world regions.
Regardless, it is now recognized, most recently in the inquiry’s interim report, that the high risk of
violence experienced by Indigenous women and girls stems, in large part, from a failure of police and
others in the criminal justice system to adequately respond to, or provide for, the needs of Indigenous
women and girls.
As stated by the United Nations Secretary-General, in his latest report on the progress towards
Sustainable Development goals, this violence is perpetuated and maintained through broader
patriarchal systems of oppression and ongoing gender inequality.
Femicide in the Canadian Context

● The Montreal Massacre
● Woman Killing: Intimate Femicide in Ontario, 1974-1994
● Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls
Summary
Highlighting the above events in the evolution of femicide in Canada is not meant to detract from the
various other groups of femicide victims. It is also recognized that many other social identities, solely
or in combination, act to compound the risk of femicide for some women and result in varying social
and legal responses. These issues are further discussed and expanded upon in other sections of the
website.
References
Caputi, Jane, and Diana E. Russell. 1990. "Femicide: speaking the unspeakable." Ms.: 34-7.
Castañeda Salgado, M.P. 2016. Feminicide in Mexico: An approach through academic, activist and
artistic work. Current Sociology 64(7): 1054-1070.

Fregoso, Rosa-Linda and Cynthia Bejarano. 2010. “Introduction: A Cartography of Femicide in the
Americas.” Pp. 1-42 in Terrorizing Women: Femicide in the Americas, edited by Rosa-Linda Fregoso
and Cynthia Bejarano. Duke University Press.
Gartner R, Dawson M and Crawford M (1999) Woman Killing: Intimate Femicide in Ontario,
1974-1994, Resources for Feminist Research 26: 151-173.
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (2014) Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in
British Columbia, Canada. IACHR.
Lagarde De Los Ríos, Marcela. 2010. "Preface: Feminist Keys for Understanding Feminicide:
Theoretical, Political and Legal Construction." Pp. xi–xxvi in Terrorizing Women. Feminicide in the
Americas, edited by Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano. Duke University Press,
Durham/London.
Native Women’s Association of Canada (2010) What Their Stories Tell Us: Research Findings from
the Sisters in Spirit Initiative. Ottawa: NWAC.
Pinelo, Lujan A. A Theoretical Approach to the Concept of Femicide/Feminicide. (MS Thesis,
Universiteit Utrecht, 2015) 1-109.
Radford, Jill, and Diana EH Russell. 1992. Femicide: The politics of woman killing. Twayne Pub.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (2014) Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women: A National
Operational Overview. Ottawa: RCMP.
Russell, Diana EH. 1975. "The politics of rape." New York: Stein & Day.
Russell, Diana, and Harmes, Roberta. 2001. Femicide in Global Perspective. New York: Teachers
College Columbia University Press.
Russell, Diana E.H. 2012. Defining femicide. Introduction speech presented to the United Nations
Symposium on Femicide.
Russell, Diana EH. 2008. "Femicide: Politicizing the killing of females." Pp. 26-31 in Strengthening
Understanding of Femicide: Using Research to Galvanize Action and Accountability. Seattle, WA:
PATH.
Sanford, Victoria. 2008. "From genocide to feminicide: Impunity and human rights in twenty-first
century Guatemala." Journal of Human Rights 7(2): 104-122.
Femicide: an intractable history
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03 MAR 2020 MARK FINNANE, ANDY KALADELFOS AND SUSANNE KARSTEDT

A long history of femicide and violence against women shows no sign of
improving.
The recent murders of Hannah Clarke and her three children at Camp Hill demonstrate once again
the persistence of Australian experience of domestic violence. The very familiarity of the
middle-class, suburban setting for the extreme violence of this killing has provoked a conversation
about a pattern of intimate partner control and victimisation that frequently acts as a pathway to
murder. The courageous, early public exposure by Hannah’s family of their daughter’s gradual
recognition of the extent of her abuse has pre-empted the often frustrating wait for the outcomes of
police and coronial investigation.
Violence against women is one of the modern world’s most intractable problems. It is an expression
of women’s inequality. In the Clarke case, it demonstrates their continuing vulnerability in spite of the
otherwise general decline in inter-personal violence.
In a widely recognised trend in modernising societies, homicide declined not just steadily but often
swiftly. But this decline in violence is not shared equally. European empires that witnessed
remarkable declines in violence in their home countries in the nineteenth century inflicted excessive
violence on the people they colonised. And even within those societies showing a decline of
violence, the benefits were more likely to be felt by men than by women.
Our research suggests that long-term homicide trends in Australia replicate this pattern. In the early
to mid-nineteenth century, homicide rates in the Australian colonies were much higher than they
were a century later. Men are still killed in greater numbers than women by the late twentieth century,
but the decline in risk of homicide was invariably far greater for men than women. So great was the
change that by the inter-war years the rate of homicides per 100,000 women was greater in some
years than that for men. The reasons for these changes – especially men’s declining risk – are
inevitably complex. But for women, a disturbing reality continued. Not only did their risk of homicidal
death remain constant – they were always much more likely to be killed by an intimate partner than
were men.
The reality of this picture has long been disguised by our preferred response to violence – through
law and policing, and a focus on offenders. Official statistics on murder rarely counted the age and
gender of those killed, or their racial background. The reality of domestic murder, and the risk of
being killed by a family member, was hidden away in official ‘cause of death’ statistics. In mortality
data, a murder is a rare event, its incidence drowned out by the volume of other causes, natural and
otherwise. But the emergence in recent decades of a focus on the victims of violence has enabled
us to understand anew the scale of a problem first recognised in the nineteenth century – the perils
of the domestic environment for women and children.
We need to find ways to ensure that women’s equality means just that in a place where
it continues to be most threatened, the home and the family.

The Australian experience is no different to that internationally. If we compare contemporary
homicide rates across countries, those with low general homicide rates have higher proportions of
female victims, as the decline is fed mostly by a decline in male fatalities (and male-on-male
homicides). Latin American countries with extremely high homicide rates have a much higher
proportion of mostly young male compared to female victims. Yet as men’s risk of being a homicide
victim has declined there has been little change in the risk of women’s victimisation.
Let us face these facts another way. Over time, in Australia as elsewhere, male-on-male homicide
rates are susceptible to change that brings them down, and male-on-female violence is not: in
contemporary societies like Australia with low homicide rates, women’s risk of being a victim of
homicide is close to that of men. It does not follow that there are no changes in women’s risk of
homicide between societies – the general social conditions that contribute to higher or lower rates of
violence in different societies are also related to significant differences in women’s risk of homicide
over time and place. And within places like Australia with its history of colonialism, dispossession
and protracted disadvantage of Aboriginal people, these patterns are replicated. The proportion of
Aboriginal women dying at the hands of an intimate partner is much higher than for the general
community.
The intractable persistence of domestic violence leaves a legacy in discourse, in the ways in which
these crimes are understood and spoken about. Historically these acts of violence have unsettled
familial ideology in the social and political world. Either the event was minimised as an expression of
a particular pathology – of drink, of madness, of a degraded moral state – or excused as the
perpetration of an exceptional event by a man who was otherwise a good father, or even one whose
so-called love for their victims was used to explain their violence. Traces of these attitudes can be
seen in the controversial comments last week that sought to excuse or understand or ‘balance’ a
murderer’s actions, to look for what ‘drove him to it’. Their widespread condemnation shows the
influence of a contemporary social movement that expresses women’s demand for equality and
seeks to refute these long-standing responses to intimate partner violence.
What we already know about Hannah Clarke’s case confirms in a most chilling way the pertinence of
Jess Hill’s 2019 insistence that we talk not just about domestic violence, but about its seed-bed,
domestic abuse. We need to find ways to ensure that women’s equality means just that in a place
where it continues to be most threatened, the home and the family. Law and policing have long
proved weak remedies to a seemingly intractable problem that demands more imaginative and
sustainable solutions including primary prevention, ensuring women’s economic security and
supporting effective men’s behaviour change programmes.
Mark Finnane (Griffith University), Andy Kaladelfos (UNSW), and Susanne Karstedt (Griffith
University) are researchers in criminology and history. Drawing on data in the Prosecution Project
they are investigating inter-personal violence in Australia with the support of an Australian Research
Council grant (DP190100322), ‘Australian Violence: Understanding Victimisation in History’.
This piece was first published in the Australian Women's History Network. Read the original
article.
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Gabby Petito
Femicides in the US: the silent

epidemic few dare to name
A woman with a red hand painted on her face, which calls attention to the high rates of
Indigenous women who are murdered or missing. Photograph: Kevin Mohatt/Reuters
The death of Gabby Petito draws attention to a form of widespread gendered violence in
the US that has long been hiding in plain sight
Rose Hackman
Sun 26 Sep 2021 04.00 EDT
●
T he last week of July, as Gabby Petito and her fiance, Brian Laundrie, posted
Instagram photos of themselves hiking barefoot in Utah’s Canyonlands national park,

bronzed skin matching apricot-colored rocks, the body of Jerri Winters was discovered
in Clinton Township, Michigan.
Her boyfriend, Matthew Lewinski, immediately admitted to the police he strangled her
last December, keeping her mutilated body in the basement of the home they shared for
months.
The same week, down in Starkville, Mississippi, William Chisholm was convicted of
capital murder in the death of his ex-girlfriend Dr Shauna Witt. One month following
her breaking up with him, Chisholm stormed the Walmart eye clinic where Witt worked
as an optometrist and shot her dead.
Over in Baltimore, Maryland, Gomezgeka Chisala was that same week being held
without bail after confessing to the killing of his ex-girlfriend Shaunya Green, a
life-loving nurse and mother of two who once traveled to Africa to walk among
elephants. Earlier in the month, Chisala had driven to Green’s home with a gun, entered
into an argument with her and shot her dead.
Gabby Petito. Photograph: Fbi Handout/EPA
Year after year, FBI statistics on nationwide homicides reveal that a vast proportion of
women killed in the US are killed by current or former intimate partners. According to
the CDC, homicide is the fourth leading cause of death for girls and women one to 19
years old, and the fifth leading cause of death for women 20 to 44.
The heart-wrenching confirmation that the remains of Petito had been found in
Wyoming, and the search for Laundrie, deemed a “person of interest” in what has now
been ruled a homicide, begs for scrutiny not only the circumstances of Petito’s
devastating disappearance, but draws sorely needed attention to a form of widespread
gendered deadly violence in the US that has long been hiding in plain sight.
According to analysis of FBI data, of all female homicides accounted for in 2018 where
the relationship between perpetrator and victim could be identified, 92% of cases
involved women or girls killed by a man they knew, 63% of whom were killed by current
husbands, ex-husbands or current boyfriends.
This puts confirmed American female intimate gendered killings happening at a

staggering rate of almost three women every day. Those circumstances are drastically
different to men’s, who are killed by other men in three quarters of cases, and in over a
quarter of cases by strangers.
Blue ribbons in memory of Petito are scattered across her hometown of Blue Point, New
York. Photograph: Brittainy Newman/AP
Yet this particularity – and predictability – receives barely any attention domestically.
While in France, the word femicide, or féminicide, is now used as a way of describing the
epidemic of women killed by men in intimate settings, the term is barely understood
outside of niche circles in the US. This, in spite of the fact that there are 10 times more
women killed in this way in this country than in France (1,014 confirmed intimate
acquaintance killings of women in the US in 2018 compared to 120 that same year in
France). Adjusting for population size, the problem is twice as bad in the US than it is in
France.
In Turkey, where so-called “honor killings” are reportedly still practiced, and where the
murder of a 27-year-old woman by her ex-boyfriend last summer sparked
globally-covered protests, the rate of women killed is also below that of the US. There,
474 women were killed in 2019, compared to 2,991 women in the same year here. Even
accounting for the fact that the US is four times larger in population than Turkey, the
proportion of femicides here remains distinctly larger.
violence against women during a march in Toulouse, France. Photograph: Alain

X/Shutterstock
When Americans do recognize the term femicide, they often think of it as a problem
happening in other countries, or in already marginalized communities at home.
There is some merit to those thoughts. According to the National Indigenous Women’s
Resource Center, the homicide rate for Indigenous women and girls in the US is six
times higher than it is for white women and girls, and 94% of cases are attributable to
former or current partners. But the severity of this mostly flies under the radar. Half of
Indigenous homicide reports are missing from FBI data, the center says, meaning many
lives lost are ignored in much of the official counting.
When Indigenous women are reported missing, less effort is put into finding them
across the board, numbers suggest. In Wyoming, where the remains of Petito were
found eight days after she was reported missing, white people are found in 81% of cases
after a week of being declared missing, compared to only 61% of Indigenous people in
the same timeframe – a difference of 20%.
Laws protecting Indigenous rights in the US, which gives power to tribal courts and
federal courts, but not state courts, can complicate matters too.
Deb Haaland said media coverage of the death of Petito should be a reminder of the
Native American women who are missing or murdered. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
At the end of 2019, two months after 17-year-old Faith Lindsey went missing in Pauls
Valley, Oklahoma, her boyfriend, Tanner Washington, was arrested for first-degree
murder by local authorities after being found with Lindsey’s blood on his shoes, pants
and phone. But charges were later dismissed because of the alleged crime happening on
tribal land.
While federal charges were brought this year, the trial has yet to happen, and Faith’s
body was never found – meaning she is yet another Indigenous woman unaccounted for
in official femicide counts while her family awaits answers.
“It’s a hard time because not knowing where she’s at, not knowing if she’s still here or if
she’s gone. We don’t know,” her sister Justice said last fall.
While nationwide homicide data for 2020 and 2021 have yet to be released, anecdotal
evidence suggests the problem got worse during the lockdowns associated with the
Covid-19 epidemic.
Scott Colom, a district attorney in north-east Mississippi, tells me there has been an
undeniable uptick in domestic violence incidents. In the last four months alone, in the
relatively small four-county area he serves, where the population is about 140,000,
three Black women have been killed, with current or former intimate partners facing
charges. Their names were Lisa Brooks, Whitney Taylor and Kaliyah Brooks.
Of all the women captured in FBI homicide data, Black women and girls are being
murdered by male offenders at a rate of almost three times more than white women.
Colom says part of the problem is how the system addresses daily occurrences of
domestic violence incidents before they turn lethal. He explains that with the
strengthening of violence against women laws, including mandatory arrest laws, arrests
are almost certain when someone is accused of domestic violence. But as the system
focuses on arrests, charges and convictions, the victim’s needs and wishes are
paradoxically often brushed to the side.
As things stand, after a complaint or an arrest, there is no formal follow-up with an

accuser, and in the months in between an arrest being made and them being bid to
court, the accuser has very often dropped charges. This happens because the accuser
may rely on the accused for money or housing, because he may be the father of her
children, or because she is emotionally attached to him and doesn’t want to be the cause
for him going to jail.
ice’ button is seen as people New York protest the killings of three trans women – Muhlaysia Booker,
ichelle Washington – in 2019. Photograph: Demetrius Freeman/Reuters
This week, a middle-aged woman ended up in hospital having to undergo surgery in one
of the counties Colom serves after her husband beat her with a crowbar. She was able to
call her son during the incident to help de-escalate, but when investigators talked to her,
she explained leaving him was not an option. She understood her husband was a threat
to her, but she needed him to pay rent and couldn’t afford a divorce.
“This is a huge problem in our system: that we are not equipped to give her what we
need for her to feel safe, and for her to have the ability to get away from this guy. There
needs to be a lot more support for women who are victims of domestic abuse to help
them get out of their situation,” Colom says, adding that domestic violence response is
“one of the worst things we are doing in this system”.
Identity
Femicide Is a Growing Issue in

the United States
The killings of Vanessa Guillén, Oluwatoyin Salau, Nina Pop, and many more
are part of a global problem.
BY
AUGUST 28, 2020
GETTY IMAGES
The killing of 20-year-old Vanessa Guillén, a Mexican-American Army specialist
who disappeared from Fort Hood, Texas on April 22, whose remains were found
more than two months later on June 30, has spurred conversations about
violence against women in the military. Hundreds of women, in what has been
called the “military’s #MeToo moment,” have shared stories about sexual
harassment and assault, illustrating a culture of violence within the ranks of the
U.S. military.
Before her disappearance, Guillén told her family that she had been sexually
harassed. News of her experience with sexual harassment spurred other women
service members to share their own stories under the hashtag
#IAmVanessaGuillen. After her remains were found, a criminal complaint
released by the Department of Justice alleges that fellow soldier Aaron Robinson
murdered Guillén at Fort Hood, dismembering and burying her body with the help
of his girlfriend, Cecily Aguilar. On July 1, Robinson died by suicide. Aguilar has
been charged with tampering with documents or proceedings and has pleaded
not guilty.
As Vanessa Guillen’s murder, horrific in its own right, has helped uncover a
pattern of violence within the military, it also reveals a larger global epidemic of
violence against cis and transgender women. Femicide, generally understood to
mean the murder of women for being women, a term often applied abroad, is a
global issue that significantly impacts Black, Indigenous, poor, and migrant
women. It’s oftentimes thought of as violence relegated to peripheries, border
cities like Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, or endemic to regions like Latin America or
Africa. The truth is that femicide is an ever-present and growing crisis in the
United States.
There are various types of femicide, and it can be hard to collect data on these
killings because some countries don’t collect information that could categorize
them as so, according to the World Health Organization. Compounding that
difficulty is that various places define the word differently — for some, femicide
means the killing of women because they are a woman, while for others it’s any
murder of a woman. Some countries, like Mexico, have passed laws against
femicide, giving a legal meaning to the term: the murder of a woman can be
classified as a femicide if her killing was motivated by gender. The U.S. hasn’t
adopted a standardized definition for the term but the federal government tracks
domestic violence killings. The Violence Against Women Act passed in 1994
recognizes domestic violence as a national crime.
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While there's no consensus on what qualifies as femicide, this kind of violence
has been on the rise globally. In Latin America, El Salvador and Honduras are
consistently among the countries with the highest femicide rates globally, while
Mexico saw a 145% jump in femicide cases between 2015 and 2019. Last year,
South Africa declared femicide a national crisis when nearly 3,000 women were
murdered between 2018 and 2019.
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These numbers are shocking, but often ignored are the rising rates of femicide in
the United States.
In 2018, 114 women were killed in Los Angeles County, the highest number since
the beginning of the decade, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis. That
report found that “women are less likely than men to be killed in a shooting, but
more likely to be beaten, stabbed or strangled.”
The number of women killed in the U.S. has been steadily rising since 2014,
according to the most recently available data from Violence Policy Center, and
1,948 women were killed by men in 2017. Women under 29 and women of color,
including trans women, are disproportionately murdered—Black and Native

American women experienced the highest rates of homicide between 2003 and
2014, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The disappearance of Native American women is a critical problem—nearly
5,600 were reported missing last year, according to the FBI’s National Crime
Information Center and this is violence that has persisted over centuries and
permeates communities. And, so far in 2019, at least 26 transgender or gender
non-conforming people were killed in this country.
Women Count USA: Femicide Accountability Project is an online database
organized by Dawn Wilcox, a nurse who tracks femicide in the U.S. Of the 1,838
women and girls killed in 2018 the majority were killed by current or former
partners, according to the organization.
There are stories and names behind these numbers. Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau
was a 19-year-old Black Lives Matter activist held captive and sexually assaulted
before being killed in Tallahassee. Nina Pop, a Black trans woman who was
stabbed to death in Missouri, and Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, a Black trans
woman whose body was found near the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania, were
both murdered this year.
Guillén's name, too, is on that list.
The day Guillén's killer died, her family held a press conference demanding
answers from military authorities. Vanessa Guillén's sister Lupe Guillén gave a
gut-wrenching speech condemning the military for sidelining the family during
their investigation and for failing to protect her sister, who she says experienced
sexual harassment. “My sister Vanessa Guillén was sexually harassed yet
nothing was done,” she said. “She deserves respect. She deserves to be heard
because if this can happen to my sister, it can happen to anyone else.”
After finding her remains, the Army Col. Ralph Overland, commander of th
S arah Fair George, a state’s attorney in Vermont who serves a majority white,
mostly middle-class constituency, explains that while domestic violence is one of their
most common charges, it is also among the most complicated.
“The dynamic of intimate partner violence is by its very name intimate. So there are very
rarely witnesses, very rarely corroborating evidence. There’s the complicated factor of
control and manipulation, financial dependence, isolation – all of those types of things
that come from being in an abusive relationship that make the proving something
beyond a reasonable doubt difficult,” George says.
When considering reporting intimate partner violence, these factors play into account in
accusers’ minds who may be reluctant to either denounce or follow through on an
accusation, while the person committing violence might take advantage of these factors,
with the situation escalating.
“That’s why so many ultimately end up in this extreme of homicide. Because there’s
build up over time behind these closed walls. The person gets more and more violent
without any intervention and it ends up being fatal.”
George says it is “alarming” to her that while Vermont’s homicide rate is consistently in
the single digits every year, she can think of three incidents of women being killed by
current or former intimate partners in the last couple of years in her county alone.
She believes a more holistic approach is needed: one that would spend more time and
resources on addressing the root problem, discouraging recidivism and truly listened to
victims.
Colom agrees: advocating for a more reparative system in which counsellors would meet
with victims, assess needs and wishes and provide immediate access to material support
– including housing, money, or jobs. If women decided to stay, a more reparative system
would focus on making the landing as safe as possible, working with men towards
growth and change.
But there is barely any funding for these types of services – just federal funding for
arrests and convictions.
The other, essential and consistently missing part of the puzzle precedes physical
violence, and has more to do with power, and male entitlement over women.
“Historically, there’s been a problem with how men have been taught to view women.
And some of that manifests itself in what we see with these murders,” says Colom, who
was the prosecutor in the case of the Walmart fatal shooting of the optometrist that
involved two middle-class white people, and is quick to point out that “toxic masculinity
does not know class, that’s for sure”.
“What I see is that they are treating women like their property. Like, ‘This person
belongs to me. If I can’t have her, nobody can have her. If I am not happy, it’s her fault.’
It’s a frame of mind of toxic masculinity that I see all the time,” Colom says.
Teaching men to get out of this frame of mind is crucial. Without doing this, we are left
living in a country that has silently accepted femicide as a byproduct of its structure – to
the extent that it doesn’t even bother naming it.
Spinelli, Barbara. 2011. "Femicide and Feminicide in Europe." Expert Group Meeting on
Gender-Motivated Killings of Women.
Statistics Canada (2006) Victimization and offending among the Aboriginal population in Canada.
Ottawa: Minister of Industry.
Tuesta, Diego, and Jaris Mujica. 2015. "Femicide penal response in the Americas: Indicators and the
misuses of crime statistics, evidence from Peru." International Journal of Criminology and
Sociological Theory 7(1): 1-21.
ABOUT FEMICIDE
● History
● Types of Femicide
● Trends & Patterns in Femicide
● Glossary
TWITTER
Femicide Census – Profiles of women killed by men
www.femicidecensus.org/
Who is the perpetrator of femicide?
● 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 by men and of females by other females in the
interests of men".
Aut hor Note
Gender related killings (femicide/feminicide) are the most brutal and extreme manifestation of a
continuum of violence against women and girls that takes many interconnected and overlapping
forms. Defined as an intentional killing with a gender-related motivation, femicide may be driven
by stereotyped gender roles, discrimination towards women and girls, unequal power relations
between women and men, or harmful social norms. Despite decades of activism from women’s
rights organizations as well as growing awareness and action from Member States, the available
evidence shows that progress in stopping such violence has been deeply inadequate.
With the aim of galvanizing global action against this all too pervasive crime, in line with the
vision of the Generation Equality Forum action coalitions, UNODC and UN Women have joined
forces to produce the second edition of a report on gender-related killings of women and girls.
Released ahead of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and the
16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, the report’s chilling findings add
heightened urgency to an existing global emergency.
Here are 5 key findings:
1. Women and girls are most likely to be killed
by those closest to them.
In 2021, around 45,000 women and girls worldwide were killed
by their intimate partners or other family members (including
fathers, mothers, uncles and brothers). This means that, on
average, more than five women or girls are killed every hour by
someone in their own family. Current and former intimate

partners are by far the most likely perpetrators of femicide,
accounting for an average of 65 per cent of all intimate partner
and family related killings.
The numbers of intimate partner and family related killings
have remained relatively stable over time—indicating that the
world is failing to stop deaths that could be prevented through
early intervention, gender responsive policing and justice, and
access to survivor centred support and protection.
2. Femicide is a universal problem.
Like all forms of gender-based violence against women and
girls, femicide is a problem that affects every country and
territory across the globe. According to the new report, in 2021,
Asia recorded the largest number of female intimate partner and
family related killings with an estimated 17,800 victims;
followed by 17,200 in Africa; 7,500 in the Americas; 2,500 in
Europe; and 300 in Oceania.
Adjusted for total population size, the available data shows that,
in 2021, 2.5 women and girls per 100,000 were killed by an

intimate partner or family member in Africa; compared with 1.4
in the Americas; 1.2 in Oceania; 0.8 in Asia; and 0.6 in Europe.
3. The true scale of femicide is likely much
higher.
While the numbers presented in the report are alarmingly high,
they are the tip of the iceberg. Too many victims of femicide
still go uncounted: for roughly four in ten intentional murders
of women and girls in 2021, there is not enough information to
identify them as gender-related killings because of national
variation in criminal justice recording and investigation
practices.
In many cases, only gender related killings perpetrated by an
intimate partner or family member are counted as
femicides—yet we know that gender-related killings take place
in many contexts beyond the private sphere. They can be
related to rape or sexual violence by someone unknown to the
victim; linked to harmful practices such as female genital
mutilation or so-called “honour”-based violence; a result of hate
crimes linked to sexual orientation or gender identity; or

connected with armed conflict, gangs, human trafficking and
other forms of organized crime.
Ensuring the availability of comprehensive disaggregated data
is critical to strengthening femicide prevention, protection and
response measures, as well as access to justice. To help move
beyond the current limitations in data collection, UNODC and
UN Women recently developed the Statistical framework for
measuring the gender-related killing of women and girls
(“femicide/feminicide”), approved by the United Nation’s
Statistical Commission in March 2022.
4. Marginalized women and girls face greater
risk.
There continue to be significant limitations in data and
information on gender-related killings of marginalized groups.
For instance, the women’s rights organization MundoSur
analyzed data portals of 12 Latin American countries and found
that only one country collects information on whether the
victim had a disability or was pregnant; two countries collect

data on the victim’s ethnic identity; and three countries record
whether the victim was a migrant.
Despite data limitations, the available evidence from Canada
and Australia suggest that indigenous women are
disproportionately affected by gender related killings. At 4.3
per 100,000 women and girls, the rate of female homicide in
Canada was five times higher among indigenous than among
non-indigenous women and girls in 2021.
To prevent femicide, it is crucial that national authorities record
comprehensive data on victims. By identifying women and girls
at greater risk, countries can better inform prevention and
protection mechanisms.
5. Femicide can and must be prevented.
Gender-related killings and other forms of violence against
women and girls are not inevitable. They can and must be
prevented through primary prevention initiatives focused on
transforming harmful social norms and engaging whole
communities and societies to create zero tolerance for violence
against women; early intervention and risk assessment; and

access to survivor-centered support and protection as well as
gender responsive policing and justice services.
National experiences, for example in South Africa, strongly
suggest that substantive and sustained decreases in femicide can
be achieved through comprehensive laws and policies aimed at
preventing gender-based violence against women, firearms
control legislation and activism of women’s rights and
community-based groups.
More research is required to better understand what is driving
increased femicide in certain contexts, and what factors have
enabled decreases in others to better inform prevention
strategies.
Women’s rights organizations play a crucial role in preventing
violence against women and girls, driving policy change,
holding governments to account, and providing critical survivor
centred services. Strengthening financial support to and
partnership with women’s rights organizations is critical in
reducing and preventing gender related killings and all forms of
gender-based violence against women and girls.

In the face of a global pushback against women’s rights, protecting women and girls from
violence is getting even more challenging. From regressive laws exacerbating impunity
for domestic violence perpetrators to the use of force against femicide and gender-based
violence protestors and the growing marginalization of women’s rights organizations,
women and girls are often being denied justice, protection and support.
Against the pushback, we push forward. This 16 Days, we’re calling on everyone to join
us in the fight against gender-based violence. From amplifying the voices of survivors
and activists to supporting women’s organizations and strengthening feminist movements,
here are 10 ways you can act now:
https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/feature-story/2022/11/push-forward-10-ways-t
o-end-violence-against-women
s
Abstract
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh
euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam,
quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum
dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan.
Keywords: Lorem, ipsum, dolor

Your Full Title of Your Paper
euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat (Lorem, 20XX). Duis autem vel
eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu
feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan.
Method
Participants
euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor
in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis
at vero eros et accumsan.
Assessments and Measures
Ut blandit malesuada quam, ac varius tortor gravida eget. Vestibulum id ligula leo, ut
accumsan mi. Sed tristique euismod convallis. Nulla facilisi. Etiam vestibulum est id orci
interdum vitae porta enim blandit. Cras sit amet arcu dolor, at venenatis erat. Vestibulum
accumsan placerat mauris. Morbi nec nibh nibh. Duis ultricies posuere nunc. Morbi at tellus quis
magna vestibulum eleifend.
Heading 3 is the beginning of a paragraph ending with a period. Maecenas
ullamcorper bibendum consequat. Pellentesque ultrices, eros eu tincidunt pretium, magna leo
volutpat libero, non bibendum diam nunc eget urna. Vivamus eu tortor et dui aliquam vestibulum
at vel augue. Vivamus elit dui, porttitor eget egestas at, rhoncus in justo. Curabitur tristique, elit
ac venenatis volutpat, eros mauris iaculis diam, vitae rhoncus erat metus vitae eros.
First Heading 4 level in the section. Nulla congue egestas ante, id ultricies orci
dignissim commodo. Fusce placerat, libero eu pharetra pulvinar, lorem dui pulvinar nisi, et
semper orci orci vitae magna. Nullam sodales, felis id feugiat scelerisque, tortor nulla interdum
mauris, ac porttitor odio dolor eget eros.
Second Heading 4 level in the section. Duis sit amet ipsum pretium erat accumsan
iaculis vitae eget risus. Donec ut dui in lorem volutpat fermentum bibendum pulvinar libero.
Nunc imperdiet eros et mi posuere pellentesque. Donec tincidunt ipsum eget nisl ullamcorper eu
placerat libero ullamcorper. Maecenas id luctus ligula. Cras condimentum eleifend nibh sit amet
iaculis. Suspendisse placerat sollicitudin mi, vel ornare augue hendrerit ac. Nulla sed suscipit
sapien. Cras pellentesque orci lectus, eu consequat enim.
First Heading 5 level in the section. Nulla congue egestas ante, id ultricies orci dignissim
commodo. Fusce placerat, libero eu pharetra pulvinar, lorem dui pulvinar nisi, et semper orci orci
vitae magna. Nullam sodales, felis id feugiat scelerisque, tortor nulla interdum mauris, ac
porttitor odio dolor eget eros.
Second Heading 5 level in the section. Duis sit amet ipsum pretium erat accumsan iaculis
vitae eget risus. Donec ut dui in lorem volutpat fermentum bibendum pulvinar libero. Nunc
imperdiet eros et mi posuere pellentesque. Donec tincidunt ipsum eget nisl ullamcorper eu
placerat libero ullamcorper. Maecenas id luctus ligula. Cras condimentum eleifend nibh sit amet
iaculis. Suspendisse placerat sollicitudin mi, vel ornare augue hendrerit ac. Nulla sed suscipit
sapien. Cras pellentesque orci lectus, eu consequat enim.

Results
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placerat sollicitudin mi, vel ornare augue hendrerit ac. Nulla sed suscipit sapien. Cras
pellentesque orci lectus, eu consequat enim.
Outcome 1
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Outcome 2
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Discussion
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in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis
at vero eros et accumsan.

References
Lastname, C. (2008). Title of the source without caps except Proper Nouns or: First word after
colon. The Journal or Publication Italicized and Capped, Vol#(Issue#), Page numbers.
Lastname, O. (2010). Online journal using DOI or digital object identifier. Main Online Journal
Name, Vol#(Issue#), 159-192. doi: 10.1000/182
Lastname, W. (2009). If there is no DOI use the URL of the main website referenced. Article
Without DOI Reference, Vol#(Issue#), 166-212. Retrieved from http://www.example.com
Gender related killings (femicide/feminicide) are the most brutal and

extreme manifestation of a continuum of violence against women and
girls that takes many interconnected and overlapping forms. Defined as
an intentional killing with a gender-related motivation, femicide may be
driven by stereotyped gender roles, discrimination towards women and

girls, unequal power relations between women and men, or harmful social
norms. Despite decades of activism from women’s rights organizations as
well as growing awareness and action from Member States, the available
evidence shows that progress in stopping such violence has been deeply
inadequate.
With the aim of galvanizing global action against this all too pervasive
crime, in line with the vision of the Generation Equality Forum action
coalitions, UNODC and UN Women have joined forces to produce the
second edition of a report on gender-related killings of women and girls.
Released ahead of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence
against Women and the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based
Violence, the report’s chilling findings add heightened urgency to an
existing global emergency.
Here are 5 key findings:

1. Women and girls are
most likely to be killed
by those closest to
them.
In 2021, around 45,000 women and girls worldwide were killed
by their intimate partners or other family members (including
fathers, mothers, uncles and brothers). This means that, on
average, more than five women or girls are killed every hour by
someone in their own family. Current and former intimate
partners are by far the most likely perpetrators of femicide,
accounting for an average of 65 per cent of all intimate partner
and family related killings.
The numbers of intimate partner and family related killings
have remained relatively stable over time—indicating that the
world is failing to stop deaths that could be prevented through

early intervention, gender responsive policing and justice, and
access to survivor centred support and protection.
2. Femicide is a
universal problem.
Like all forms of gender-based violence against women and
girls, femicide is a problem that affects every country and
territory across the globe. According to the new report, in 2021,
Asia recorded the largest number of female intimate partner and
family related killings with an estimated 17,800 victims;
followed by 17,200 in Africa; 7,500 in the Americas; 2,500 in
Europe; and 300 in Oceania.
Adjusted for total population size, the available data shows that,
in 2021, 2.5 women and girls per 100,000 were killed by an
intimate partner or family member in Africa; compared with 1.4
in the Americas; 1.2 in Oceania; 0.8 in Asia; and 0.6 in Europe.

3. The true scale of
femicide is likely much
higher.
While the numbers presented in the report are alarmingly high,
they are the tip of the iceberg. Too many victims of femicide
still go uncounted: for roughly four in ten intentional murders
of women and girls in 2021, there is not enough information to
identify them as gender-related killings because of national
variation in criminal justice recording and investigation
practices.
In many cases, only gender related killings perpetrated by an
intimate partner or family member are counted as
femicides—yet we know that gender-related killings take place
in many contexts beyond the private sphere. They can be
related to rape or sexual violence by someone unknown to the
victim; linked to harmful practices such as female genital
mutilation or so-called “honour”-based violence; a result of hate

crimes linked to sexual orientation or gender identity; or
connected with armed conflict, gangs, human trafficking and
other forms of organized crime.
Ensuring the availability of comprehensive disaggregated data
is critical to strengthening femicide prevention, protection and
response measures, as well as access to justice. To help move
beyond the current limitations in data collection, UNODC and
UN Women recently developed the Statistical framework for
measuring the gender-related killing of women and girls
(“femicide/feminicide”), approved by the United Nation’s
Statistical Commission in March 2022.
4. Marginalized women
and girls face greater
risk.
There continue to be significant limitations in data and
information on gender-related killings of marginalized groups.

For instance, the women’s rights organization MundoSur
analyzed data portals of 12 Latin American countries and found
that only one country collects information on whether the
victim had a disability or was pregnant; two countries collect
data on the victim’s ethnic identity; and three countries record
whether the victim was a migrant.
Despite data limitations, the available evidence from Canada
and Australia suggest that indigenous women are
disproportionately affected by gender related killings. At 4.3
per 100,000 women and girls, the rate of female homicide in
Canada was five times higher among indigenous than among
non-indigenous women and girls in 2021.
To prevent femicide, it is crucial that national authorities record
comprehensive data on victims. By identifying women and girls
at greater risk, countries can better inform prevention and
protection mechanisms.
5. Femicide can and
must be prevented.
Gender-related killings and other forms of violence against
women and girls are not inevitable. They can and must be
prevented through primary prevention initiatives focused on
transforming harmful social norms and engaging whole
communities and societies to create zero tolerance for violence
against women; early intervention and risk assessment; and
access to survivor-centered support and protection as well as
gender responsive policing and justice services.
National experiences, for example in South Africa, strongly
suggest that substantive and sustained decreases in femicide can
be achieved through comprehensive laws and policies aimed at
preventing gender-based violence against women, firearms
control legislation and activism of women’s rights and
community-based groups.
More research is required to better understand what is driving
increased femicide in certain contexts, and what factors have
enabled decreases in others to better inform prevention
strategies.
Women’s rights organizations play a crucial role in preventing
violence against women and girls, driving policy change,

holding governments to account, and providing critical survivor
centred services. Strengthening financial support to and
partnership with women’s rights organizations is critical in
reducing and preventing gender related killings and all forms of
gender-based violence against women and girls.
In the face of a global pushback against women’s rights, protecting women and girls from
violence is getting even more challenging. From regressive laws exacerbating impunity
for domestic violence perpetrators to the use of force against femicide and gender-based
violence protestors and the growing marginalization of women’s rights organizations,
women and girls are often being denied justice, protection and support. Against the
pushback, we push forward. This 16 Days, we’re calling on everyone to join us in the
fight against gender-based violence. From amplifying the voices of survivors and activists
to supporting women’s organizations and strengthening feminist movements, here are 10
ways you can act now:
https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/feature-story/2022/11/push-forward-10-ways-t
o-end-violence-against-women Explainer: What is femicide and how bad is it
globally? Adie Vanessa Offiong, CNN
Blog - Latest News
ERADICATING FEMICIDE IN SOUTH AFRICA

In September 2019, after days of protests, the South African government declared femicide in
South Africa a national crisis. Femicide, simply put, is the intentional murder of a woman.
However, the World Health Organization (WHO) elaborates on the definition and adds that the
murder of a woman is intentional because she is a woman. It is different from male homicide
because in many cases of femicide, the crime is “committed by partners or ex-partners and
involves ongoing abuse in the home, threats or intimidation, sexual violence or situations where
women have less power or fewer resources than their partner.”
The Facts
The Republic of South Africa is at the southern tip of Africa, and Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe,
Mozambique, Swaziland and Lesotho borders it. Femicide in South Africa is nothing new, dating
back as early as colonialism in the 17th century. Female violence has continued since then,
possibly due to the lack of severe consequences for the perpetrators. However, studies for
femicide in South Africa did not begin until 1999.
According to South Africa’s Department of Police, someone murders a woman every three hours,
which equates to about seven per day. In contrast, someone murders a man every 30 minutes,
about 50 per day. Despite the lower murder rates for women, most female homicides are much
more violent in nature than the male. Many of the female victims suffer assault, rape and burning
before their perpetrators dump them. In comparison to other countries, this rate of femicide is
almost five times higher than the world’s average. South Africa ranks fourth in the world for the
highest rate of violence against women. Additionally, people reported 39,633 rapes and 6,253
sexual assaults in 2017 alone.
Activism Enabling Change
Femicide has gained a lot of media attention in recent years. Anene Booysen suffered brutal rape
and murder in 2013. In 2017, an ex-boyfriend murdered Karabo Mokoena. Protests against
femicide in South Africa broke out in September 2019 after the rape and murder of the University
of Cape Town student, Uyinene Mrwetyana. The protests requested action from the South African
government, including the death penalty for all perpetrators of femicide.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the country was in a national crisis of
violence against women after three days of protests. He detailed a plan of action to combat
femicide and gender-based violence, including making the register of offenders public, reviewing
cold cases and providing harsher penalties for perpetrators. President Ramaphosa also promised
to implement policies in schools, workplaces and communities that would curb violence against
females.
The Cavalry Steps In

Femicide in South Africa is also gaining attention internationally. The stories of Anene Booysen
and Karabo Mokoena have made international headlines. Award-winning and South African-born
actress Charlize Theron has used her platform to speak out against the violence against women in
the country, and she has been doing so since 1999. She urged the leaders of South Africa to do
more for women and told men not to be bystanders.
In an era of the internet and movements such as #MeToo, the ongoing femicide in South Africa is
impossible to ignore. Thankfully, the South African government has taken the right steps. Not only
did the President of South Africa publically acknowledge it as a national crisis but also vows to
take action against it. It remains for one to see if the South African government keeps its
promises, but it is clear that the women and media of South Africa will hold it accountable until
they get the justice they deserve.
– Emily Young
Photo: Pixabay
Editor’s note: This story is part of As Equals, CNN's ongoing series on gender
inequality. For information about how the series is funded and more, check out
our FAQs.
NEWS
5 Countries Where Femicide Is At Its

Worst And What We Can Do To Help
UDICE, Kristina(2015)
With recent outrage in Argentina over the brutal murder of 14-year-old Chiara Paez, the
conversation about femicide has been reignited in mainstream media.
The young girl was allegedly beaten and killed by her boyfriend during a supposed
dispute over her pregnancy. This case brings to light the overwhelming violence brought
against women throughout much of the world.
This violence against women, the killing and maiming of women solely because of their
gender, has been coined femicide.
It’s important to distinguish femicide from homicide, as most research conducted in

countries with high rates of femicide don’t consider them as such.
Femicide is the sexist violence against women because of a patriarchal system that
believes in the inferiority of women themselves.
It’s a crime that discriminates. It is not just the murder of women, but the murder of
women because they are women. In many cultures and societies, this violence has long
been accepted and encouraged.
And even now, when many countries have created laws against femicide, this violence
is still all-consuming.
There are many different forms of femicide, but they all involve the beating, mutilating,
torturing or killing of women and girls because of the fact they are women.
In much of the world, women are seen more as objects, instead of people with equal
power and representation in their societies. Because of this, the beating and killing of
women is allowed, looked over or even encouraged.
The different forms of femicide include honor killings, dowry killings, intimate femicide,
non-intimate femicide, genital mutilation, infanticide, sex trafficking and many others.
It’s important to stay informed on matters such as these, and the first step to doing so is
understanding these issues, where these killings are most committed and how to put an
end to it.
Here’s a list of five countries where femicide is most prevalent in the world today.
Argentina
The murder of Chiara Paez outraged the country of Argentina, and sent thousands of
people into the streets to protest.
Stories of other women killed or beaten because of getting pregnant, having sex or
other reasons connected to their gender, flooded the media.
It sparked protests that began in Buenos Aires, but spread through Chile, Uruguay and
up to Miami, FL. According to La Casa Del Encuentro, 31 women are killed every hour
in Argentina, and 1,800 women have been killed since 2008.
Argentina has one of the biggest problems with femicide, and these protests are
hopefully going to bring about justice.
El Salvador
According to the Small Arms Survey, El Salvador is the country with the highest
femicide rate.
And while femicide is considered a criminal act in El Salvador, fewer than 3 percent of
these cases are taken to court. Most of these killings fall under the intimate femicide
category: acts commited against women by their partners or family members.
And, most of these acts are due to the woman having sex before marriage, having sex
outside of marriage or being raped.
The cases of femicide have only increased, averaging to about 600 cases in 2011. The
numbers aren’t decreasing.
India
The type of femicide most prevalent in India is dowry killing, or the killing of a woman by
her partner or members of her partner’s family, because she wasn’t able to bring a big
enough dowry into the family.
Then there is the killing of young girls, simply because they are not boys. This killing is
also known as infanticide, and according to studies, 21 percent of girls between the
ages of 1 to 5 won’t see their sixth birthday.
And, infant girls are 50 percent more likely to die than boys before their first birthday. In
many cases, girls grow up to become victims of more domestic violence than their male
counterparts.
This abuse is a result of deliberate neglect by the family for the simple fact that they are
female and have "less to offer" than men.
Honduras
In Honduras, femicide is also widely committed. And while intimate femicide is a large
problem, an even bigger problem facing the country is the high rate of child sex
trafficking.
In Honduras, many young girls are forced into becoming sex workers. Young girls suffer
large amounts of child abuse, and the country has no way of protecting them, even
though child protection laws exist.
Many of these children need shelters and need the government to enforce these laws,
but the children are left unprotected.
In many cases, they are killed. Extrajudicial killings (illegal killings sponsored by the
government) of young children, especially young girls, has risen from 447 in 2009 to
1,068 in 2011.
Femicide is considered the second leading killer of women in Honduras. Honduras

ranks third on the Small Arms Survey, in terms of highest rates of femicide, and these
sexist killings are going unreported and unresolved.
Mexico
Mexico is another country where the sexist killing of women is an issue that has gained
major attention recently with stories of women like Rosa Diana, Dulce Cristina Payan
and Barbara Reyes.
According to the National Citizen Female Observatory, six women are killed due to their
gender every day.
The murder and mutilation of women has been on the rise since the 90s, and it’s only
getting worse.
Women are often found dead after having had their breasts cut off and/or their bodies
brutally, sexually abused.
Most of the perpetrators are husbands, boyfriends or family members.
And, the biggest problem facing the country in regard to these horrific crimes is the lack
of government intervention on behalf of these women.
Between 2012 and 2013, only 24 percent of femicides were investigated. Of those, only
1.6 percent came to a conclusion with someone arrested and sentenced.
There is too much violence in Mexico and not enough government aid, and because of
this too many women are killed without remorse.
This is just a small sample of the countries where femicide is a nationwide pandemic.
Some others include South Africa, Guatemala, Columbia, Brazil and the Russian
Federation.
These countries report severely high levels of violence against women, with little to no
policies protecting them, or the ability to enforce the laws that do exist. But, even the
numbers we have don’t necessarily show the truth.
Most of these statistics are grossly inaccurate. These countries don’t accurately report
the number of victims, due to lack of awareness or general disbelief in the illegality of
femicide itself.
This violence can’t continue, and it is our responsibility to do everything we possibly can
to end these careless murders.
What can be done? The World Health Organization has some ideas.
For starters, it’s important that better information be taken down in relation to these
heinous crimes. More effective records need to be kept based on the newly evolving,
legal definition of femicide.
Femicide as a criminal act has already been incorporated into legislation in many
countries, such as Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico.
These are some of the countries with the highest rates of femicide, but unfortunately, in
most of these countries, the laws prove useless in prevention.
They are only effectively enforced when women are killed, and even then, the
subjectivity that surrounds the term makes it harder to win a conviction.
There also needs to be more effective sensitivity training for police and health workers.
They need to know what to look for; they need to be able to see growing signs of
violence before they lead to death.
There need to be stricter gun laws, as many of these women were killed as a result of
gun violence. When a gun was introduced into the home, women were three times more
likely to be killed by it.
In countries with the highest rates of homicide, over 60 percent of the women killed
were killed using guns.
But, most importantly, what we can all do right now as we read this article is raise and
strengthen awareness.
This is a problem most people aren’t quite aware of.
Femicide is a term not many people fully comprehend, but it’s important we learn more
about this term, this violence and the women and children who suffer because of a
patriarchal system that degrades women.
The more people who know about it, the more people can stand up, have a voice and
fight for the rights and the safety of these women.
That’s the most important thing of all.
Shanquella Robinson death being

investigated as femicide. Here is what it
means
ByNicole Chavez and Rikki Klaus, CNN, CNNWire
Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Mexican authorities issued an arrest warrant for an acquaintance of Shanquella Robinson, the
woman found dead while vacationing in Mexico
The killing of Shanquella Robinson is being investigated as a femicide, an

unfamiliar term for many in the United States as this gender-motivated crime
has not been defined by US legislation despite being a global issue.
The video featured is from a previous report.

Robinson, a 25-year-old student at Winston-Salem State University in North

Carolina died in October while staying in a luxury rental property in the
Mexican state of Baja California Sur.
Prosecutors in Mexico are seeking to extradite one of Robinson's friends as a

suspect in the case. Daniel de la Rosa, the attorney general for Baja
California Sur told local media last week that an arrest warrant was issued for
the crime of femicide, or the killing of a woman because of her gender, in
connection with Robinson's case.
No one has been charged in the case, and authorities have not released the
names of Robinson's friends.
Top Stories
RELATED: Shanquella Robinson death: Mexican authorities pursuing case

against American suspected in killing
Unlike Mexico and other Latin American countries, the US does not have a
law recognizing femicide as a different crime than homicide, which several
experts say does not mean that killings targeting women are not happening in
the US at alarming rates.
"Femicides happen all the time in the US, and many famous murder cases
that we all have in our consciousness are actually femicide, but we don't put
that label on them," said Dabney P. Evans, director of Emory University's
Center for Humanitarian Emergencies, who studies violence against women.
As the investigation into Robinson's death continues, here's what you need to
know about what is considered femicide in Mexico, why gender-based
violence is a big problem globally, and why scholars say that writing femicide
into US law could help women.
It's become a crisis in Mexico
Femicide is the most extreme form of gender-based violence (GBV) and is

defined as the "intentional murder of women because they are women."
Femicides fall into two categories: intimate and non-intimate femicide. The
former refers to the killing of women by current orex-partners, while the latter
is the killing of women by people with whom they had no intimate relationship.
In most countries, femicide is not different from homicide in criminal law, but
Mexico is among at least 16 countries that have included femicide as a
specific crime.
Under federal law in Mexico, people can face up to 60 years in prison if

convicted. The difference between homicide, or unlawful killing, and femicide,
varies from state to state in Mexico.
There could be a history of violence -- sexual or not -- and threats, or "if the
victim was in community, for example, and if she was killed and her body was
in public," said Beatriz García Nice, who leads the Wilson Center's initiative on
gender-based violence.
RELATED: Mystery surrounds North Carolina woman's death while on

vacation in Mexico
A video circulating online in recent weeks appears to show a physical

altercation inside a room between Robinson and another person. Her father,
Bernard Robinson, told CNN his daughter is seen in that video being thrown
to the floor and beaten on the head.
It's not clear when the video was taken or if it depicts the moment Robinson
suffered the injury that led to her death.
While there is legislation against femicide in Mexico, "the main problem is the
execution," García Nice said. The number of gender-based violence cases are
underreported in national statistics and the law is "under executed" in the
judicial system, she said.
García Nice says nearly 95% of femicide cases in Mexico go unpunished. "If
you commit a crime of femicide, there's really not that much of a chance for
you to get convicted for it. And that's one of the reasons why we see that rates
are still very, very high."
Alejandra Marquez, an assistant professor of Spanish with a focus on gender

and sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean at Michigan State University,
said the "feminicidos" crisis in Mexico started several decades ago and first
gained national attention in the 1990s when hundreds of women were killed in
the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez.
Top Stories
"There used to be this idea, especially in central Mexico, where it was like
'women are getting killed over there at the border,' but because it's expanded
all over the country, it's sort of become this phenomenon that can no longer be
ignored," Marquez told CNN.
"When you're in Mexico, it's part of day-to-day conversation," Marquez added.
More needs to be done in the US, experts say
The disproportionate killings of Black women, the crisis of missing or

murdered Indigenous people and the 2021 deadly shootings of women at
Atlanta-area spas are some examples of cases that could potentially be
labeled as femicides, experts say.
"As a society, we need to recognize that these are not one-off deaths. These
are in fact, connected to patterns of masculine violence, and we need to think
more closely about preventing that kind of violence," said Evans, the scholar
at Emory University.
An analysis of homicide data by the Violence Policy Center shows 2,059

women in the US were killed by men in 2020 and 89% knew their offenders.
For Evans, having femicide legislation in the US would not solve the issues of
toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and misogyny that lead to gender-based violence
but the terminology could "allows us to talk about this phenomenon" and
prevent it from happening.
There are existing laws that address gender-based violence in the US and
mechanisms to track domestic violence but they are flawed.
The federal hate crime law covers violent or property crimes at least partially
motivated by bias against race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity,
gender or gender identity. At the state level, the definition of a hate crime
varies and several states do not cover bias based on gender.
RELATED: Shanquella Robinson update: Woman vacationing in Mexico may

have received care hours before death
Earlier this year, federal lawmakers reauthorized the Violence Against Women
Act. The legislation is aimed at protecting and supporting survivors of
domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking -- all documented precursors in
femicide cases.
During a March ceremony celebrating the act's passage, President Joe Biden
said more needs to be done to address the issue.
"No one, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, should experience abuse.

Period. And if they do, they should have the services and support they need to
get through it. And we're not going to rest."
Gender-based violence is a global problem

An estimated 81,100 women and girls around the world were killed
intentionally last year with about 56% of them by intimate partners or family
members, a UN report published last week shows.
It's hard to describe the full scope of gender-based violence, the report says,
because roughly 4 in 10 killings reported by authorities have "no contextual
information to allow them to be identified and counted as gender-related
killings."
"These rates are alarmingly high, as we can see; however, that's the tip of the
iceberg," Kalliopi Mingeirou, the chief of Ending Violence against Women
Section at UN Women, one of the entities that compiled the report.
Mingeirou said when a femicide isn't classified legally for what it is, police
cannot investigate properly. Other challenges in stopping and preventing
femicides include the lack of resources and training for authorities expected to
implement laws.
"What women and girls deserve around the world is to have a world that
respects their choices, that respects their rights," Mingeirou said. "We need to
have equal rights. We have a primary right to be free from violence because if
we are free from violence and harassment, we can achieve, and we can thrive
in this world."
The CNN Wire™ & © 2022 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros.
Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
(CNN)Before the murder of Sabina Nessa, a 28-year-old primary school

teacher killed in London, some were already speaking of a "femicide epidemic." But
what is femicide?
Here's what you need to know about the term, how different parts of the world
compare and what can be done to reduce femicides.
What is femicide?
Femicide, also known as feminicide, is the most extreme form of gender-based

violence (GBV) and is defined as the "intentional murder of women because they are
women." 
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO),"most cases of femicide are

committed by partners or ex-partners, and involve ongoing abuse in the home, threats
or intimidation, sexual violence or situations where women have less power or fewer
resources than their partner."
Femicides fall into two categories: intimate and non-intimate femicide. The
former refers to the killing of women by current or  ex-partners, while the latter
encapsulates the killing of women by people with whom they had no intimate
relationship. This includes women killed during armed conflict as a weapons of war;
so-called "honor" killings, where a woman is killed for allegedly bringing shame to her
family; the murder of women because of their race or sexuality;

femicides perpetrated by other women, acting as "agent(s) of patriarchy;" and the
killing of transgender women. 
How big is the problem?
There is no global, standardized or consistently recorded data on femicide.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's (UNODC) most recent global

report on homicide was published in July 2019, presenting data from 2017. That year,
87,000 women around the world were intentionally killed -- more than half of them
(50,000) by intimate partners or family members. The total number is up from an
estimated 48,000 in 2012.
But the problem is probably bigger. The "data gaps mask the true scale of
violence" wrote the European Institute of Gender Equality, whose EU-wide survey
results on GBV are expected in 2023.
Friends and relatives of Fernanda Olivares placed flowers, banners and candles in
front of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, on July 4, 2021, demanding justice for
her death. Diego Helguera, who ran her over on June 12, is on trial for femicide.
(Photo by Gerardo Vieyra/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
How do regions of the world compare?
In the United Kingdom, between 2009 and 2018 "a woman is killed by a man every
three days", according to the Femicide Census' 10-year report, published in
November 2020. 
 In 2017 the largest recorded number of women were killed in Asia, followed by Africa,

the Americas, Europe and Oceania. 
A 2016 study, "A Gendered Anaylysis of Violent Deaths" , reported that although their

overall homicide numbers were low, Slovenia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Austria were
the top four "high-income countries in which the female homicide rate is greater than
or equal to the male homicide rate." Germany and Hong Kong are tied in fifth place --
though Hong Kong is not a country but a territory.
Although the UNODC reports that overall femicides form a small percentage of all

murders, the global trend is still disturbing. German broadcaster DW reported in
November 2020 that "every day in Germany a man tries to kill his partner or
ex-partner. Every third day an attempt is successful." 
There has been outcry across the globe at the numbers of women killed, from the US
to Albania  and Mexico, South Africa to Australia.
Is femicide different from homicide in criminal law?
No, in most countries it is not. 

Only a handful of countries legally recognize femicide as distinctly different from

homicide; most of them are in Latin America where 16 countries have included
femicide as a specific crime.
No EU member states have defined femicide in their legislation. Nor has the US,
though the Violence Against Women Act, which expired in 2018 and is awaiting
reauthorisation by Congress, is considered "landmark legislation" because it makes it
a responsibility of the federal government to prosecute domestic violence and support
victims.                                              
The UK Parliament only recently rejected a petition calling for femicide to be made a
crime stating: "It's not clear what the petition is asking the UK Government or
Parliament to do. Murder is already a crime, so we're not sure what you'd like to
happen by creating a new offence." 
However, Ivana Milovanović, a Serbian judge who is an expert in GBV, told UN

Women, a UN organization that advocates for the empowerment of women and
gender equality: "Femicide should be recognized as a specific criminal offense." 
"Femicide differs from other forms of murder because it is the gender-related killing of
a woman only because she is a woman," she explained. "This indicates that the root
causes of femicide differ from other types of murder and are related to the general
position of women in the society, discrimination against women, gender roles, unequal
distribution of power between men and women, habitual gender stereotypes,

prejudices and violence against women."
Former US senator, Barbara Boxer, second from right, and then senator Joseph
Biden, at a press conference on Capitol Hill, discuss the violence against women act
on February 24, 1993. (AP Photo/Barry Thumma)
Does writing femicide into law help women get justice?
It has been argued that by writing femicide into criminal code, first there is
an acknowledgment of the misogynistic nature of these crimes, but also that there will
be more accurate data collection that can, in turn, lead to better policy and practices
that protect women.  
In Mexico, for example, not only is femicide recognized in law, in 2020 the country's
Congress approved tougher sentences for femicide -- 45 to 65 years in prison if
convicted. 
Staying in Latin America, Guatemala has a similar system, with specialist judges and
prosecutors trained in dealing with cases of femicide.
But these provisions and penalties have not resulted in higher conviction rates, or a
decrease in these crimes. The UNODC writes: "Countries in Latin America have
adopted legislation that criminalizes femicide as a specific offense in their criminal
codes. Yet there are no signs of a decrease in the number of gender-related killings of
women and girls."
Looking specifically at Mexico, Meghan Beatley reports: "Paradoxically, even when

women's killers are caught and prosecuted, the category of femicide has made it
harder to convict them." 
This is because prosecutors have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the crime
was indeed perpetuated because the victim was a woman.
"The notion of gender-related killing, or "femicide," requires an understanding of which

acts are gender related -- something that is subject to a certain degree of
interpretation," writes the UNODC in its 2019 global study on homicide. "In many
cases there is a continuum of (intimate partner) violence that culminates in the killing
of women even when perpetrators have no specific (misogynistic) motives."
People place candles at a vigil for murdered 28-year-old teacher Sabina Nessa in
Kidbrooke in south-east London, September 24, 2021. (AP Photo/David Cliff)
How can we reduce femicides?

Well, first, here's what doesn't work: telling women what to do or wear, and how to
behave in order to avoid becoming victims of violence. 
Following Nessa's murder, there was outrage after the local council handed out over
200 security alarms to women and vulnerable people in the area where the teacher's
body was found. Writer Sophie Gallagher expressed her frustration in a column saying
that this sort of response from the authorities, as well as guidance from the police
advising women how to stay out of harm's way, "aggressively perpetuate[d] the female
position as one of second-class citizens, whose duty it is to defer to the unalienable
rights of violent men to exist."
She added: "These "safety rules" are false assurances that society gives us to shuck
off responsibility for what happens to us at the hands of the insidious misogyny it
allows to run rampant."  
They've been beaten, trolled, threatened with sexual violence but refuse to be
silenced
So, what does taking responsibility look like? The Small Arms Survey report called
data collection "indispensable" to preventing gender-based violence. "Data
disaggregated by sex, age, ethnicity, victim--perpetrator relationship, and motivation
for violence, along with contextual information, such as the location, time, and
instrument of violence, will benefit efforts to diagnose, reduce, and prevent violence,
including lethal violence," its authors wrote.
When it comes to best practices, Peru's government is often cited. Its action plan
includes "several agencies with specialized task forces [working] toward femicide
reduction and prosecuting the abusers, including emergency centers for women, a
hotline for victims of violence against women, and the Specialized Police Squad for
Prevention Against Domestic Violence."
Ultimately though, to reduce GVB in all its forms, cultural and social norms must
change. Research published by Bristol University Press suggests that societies must
take a close look at their views of "masculinity and femininity, gender
equality, domestic violence and femicide laws, patriarchal ideology, traditional values,
the role of religion in society and media coverage of femicide and violence against
women."
Read more from the As Equals series
*Header image caption: Sabina Nessa
GENDER INEQUALITY
As the UK publishes its first census of women killed by men, here’s a

global look at the problem , Nov 25, 2020
More than half of women and girls killed by men are murdered by their current or
previous partners.
Image: Unsplash/Charl Folscher
Douglas Broom
Senior Writer, Formative Content
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Follow
● Six women are killed every hour by men around the world, most by men
in their own family or their partners.
● A new report shows that in the UK a woman is killed by a man every
three days.
● COVID-19 is overshadowing the issue, the United Nations says.
● On International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the
UN is calling on nations to act.
Six women are killed by men every hour in a “global pandemic of femicide” that is being
partly hidden by COVID-19 – and the United Nations is calling for urgent action.
More than half of women and girls killed by men are murdered by their current or
previous partners, according to UN data.
Have you read?
● This wall of shoes is for the women killed by domestic violence
● In his New Year message, pope decries violence against women
● Screaming to be heard: Swiss women strike against gender inequality
The latest UN figures show that 137 women across the world are killed every day by a
partner or member of their own family – a total of 50,000 women a year murdered by
people they know and should be able to trust.
80% of murders were committed by men in 2017. Image: Statista
“As the world grapples with the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its
negative impact on women, a pandemic of femicide and gender-based violence against
women is taking the lives of women and girls everywhere,” says Dubravka Šimonovic, a
UN human rights expert.
Violence against women and girls is “still so deeply embedded in cultures around the
world that it is almost invisible,” the UN says, describing it as “a construct of power and
a means of maintaining the status-quo”.
Preventable deaths
The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020 found that between a
fifth and nearly a half of women globally suffer physical or sexual abuse from their male
partners. The Middle East and North Africa has the highest rate with 45% of women
being harmed.
45% of Middle Eastern and Northern African women have been subjected to physical and/or sexual
violence. Image: World Economic Forum
But the problem persists across the world. In North America, the rate was 32% and in
Western Europe 22%. And in the UK, a new first-of-its-kind report from the Femicide
Census shows that a man kills a woman every three days in the country – a statistic
unchanged across the 10 years studied.
“Men’s violence against women is a leading cause of the premature death for women
globally but research in the UK and Europe is limited and unconnected,” said Karen
Ingala Smith, co-founder of the Femicide Census.
“By providing detailed comparable data about femicides in the UK since 2009, including
demographic and social factors and the methods men selected to kill women, we can
see that these killings are not isolated incidents, and many follow repeated patterns.”
Speaking ahead of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women,
the UN’s Šimonovic called for countries to halt the problem by setting up “national
multidisciplinary prevention bodies or femicide watches/observatories on violence
against women”.
“Many of these femicides are preventable,” she adds, noting that although a growing
number of states have begun to tackle the problem it has been mostly left to human
rights and women’s groups to highlight the scale of the death toll.Digital Daily
Are Black Women Safe? The Shanquella

Robinson Effect.
Sherri Kolade
December 22, 2022

Shanquella Robinson’s death shocked the nation and keeping travelers and women on
guard to stay safe themselves.
Photo courtesy of Shanquella Robinson’s Instagram page, its.quella_
By: Sherri Kolade and Rasha Almulaiki
Lastly, You already know her name.
Shanquella Robinson.
The bright, 25-year-old Charlotte woman who was tragically killed in Cabo, Mexico,
while celebrating a friend’s birthday in late October with her reported friends, one of
whom allegedly ended her life just 24 hours after arriving in Mexico.
Jealousy is as cruel as the grave and envy isn’t that far behind either.
Were those the motivating factors behind the death of Robinson who had a big heart
and was financially well off? Some are saying yes.
Her parents were falsely notified that she died from alcohol intoxication, but an autopsy
report, however an autopsy showed that she suffered a severe spinal cord injury and
her neck vertebrae were misaligned.
A video that was heavily circulated after her death revealed Robinson being brutally
abused by a woman apparently in the rented home they were staying in, according to
reports.
One of the women in the group is a suspect in Robinson’s case, and Mexican
prosecutors are requesting her extradition.
Toxic Friends Forever?
With one of Robinson’s friends a suspect, and with many murders nationwide being
committed by someone the victim knows, it’s time to reexamine what toxic friendships
really look like.
Health.com reports that toxic friends can create a sometimes-devastating ripple effect.
“When one friend is toxic, it can influence you, but you also have the ability to take
some time away and interact with other friends,” said Elizabeth Lombardo, Ph.D., author
of “Better Than Perfect: 7 Strategies to Crush Your Inner Critic and Create a Life You
Love.” In a bigger setting, people are more likely to succumb to “group act,” which
intensifies these unhealthy behaviors.
“People in a toxic group are more likely to act in toxic ways, even if that is not consistent
with how they would act on their own,” Lombardo says. “In a sense, there is greater
toxicity in the group.”
According to CNN, femicide is the “deliberate murder of women because they are
women” and an arrest warrant for it was issued last week, according to Daniel de la
Rosa, the attorney general for Baja California Sur.
Femicide or Homicide?
The well-to-do Robinson, a businesswoman, model and social media influencer, died in
October while vacationing at a Baja California Sur rental property. Black Information
Network reported her death as being investigated in Mexico as femicide, a
gender-motivated crime that has yet to be defined by U.S. legislation.
Although authorities later changed the crime from femicide to homicide, there is still
much justice to be done with female murder victims in Mexico and beyond.
Femicides can fall into two categories: intimate, which refers to the killing of women by
current or ex-partners, and non-intimate, a slaying in which women have had no
intimate relationship with their killers. There could also be a history of violence and
threats, or “if the victim was in community, for example, and if she was killed and her
body was in public,” said Beatriz García Nice, who leads a gender-based violence
initiative at the Wilson Center.
Alejandra Marquez, a professor at Michigan State University, said the “feminicidos”

crisis in Mexico first garnered national attention in the 1990s when hundreds of women
were killed near the border.
“There used to be this idea, especially in central Mexico, where it was like ‘women are
getting killed over there at the border,’ but because it’s expanded all over the country,
it’s sort of become this phenomenon that can no longer be ignored,” Marquez told CNN.
In the U.S., there is no differentiation between femicide and homicide in criminal law.
Mexico, however, is among at least 16 countries that consider femicide a specific crime.
Though the U.S. doesn’t have legislation differentiating femicide from homicide, experts
say killings targeting women are still happening across the nation.
“Femicides happen all the time in the US, and many famous murder cases that we all
have in our consciousness are actually femicide, but we don’t put that label on them,”
said Dabney P. Evans, director of Emory University’s Center for Humanitarian
Emergencies. “As a society, we need to recognize that these are not one-off deaths.
These are, in fact, connected to patterns of masculine violence, and we need to think
more closely about preventing that kind of violence.”
Yet, while there are laws in place against femicide in Mexico, “the main problem is the
execution,” García Nice said, noting that nearly 95 percent of femicide cases in Mexico
go unpunished.
“If you commit a crime of femicide, there’s really not that much of a chance for you to
get convicted for it,” she said. “And that’s one of the reasons why we see that rates are
still very, very high.”
Be Prepared: Traveling Safely as Black Women
As women of color, traveling alone or in a group is an experience saddled with an extra

layer for caution due to potential risks of discrimination and personal safety, both
domestically and abroad.
Imani Elie is the founder and operator of Detroit Travel Company, a Black-owned
independent travel agony, which also offers travel merchandise, concierge and event
planning and management services.
When recommending travel locations, Elie said she often suggests places she has
visited more than once and had a good experience as a Black woman.
“Belize is somewhere a lot of Black Americans can go and feel like they’re at home
because there’re so many darker skinned people and natural Black people that are
there,” said Elie. “It’s a very mixed country but English is one of their number one
languages. I’d more than likely someone go to Central America, where I’ve had positive
experiences.”
Since 2016, Elie has advised new and experienced travelers from Detroit and other
cities across the U.S. between the ages of 25 to 35, and most recently, women aged 35
to 44 on group travels.
“Whether they are alone or in a group, I always want to make sure they’re in a
reputable, well-established location, four or five stars if there’s a resort. Most people do
like the all-inclusive option because it offers everything right there on location and they
don’t have to leave. There are also options of private estates that have security and are
gated with different services, like transportation.”
Elie strongly advises people to consider properties that are run by a U.S.-based
hospitality service or property management company.
“We’ve seen situations in the last three years where locally owned, private residences
don’t have security or safeguards put in place, like for carbon monoxide poisoning or
unauthorized hidden cameras on site,” said Elie. “I want everyone to have the full
transparency of their safety at the forefront of their mind at all times.”
Another safety measure to keep in mind is to consume alcohol responsibly in public so

that you are not vulnerable to scams.
“You never want to stick out or be inebriated in public where you can’t take care of
yourself,” said Elie.” It’s not necessarily for physical safety, but a financial risk.
Someone might try to scam you or upcharge you because they think you don’t know
any better.”
Before leaving the U.S. travelers should share their travel plans with a trusted
emergency contact. Also, sign up for the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program system
with the U.S. State Department to receive security updates and be registered in the
system in case you need assistance.
Title:
A medico-legal definition of femicide
Authors:
Cecchi, R. a, ⁎
Sassani, M. b
Agugiaro, G. a
Caroppo, E. c
De Lellis, P. d
Sannella, A. e
Mazza, M. f
Ikeda, T. a
Kondo, T. g
Masotti, V. a
Affiliation:
a Institute of Legal Medicine, Department of Medicine and
Surgery, University of Parma, Italy
b Institute of Metabolism and Systems Research, College of
Medical and Dental Sciences, University of Birmingham,
United Kingdom
c Department of Mental Health - Local Health Authority Roma
2, Italy
d Department of Electrical Engineering and Information
Technology, University of Naples Federico II, Italy
e Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of
Cassino, Italy
f Institute of Psychiatry and Psychology, Department of
Geriatrics, Neuroscience and Orthopedics, Fondazione
Policlinico Universitario A. Gemelli IRCCS, Università Cattolica
del Sacro Cuore, Rome, Italy
g Institute of Legal Medicine, Wakayama Medical University
School of Medicine Graduate School of Medicine, Japan
Source:
In Legal Medicine November 2022 59
Publisher:
Elsevier B.V.
Keywords:
Femicide
Female homicide
Legal medicine
National laws
International resolutions
Definition
Abstract:
Highlights •Femicide deserves an unambiguous
definition.•Only a few countries have specific laws on
femicide.•International organizations stand against

femicide.•Femicide is the failure to recognize the victim’s right
to self-determination.•There is a need for homogeneous
methodology for the study of female homicides.
Document Type:
Article
ISSN:
1344-6223
DOI:
10.1016/j.legalmed.2022.102101
Accession Number:
S134462232200089X
Copyright:
© 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Persistent link to this record (Permalink):
https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthTyp
e=sso&db=edselp&AN=S134462232200089X&site=eds-live&s
cope=site&custid=s1229530
Cut and Paste:
<A
href="https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&Aut
hType=sso&db=edselp&AN=S134462232200089X&site=eds-li
ve&scope=site&custid=s1229530">A medico-legal definition of
femicide</A>
Database:
ScienceDirect
Femicide and forensic pathology: Proposal

Back
for a shared medico-legal methodology

Authors:
Cecchi, Rossana a, ⁎
Masotti, Vittoria a
Sassani, Matilde b
Sannella, Alessandra c
Agugiaro, Giulia a
Ikeda, Tomoya a
Pressanto, Davide Maria a
Caroppo, Emanuele d
Schirripa, Maria Laura a
Mazza, Marianna e
Kondo, Toshikazu f
De Lellis, Pietro g
Affiliation:
a Institute of Legal Medicine, Department of Medicine and Surgery, University of
Parma, Italy
b Institute of Metabolism and Systems Research, College of Medical and Dental
Sciences, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
c Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Cassino, Italy
d Department of Mental Health - Local Health Authority Roma 2 -, Italy
e Institute of Psychiatry and Psychology, Department of Geriatrics, Neuroscience
and Orthopedics, Fondazione Policlinico Universitario A. Gemelli IRCCS, Università
Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Rome, Italy
f Institute of Legal Medicine, Wakayama Medical University School of Medicine
Graduate School of Medicine, Japan
g Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of
Naples Federico II
Source:
In Legal Medicine February 2023 60
Publisher:
Elsevier B.V.
Keywords:
Male and female homicide
Femicide
Forensic pathology
Legal medicine
Autopsy
Abstract:
Highlights •Femicide is a murder due to the failure to recognize the victim's right to
self-determination.•There is a need for homogeneous methodology for the study of
female homicides.•Male and female homicides can be considered as two distinct
victimological phenomena.•Injuries and circumstantial patterns in femicides could
represent evidence of a specific murder, deserving a specific regulatory
framework.•More studies with a standardized data collection are needed to
corroborate the theory of this paper.
Document Type:
Article
ISSN:
1344-6223
DOI:
10.1016/j.legalmed.2022.102170
Accession Number:
S1344622322001584
Copyright:
© 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Accessibility Information and Tips

Notes on femicide/feminicidio and the limits of justice
Citation
Title:
Notes on
femicide/feminici
dio and the
limits of justice
Authors:
Juliana M. Streva
Source:
Sortuz, Vol 12, Iss
1, Pp 103-128
(2022)
Publisher Information:
Oñati International
Institute for the
Sociology of Law,
2022.
Publication Year:
2022
Collection:
LCC:Sociology
(General)
LCC:Law
Subject Terms:
critical legal
studies
gender-based
violence
women’s
movement
international law
and human rights
system
discourse of rights
estudios jurídicos
críticos
violencia de
género
movimiento de las
mujeres
femicidio/feminicidi
o
femicide/feminicide
derecho
internacional y
sistema de
derechos humanos
discurso de
derechos
Sociology
(General)
HM401-1281
Law
Description:
This paper is part
of a longer
research project
that works towards
a critical reading of
the role of law in
reinscribing and
even producing
structural and
institutional
violence. For
introducing such a
complex
multi-sited topic,
the present article
focuses on the
socio-juridical
approach to
violence against
women by
unpacking (i) the
terminology of
“femicide” and
“feminicidio”; (ii)
the main
instruments and
decisions from the
international
human rights
system; (iii) the
implementation of
the international
discourses and
documents. In a
materialistic
framework, we
examine the
Brazilian context,
especially
regarding the
institutional
answers on: public
information,
statistics, police
stations, and
shelters to women
and children
experiencing
violence. Through
this itinerary, the
analysis moves
from the legal
discourse towards
questioning what
lies at the limits of
justice praxis
within the
framework of
femicide. Este
artículo forma
parte de un
proyecto de
investigación más
largo que trabaja
en pos de una
lectura crítica del
papel del derecho
en la reinscripción
e incluso la
producción de la
violencia
estructural e
institucional. Para
introducir un tema
tan complejo y
multisituado, el
presente artículo
se centra en el
enfoque
socio-jurídico de la
violencia contra las
mujeres,
desentrañando (i)
la terminología de
“femicidio” y
“feminicidio”; (ii)
los principales
instrumentos y
decisiones del
sistema
internacional de
derechos
humanos; (iii) la
aplicación de los
discursos y
documentos
internacionales. En
un marco
materialista,
examinamos el
contexto brasileño,
especialmente en
lo que se refiere a
las respuestas
institucionales
sobre información
pública,
estadísticas,
comisarías y
lugares de acogida
para mujeres y
niños que sufren
violencia. A través
de este itinerario,
el análisis se
desplaza desde el
discurso jurídico
hacia el
cuestionamiento
de los límites de la
praxis de la justicia
en el marco del
feminicidio.
Document Type:
article
File Description:
electronic resource
Language:
English
Spanish; Castilian
Basque
French
Portuguese
ISSN:
1988-0847
Relation:
https://opo.iisj.net/i
ndex.php/sortuz/ar
ticle/view/1486;
https://doaj.org/toc/
1988-0847
Access URL:
https://doaj.org/arti
cle/f5ba111adbf64
d859ff51e7ca68f37
93
Accession Number:
edsdoj.f5ba111ad
bf64d859ff51e7ca
68f3793
Database:
Directory of Open
Access Journals
Resources:
Femicide/unwomen.org
MichiganChronicle.com
Femicide/Wikipedia/ Definition
Femicide in Canada.ca
www.cnn.com
Dianarussell.com
Evaw-global-database.org
Borgenproject.org
Newsroom.unsw.edu.au
Ncu.edu / eds.b.esochost.com
Trends and Patterns in Femicide/Canada

The Advantages of Qualitative Research into

Femicide
● July 2017
● Qualitative Sociology Review 13(3):118-124
DOI:10.18778/1733-8077.13.3.08
● License
● CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Authors:
Weil, S., Sr
Download full-text PDFRead full-text
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Copy link
Citations (10)
References (17)
Abstract
This article reviews the state of the art of qualitative research on femicide, which, until the publication of this Special
Issue, has been extremely sparse. The paper mentions some of the limitations of the qualitative approach, such as
time consumption, ethical liabilities, and non-generalizability. However, it advocates qualitative research because of
its advantages in capturing the context, describing the experience, identifying the motives, highlighting the
relationship between perpetrator and victim, identifying the risk factors, and suggesting apt policies. The article
concludes by cautiously recommending a mixed-/merged-methods approach, which, in turn, depends upon the
research question and has its own inherent disadvantages.
: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Content may be subject to copyright.
Qualitative Sociology Review • www.qualitativesociologyreview.org 119

©2017 QSR Volume XIII Issue 3
Shalva Weil
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
UNISA, University of South Africa
The Advantages of Qualitative Research in
This article reviews the state of the art of qualitative research on femicide, which, until the publication
of this Special Issue, has been extremely sparse. The paper mentions some of the limitations of the
qualitative approach, such as time consumption, ethical liabilities, and non-generalizability. Howev-
er, it advocates qualitative research because of its advantages in capturing the context, describing the
experience, identifying the motives, highlighting the relationship between perpetrator and victim,
identifying the risk factors, and suggesting apt policies. The article concludes by cautiously recom-
mending a mixed-/merged-methods approach, which, in turn, depends upon the research question
and has its own inherent disadvantages.
Femicide; Survivors; Qualitative Research; Non-Generalizability; Narratives; Interviews; Perpetrator;
Victim; Policy; Mixed-Methods
Shalva Weil is a Senior Researcher at the Research In-

stitute for Innovation in Education at the Hebrew Universi-
ty of Jerusalem, Israel, and Research Fellow in the Depart-
ment of Biblical and Ancient Studies at UNISA, University
of South Africa. She specializes in migration, ethnicity,
ritual, gender, and violence.
Shalva Weil is the Chair of COST Action IS1206 “Femicide
across Europe.” She has published articles on femicide
in the ACUNS volumes Femicide 3, 4 +6, and an article on
femicide among girls in India in Ex Aequo (2016). She is
a co-editor of the Special Issue 2016 on “Femicide: A So-
cial Challenge” in Current Sociology. She is a board member
of the European Sociological Association (ESA) Research

Network No. 20 on Qualitative Methods; from 2005-2007,
she served as its Chair.
email address: shalva.weil@mail.huji.ac.il
I n the past few years, there has been a surge
of articles on femicide, which had previously

been “invisible” (Weil 2016a) in sociology. While
domestic violence is a common object of enquiry,
its fatal consequence had been relatively ignored.
Now, due to the activism of several organizations,
research into femicide is on the rise; however, the
vast majority of the studies are quantitative. As in
sociology in general, qualitative sociological re-
search into femicide has been relegated to an infe-
rior position in the discipline, and represents a mi-
nority sub-discipline.
It is a truism that it is dicult to conduct qualita-
tive studies of femicide, not least because the vic-
tim is dead. The qualitative researcher therefore
often takes recourse to studying “failed femicides”
of survivors. By “failed femicides,” the intention is
“an aempted femicide where the medical exam-
ination of the victim conrmed a life-threatening
event, the victim had been hospitalized in emer-
gency, and she or the perpetrator had described
the event as an aempted murder” (Weil 2016b:7).
In the WHO report on femicide, the authors were
keenly aware of the untenable situation in which
survivors nd themselves and proposed legal re-

forms globally to protect them. The report stated:
“Studies are also needed to investigate cases of
near-fatal intimate partner violence, not only to
understand the needs of survivors and character-
istics of perpetrators but also to shed light on the
factors that may prevent femicide” (WHO 2012:6).
Nevertheless, to date, the majority of studies of fe-
micide survivors that do exist are quantitative in
nature, and shed lile light on the circumstances
of the murder of a woman because of her gender.
Qualitative studies of femicide are sparse and, by
denition, restricted to small numbers. They are
even rarer among displaced, refugee, or migrant
women, who may make up a disproportionate
share of aempted femicide victims.
This article reviews the use of qualitative methods
in the study of femicide, and argues that a quali-
tative approach can be of great use to researchers
of th to Femicide
Abstract
Keywords
Thise phenomenon. Qualitative studies are usually
small-scale micro studies, which are discovery-ori-
ented, typically yielding detailed descriptions, and
revealing experiential data. Often, they produce hy-
potheses that can later be tested in larger-scale stud-
ies. Clearly, there are dierent kinds of qualitative
studies ranging from the examination of paper or
internet documents, media reports, medical docu-
ments (if released), and court and other transcripts.

Qualitative studies can consist of interviewing, fo-
cus groups, and the collection of narratives. Obser-
vations, the classic mark of ethnographic research,
are necessarily rare in femicide studies. To date, and
up to the publication of this Special Issue, the multi-
ple forms of qualitative research into femicide have
been largely neglected.
In the rst section of this article, I shall review the
state of the art of qualitative research on femicide,
as it stands today. In the second section, I shall men-
tion some of the limitations of the qualitative ap-
proach, and in the third section, I shall discuss its
advantages. I shall conclude the article cautiously
recommending a “mixed-methods” approach.
Qualitative Research on Femicide: The
State of the Art
Most qualitative studies of femicide utilize some
form of interviewing technique, usually focusing
on the survivors of “failed femicides,” but also re-
cording the narratives of “signicant others,” such
as perpetrators, relatives, and neighbors, in “suc-
cessful” femicide cases, where the woman is elim-
inated. A pioneering research with a “semi-qualita-
tive,” face-to-face orientation was the questionnaire
administered by McFarlane and colleagues (1999) to
65 aempted femicide survivors during the years
1994-1998 in 10 U.S. cities, in order to examine the
phenomenon of stalking prior to an aack. The
victims were identied from closed police records
and contacted by mail. Trained doctoral students
ran a questionnaire, including an 18-item stalking
survey; the interview took one hour. However, the
The Advantages of Qualitative Research into Femicide
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.13.3.08
120
results neither contain quotations from the victims,
nor do they convey the quality of the lethal experi-
ence.
Another study of the qualitative aspects of femi-
cide was carried out by Nicolaidis and colleagues
(2003), who conducted in-depth, semi-structured
interviews with 30 women who had survived an
aempted intimate partner femicide in six cities in
the U.S. This was part of a larger, 11-city case-con-
trol study setup to determine the risk factors of ac-

tual and aempted intimate partner femicide. The
female victims described in their own words their
relationship with the partner, and their understand-
ing of the events prior to the aempted femicide
(Nicolaidis et al. 2003:2).
Sheehan and colleagues (2015) interviewed co-vic-
tims, family members, and close friends of femicide
victims. They also examined criminal case les and
media reports. Their study was insightful in that it
showed acute risk factors prior to the femicide, iden-
tied changes in the perpetrators’ behavior and the
perpetrators’ perceived loss of control over the vic-
tim, and described barriers that victims faced when
aempting to gain safety (Sheehan et al. 2015). Mc-
Namara (2008) interviewed friends of victims of an
intimate partner femicide in Australia. Dobash and
colleagues (2004) managed to conduct qualitative
interviews with perpetrators. In a relatively large
qualitative study, Adams (2009) interviewed 31 kill-
ers of women and 16 perpetrators of aempted fem-
icides by means of an in-depth structured interview
that included 30 open-ended, as well as closed ques-
tions about their childhoods. The researchers also
accessed the men’s criminal history records.
Limitations of Qualitative Research
on Femicide
The major limitations of qualitative research are its
time consumption, its non-generalizability, and eth-
ical liabilities.
Time Consumption
In dental public health research, Gill and colleagues
(2008) distinguish between three basic types of
interviews: structured, semi-structured, and un-
structured. In femicide research, I would suggest
that structured interviews are of lile use, since
the researcher is seeking in-depth information.
Semi-structured interviews pose several key issues
that the interviewee can discuss. Unstructured in-
terviews may be particularly useful in asking about
femicide incidents. Nevertheless, Gill and colleagues
(2008) caution:
Unstructured interviews are usually very time-con-
suming (often lasting several hours) and can be dif-
cult to manage, and to participate in, as the lack
of predetermined interview questions provides lile
guidance on what to talk about (which many partic-
ipants nd confusing and unhelpful). Their use is,

therefore, generally only considered where signif-
icant “depth” is required, or where virtually noth-
ing is known about the subject area (or a dierent
perspective of a known subject area is required).
[p. 291]
Open-ended or even semi-structured interviews,
which aempt to capture an experience, take much
longer than simple questionnaires. Much depends
Shalva Weil
upon the interviewee and the context. In the case

of Ethiopian female migrants whom I interviewed
in Israel, most interviews took several hours—one
took nine hours—and had to be preceded by a rit-
ualized coee ceremony in which the interview-
ee gains the condence of the interviewer (Weil
2016b:12).
Not all qualitative research into femicide is, or has
to be, by means of interviewing. Forming a focus
group may take months. Media data, the analysis
of criminal records, and numerous other techniques
are also legitimate qualitative tools, but gaining
access to archives or police records can also take
weeks.
Ethical Liabilities
For both the qualitative and the quantitative re-
searcher, it is essential to receive ethics approval
from universities or ethics commiees from the rel-
evant professional associations in order to conduct
a femicide study. While content analyses of news
releases of femicide cases may not involve extra eth-
ical considerations, interviewing “failed femicide”
survivors or kin, including orphans or people who
might have been present at the time of the murder,
requires special skills and involves special ethical
considerations. Particularly if the interviewer is
male, and the interviewee is a close friend or rela-
tive of the victim, or a survivor of an intimate part-
ner homicide aempt, the interview situation itself
may involve transference issues. It also may be the
rst time that the interviewee has reenacted the le-
thal killing and it may represent for the victim a ca-
thartic experience.
Even good interviewers may be ill-equipped with
the knowledge of how to handle situations in
which the interviewees may cry, shout, or express
deep emotions. McNamara (2008:202) was more
suited than some other researchers to elicit qualita-
tive data, since she is an experienced social worker
and psychotherapist. However, researchers have to

be aware that participants in a study on intimate
partner femicide may be emotionally fragile and
that an interview or involvement in a focus group
may potentially place a participant at mental health
risk.
Non-Generalizability
The sociological sample in qualitative research
into femicide is necessarily small, both because it
may be dicult to identif y the object of study and
because the cases are rare. In my own study of mi-
grant women from Ethiopia in Israel, only three
women were included in my sample. Clearly, one
cannot generalize from three cases to larger pop-
ulations, either of migrant women or of Ethiopian
women. Nevertheless, as I showed (Weil 2016b),
the three cases were independently very similar
and the narratives the women told in open inter-
views, that often took many hours, were remark-
ably similar. Therefore, the issue is more of wheth-
er one can generalize from a small or minute sam-
ple to a population based on inferences. This fol-
lows Ercikan and Roth’s (2006:22) statement with
respect to qualitative studies in education: “gener-
alization is not a feature of mathematization but
a descriptor for the tendency of inferences to go
beyond the context and participants involved in
the research.”
The Advantages of Qualitative Research into Femicide

122
Advantages of Qualitative Research
on Femicide
In the past 30 years or so, both the quality of quali-
tative research and its legitimation have improved, 1
such that it is timely to record here the advantages

of the qualitative study of femicide.
Capturing the Context
Recording narratives by survivors, close kin,
friends, or even perpetrators of femicide aacks
is the most ecient way of capturing the context
of a lethal murder. The context may include the
location of the homicide and identify a domestic
or non-domestic arena. It may include the histo-

ry of the victim and the perpetrator and pinpoint
their relationship. It may relate the months, days,
or even hours leading up to the murder. In Mc-
Namara’s (2008) qualitative descriptive case study
of Australian femicides, friends narrated the im-
pact of the murder on their life-world. Their re-
actions depended upon the relationship of the
victim with her assailant, whether children were
involved, and whether friends and family were
threatened. Surprisingly, both the friends and the
victim were from middle-class backgrounds, who,
like other femicide victims, lacked the power to
protest domestic violence. The study was carried
out by one-o focus groups preceded by long
telephone interviews (McNamara 2008:202); it re-
vealed insights that no quantitative study could
have explored.
1The quality of qualitative research debate is huge with thou-
sands of references. It also embraces QHR (Qualitative Health
Research) (Calderón Gómez 2009).
Describing the Experience

Femicide narratives thus provide understanding into
women’s subjective experiences, the ways they under-
stand events, and the episodes they are trying to orga-
nize in their heads. Sometimes this is coincidental with
a phenomenological approach in which the researcher
identies the essence of human experience about femi-
cide as described by the participant in the study.
Quantitative research cannot capture an experience.
An aempted femicide or watching a femicide may
be the most traumatic episode in someone’s life.
Asking a respondent to recount the narrative of the
dreadful night or day in an unstructured interview
claries for the listener and the reader exactly what
femicide is and what the victim suered. It heightens
awareness for both the narrator and the narrated.
Recounting it provides the narrator with an identity
as a “friend of” or “bystander,” but gives the narrat-
ed more information than numbers alone can pro-
vide. It allows readers, academics, and advocates to
understand the event, and perhaps to nd solutions
or implement guidelines. Describing the experience
of femicide, particularly among migrant female sur-
vivors, may become an increasingly important tool
for policy-makers to understand how femicides oc-

cur, how they are perceived by victims, perpetrators
and society, and how they can be combated.
Identifying the Motives
Statistics on homicide or even disaggregated data
on femicide do not identify the motives for femi-
cide. In order to prevent femicide, it is essential for
practitioners to understand the underlying motives
of the killing. Some countries blur the data by lump-
ing femicide with homicide, while the motivations
for femicides remain unknown. In many cases, the
murder is carried out for one reason only: that the
victim is female. A substantial percentage of femi-
cides are intimate partner murders, where the vic-
tim knew her murderer. In some cases, the femicide
is solely misogynist. In a study of 60 wife-killings
in Ghana reported in a national daily newspaper,
jealousy and suspicion of indelity overwhelmingly
provided the basis for femicides (Adinkrah 2008).
Motivations are never clear-cut. The WHO (2012:2)
report on femicide states that the motive for what
is branded “honor” killing could be a cover-up for
other vices, such as incest, that could only be re-
vealed by a sensitive in-depth interview.
Highlighting the Relationship between
Perpetrator and Victim
Quantitative studies often fail to understand the rela-
tionship between perpetrators and victims, and spe-
cically intimate partner history. Victims may have
turned to the police, social workers, or other author-
ities complaining of severe domestic violence; they
may have been hospitalized in the past as a result of
severe beating or aempted strangulation. Perpetra-
tors may have had previous sentences, or a history of
substance abuse or alcoholism. Either of them may
have been treated for mental disorders. All of these
variables, including socio-economic factors, come to
the surface in qualitative research, but are rarely in-
vestigated once the victim or the perpetrator is sim-
ply a statistic.
Identifying the Risk Factors
In the quest for comparability, quantitative data is
often standardized, thereby removing any hope of
receiving indicators of risk factors. In an aempt
to discover the risk factors in intimate partner ho-

micides, Campbell and colleagues (2003) carried
out a large survey of 220 victims. They discovered
that the major risk factor is prior domestic violence.
However, femicides far outweigh homicides in in-
timate partner homicides and constitute four to
ve times the rate of male victims. Other import-
ant risk factors include alcohol and drug use, the
perpetrator’s access to a gun or a previous threat
with a weapon, the perpetrator’s step-child resid-
ing in the home, estrangement, especially from
a controlling partner, stalking, and more. While
this study represents a leap forward in research
on femicide, the authors are quick to point out that
more information beyond that collected through
police homicide les could be achieved by innova-
tive means. The researchers themselves also inter-
viewed a family member or close friend of the vic-
tim as a “proxy” informant. More research needs
to be carried out to identify paerns which can
help prevent the risk of femicide.
Suggesting Apt Policies
The criticism of qualitative research in general
gave rise to criteria in order to assess qualitative
studies, and a relatively large number of guide-
lines used to evaluate qualitative research in the
social and health sciences. The discrepancies be-
tween dierent guidelines and criteria tended to
reinforce the impression that qualitative research
Shalva Weil The Advantages of Qualitative Research into Femicide

124
was confusing and “unscientic.” However, qual-
itative studies of femicide can produce greater in-
depth understanding of the phenomenon. Once it
is demonstrated by qualitative means that orphans
left behind after their mothers have been murdered
have largely been neglected or “forgoen” by dif-
ferent authorities (Kapardis, Baldry, and Konstan-
tinou [in this issue of QSR]), policies can include
support programs for these children, too.
If policy-makers wish to suggest guidelines once
they understand the motivations for femicide or
what actually happened on the fatal (or near-fatal)
night, they can consult qualitative researchers. It

is for this reason that a Femicide Watch, promot-
ed by the Special Rapporteur on Violence against
Women of the United Nations Oce on Drugs and
Crime, and a European Observatory on Femicide,
2
promoted by COST Action IS1206 on “Femicide

across Europe,” should collect not only quantita-
3
tive but also qualitative data in the form of case

studies or analyzed according to type.
Conclusion
This article clearly demonstrates that qualitative
research can provide insights into femicide, not
readily available by quantitative studies. Howev-
er, qualitative studies have limitations and that is
why many methodologists add information culled
from other qualitative techniques or champion the
“mixed-methods” studies or a holistic approach to
2See: hp://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/press/releases/2016/November/
systematic-collection-and-documentation-of-killing-of-wom-
en-and-girls-needed-to-combat-femicide--say-participants-of-sympo-
sium-in-vien na.html. Retrieved June 24, 20 17.
3See: press release: www.femicide.net. Retrieved June 24, 2017.
a phenomenon. In a brief 2015 article, the method-

ologist Gobo argued that the next challenge is to
move from mixed to a fully “merged methods.”
In femicide studies, some qualitative studies do
not yield sucient information in order to write
up policy guidelines. That is why researchers (e.g.,
Sheehan et al. 2015), upon the completion of inter-
views, supplement the collected data with other
sources of data, such as media releases or ada-
vits by policy ocials. When one cannot gener-
alize from qualitative data, researchers may also
seek the statistical context in order to document
trends.
The choice of qualitative or quantitative methods is
often dictated by the research question. One type
of research is not always conducted at the expense
of another, and a holistic-, mixed-, or merged-meth-
ods approach can often be the ideal. As in the col-
lected volume edited by Ercikan and Roth (2009),
we must get beyond the qualitative and quantita-
tive polarization. This in turn may have its chal-
lenges in that the use of multiple methods may be
both expensive and take extra time because of the
need to collect and analyze dierent types of data.
To date, femicide studies have not received high

priority as funding goals.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank COST (European
Cooperation in Science and Technology) for sup-
porting Action IS1206 “Femicide across Europe,”
which provided the opportunity to network with
other femicide researchers.
Adams, David. 2009. “Predisposing Childhood Factors for Men
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Adinkrah, Mensah. 2008. “Husbands Who Kill Their Wives:
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tional Journal of Oender Therapy and Comparative Criminology
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Calderón Gómez, Carlos. 2009. “Assessing the Quality of
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Citations (10)
References (17)
... Obviously, this is only indirect information because these women can no longer provide direct testimony; therefore,
it is necessary to continue to look further into this issue and to follow a procedure to gain understanding on this
question (McPhedran, Eriksson, Mazerolle, & Johnson, 2018). In this sense, qualitative research, which supplements
the data collected by interviews with other complementary sources, can provide insights into femicide not available
by other methods (Weil, 2017). From the detailed analysis presented in some of these reports, it can be deduced that
those intimate partner femicide victims who had filed a complaint were somewhat younger and had put an end to
their relationship to a greater extent than those who had not, with no observable differences according to nationality.
...
... In this sense it could be noted that, in general, much work in IPVAW has been carried out in order to obtain
instruments so that professionals (psychologists, police, etc.) can assess the risk that women victims of IPVAW are
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Reeves, and Hilterman (2013 or Spinelli (2011)), and the focal point has been surviving women (Weil, 2017). However,
there are far fewer studies focused on murdered women and their experiences or risk perceptions. ...
... Obviously, it is difficult to directly access the experiences of intimate partner femicide victims or to conduct
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What Is Femicide?

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Running head: TITLE OF YOUR PAPER 1

Gladys Stackhouse, Stackhouse Consulting Services

What is Femicide:Femicide and its Origin until Present

less power or fewer resources than their partner.(apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle)

#women #girls Femicide #crisis #hatre CivilRightsviolated #DomesticViolence #Female #fenist

#transgender #male #census #ShanquellaRobison #DianaRussell #USA #borgenproject

#theguardian #Womenempowered #Respectwomen

Gladys Stackhouse, MLS

Stackhouse Consulting Services LLC

Image Credit: Printerval.com

seeing it as a substitute for the gender-neutral word "homicide."

● I first used the term femicide in public when I testified to the

approximately 2,000 women from 40 countries who attended the first

International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, in Brussels, Belgium, in 1976.

Here is a photo of the female-only participants attending this groundbreaking

forms of patriarchal and sexist oppression of females.

Proceedings of the International Tribunal, which was published in 1976. Used

copies of this book are still available on Amazon.com.

eventually raise global awareness of the misogynist character of most murders

crimes against us.

● When I testified about femicide at the International Tribunal, I defined it

implicitly as a hate killing of females perpetrated by males. For example, I

custom of female infanticide in many societies, to the killing of women for

● Just as murders targeting African Americans and/or other minority

must murders targeting females be differentiated by those that are femicides

perpetrator, the murder qualifies as a non-femicidal crime.

● After making minor changes in my definition of femicide over the years,

femicide does not include the increasingly widespread practice of aborting

practice is female feticide.

● Examples of femicide include the stoning to death of females (which I

consider a form of torture-femicide); murders of females for so-called "honor;"

wife-killing by immolation because of too little dowry; deaths as a result of

genital mutilations; female sex slaves, trafficked females, and prostituted

females, murdered by their "owners", traffickers, "johns" and pimps, and

females killed by misogynist strangers, acquaintances, and serial killers.

● There is a continuum of femicides ranging from one-on-one sexist

● My definition of femicide also includes covert forms of the killing of

females, such as when patriarchal governments and religions forbid women's

use of contraception and/or obtaining abortions. Consequently, millions of

And when promiscuous AIDS-infected males continue to feel entitled to have

consider AIDS resulting in the deaths of females to be a form of mass femicide.

femicide instead of some other term like gender-discriminatory-murders. First

of all, gender discrimination is not specific about which gender is a victim of

discriminatory murder. In addition, the prefix "fem" connotes female, and

"icide" connotes killing -- as in terms like homicide, suicide, genocide,

patricide, matricide, infanticide. More importantly, the excitement I felt when

would likely share my response.

● Just as U.S. Professor Catharine MacKinnon's invention of the new

crimes could be formulated, so I believed that inventing a new term for

sexist/misogynist killings of females was necessary for feminists to start

organizing to combat these heretofore neglected lethal forms of violence

of it, that is, the murder of women.

● When I was invited to speak at a seminar on femicide in Juarez, Mexico,

in December 2004, I discovered that well-known Mexican feminist scholar and

Congresswoman Marcela Lagarde who is the shorter woman on my left in this

photo, had been inspired by my co-edited book published in 1992, titled,

chose to translate the term femicide into Spanish as feminicidio.

● I believe that it was largely thanks to Lagarde's determined efforts that

the terms femicide and feminicidio -- which is more often shortened to

Latin American countries. Adoption of this term typically motivated feminists

in these countries to create anti-femicide organizations to try to combat these

lethal misogynist crimes. Thanks to the activism of many of these feminists,

eight countries in Latin America have succeeded in pressuring their patriarchal