Definition and Scope of the Problem
Femicide is the systematic killing of women. The term originated to describe targeted and serial murders related to gender roles, such as honor killings and attacks on single female migrant workers in Mexico's border regions. The term femicide has become dominant among social movements, international organizations, and progressive institutions worldwide because it is a variant of homicide but consciously echoes the identity-based eradication of genocide ā as we shall see documented below, femicide is a type of hate crime associated with social trends and policies of a āwar on womenā ā even when perpetrators express interpersonal motives (Brysk, 2018). Femicide also sometimes includes disabling but non-fatal assault, especially chronic battering of women within households. Although femicide encompasses a range of public and private gendered killing and assault, it is associated with and in the majority of cases composed of intimate partner violence.
Intimate partner violence is not just a social pathology ā it is a symptom of patriarchal abuse that crosses every culture, regime, and level of development, although its forms and challenges differ. While individual pathologies and cultural norms facilitate and filter gender violence, widespread and systematic femicide is a collective social practice with sociological roots at the community, national, and even global levels. As we will see tracing social patterns below, in every society, domestic violence functions as a systematic tactic of terror to suppress women's rising challenges to gender inequity within households and in the public sphere ā even though it is usually perpetrated by non-state actors at the micro level For example, World Bank focus groups in dozens of countries show that women's rising incomes often lead to backlash by men threatened in traditional gender roles [Munoz Boudet et al., 2013]. Women may be punished by intimate partners for trying to exercise sexual and reproductive self-determination such as use of contraception, and case studies show frequent increases in assault precisely when women's economic mobility and community status are rising but not yet firmly established. All these challenges are strongly associated with societies in economic crisis, political conflict, and contested modernization that threaten masculine livelihoods, family roles, and local control ā so the incidence and impunity of intimate partner violence do peak in certain regions and social conditions. Thus, social movement mobilization against femicide is not just a plea for protection, but rather a response to the larger inequities and disempowerment of patriarchal societies, and a quest for equal citizenship and empowerment for those affected by pervasive violence.
Latin American activists often use the term āfeminicideā which they distinguish from the broader range of gender-based killing by the role of the state in both perpetrating and neglecting violence against its female citizens, and we will draw from this understanding in our analysis. According to the Guatemala Human Rights Commission:
Feminicide is a political term. It encompasses more than femicide because it holds responsible not only the male perpetrators but also the state and judicial structures that normalize misogyny. Feminicide connotes not only the murder of women by men because they are women but also indicates state responsibility for these murders whether through the commission of the actual killing, toleration of the perpetratorsā acts of violence, or omission of state responsibility to ensure the safety of its female citizens. (Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA, 2016)
The overall level and incidence of the assault and murder of women worldwide is stunning. A World Health Organization (WHO) study based on data from 141 studies in 81 countries estimates that, in 2010, 30% of women over 15 years had experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner. The highest region of prevalence is Central Africa at approximately 65% (WHO et al., 2013). Country data that complements the global trend and adds local context is also alarming. A Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and UNPF āViolence Against Women Survey 2011ā of 12,600 women shows that 87% have been abused by their husbands, half severely enough that they go to the hospital, one-third report being raped, and the problem has ānot yet been brought under lawā (Islam, 2014: 63). Unstable regimes in the Americas are especially prone to domestic violence, with estimates of 41.2% in Honduras in 2005 (cited in Guedes et al., 2016).
The sociological linkages of household violence are clear. Surveying the global pattern, the Geneva Small Arms Survey (Nowak, 2012) finds that more than half of the hotspots of fatal femicide are in the Americas ā the world's most economically and socially unequal region but not the poorest or most traditional ā and that the killing of women is associated with the highest overall levels of homicide and crime. Higher crime countries have more violent young men, more household stress and instability, and more guns that turn domestic violence lethal. Extrapolating from demographic data to map femicide in areas where police reports are known to undercount, the study finds disproportionate female deaths in Eastern Europe and Russia, with the highest in El Salvador (12/100,000), Jamaica (10.9), Guatemala (9.7), and South Africa (9.6). High levels of femicide are more specifically related to a high proportion of firearm deaths as one-third of femicides are committed with firearms worldwide. Over and above this level, half of the murders of women use firearms in the hotspots of Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras ā and the United States (Nowak, 2012).
Femicide has tremendous social costs for victims and survivors, families and communities, and even national development and global wellbeing. A worldwide estimate of the costs of domestic violence is over $4 trillion, comprising over 5% of global GDP (Hoeffler and Fearon, 2014). Intimate partner violence is linked worldwide to gross injury, unplanned pregnancy, maternal mortality, sexually transmitted disease, employment absenteeism, depression, and suicide ā as well as murder. A WHO study (Garcia-Moreno et al., 2006) estimates that violence against women worldwide deprives women aged 15ā44 years of 5ā20% of their healthy and productive years, while a World Bank estimate (Duvvury et al., 2013) suggests gender violence causes more deaths than cancer and more illness than malaria and accidents combined for this age cohort. A review of data from the large and distinct countries of India, China, Pakistan, and Ethiopia shows that battering of pregnant women affects as many as one-quarter of mothers, and is systematically associated with low birth weight and maternal health problems. Attacks on pregnant women are associated with lower education, unplanned pregnancy, and alcohol use (Nasir and Hyder, 2003; Boyce, 2017).
Though women of all races, ethnic groups, and economic backgrounds experience intimate partner violence, women in certain demographic groups experience intimate partner violence more often and have less access to services. Groups who are historically persecuted or marginalized have higher levels of intimate partner violence. For example, indigenous women in the United States, Australia, and Canada are all more likely than the average national population to experience intimate partner violence (Burnette, 2015). According to the 2016 report on indigenous communities in Australia (Productivity Commission, Australian Government, 2016), aboriginal women are 32 times more likely than the non-indigenous population to be hospitalized due to intimate partner violence. Indigenous women on average also have less access to economic resources, which makes them more likely to experience intimate partner violence and less likely to leave an abusive partner (ibid.). The way women experience violence is intersectional, not only intrinsically tied to gender but also to race, class, disability, age, and other social categories (Walby et al., 2012).
