What is OAITH’s Definition of Femicide?
Evolving definitions of femicide attempt to include and represent the diversity of gender identities, relationships between victims and perpetrators, and motives for the killings. Our reports includes only those femicides where men have been charged with a criminal offence or deemed responsible (murder-suicide) and where there is a media report. Relationships include a current or former husband or boyfriend, a brother, son or a nephew, a male coworker, neighbour, friend or acquaintance, or another man closely known to them. Where the relationship between the victim and perpetrator is not known (or not released), but media reports indicate that a woman was killed as a result of a violent gendered crime, that woman’s name will be included on the list.
Why Do We Use Media Reports?
Our reporting relies on media sources and other publicly available sources. This means the reports are not exhaustive and can include errors or omissions. It represents only a snapshot in time of public reports of femicides for the previous year (annual report) or previous month (monthly report) at the time the reports are published. The reports are not updated to reflect criminal justice outcomes after the reports have been published.
Who Coined the Term Femicide?
Femicide as a term was coined in 1976 by Diana Russell (Corradi et al. 2016, 976). It was promoted as an alternative to the gender-neutral term homicide to highlight the killing of women primarily for the reason of being women (Dayan & Bitton, 2022, 6). Radford and Russell emphasized that “… homicide deletes from the sociological eye that special, gender-based evidence of woman killing, which is different from the murder of men” (Corradi et al. 2016, 977). They brought to light the differential fact of women’s violent death and reframed it as a special social and political problem (Corradi et al. 2016, 977). The term “… ‘femicide’ itself emerged as a way to register the importance of gender and sex in the patterns of homicide across the globe (Walklate et al. 2020, 7). As the gender-related killing of women, the categorization of femicide could be argued to rely more so on the motive of the killer than the relationship between the victim and the offender. “However, the killing of women by their male partners is typically assumed to be a gendered killing as the relationship, and the power and control dynamics within it, is central to the killing (see, for example, Pierobom de Avila 2018)” (Walklate et al. 2020, 7). “It is the major cause of unnatural death of women globally and the seventh leading cause of premature death for women globally” (Dayan & Bitton, 2022, 3).
Corradi, C., Marcuello-Servos, C., Boira, S., & Weil, S. (2016). Theories of femicide
and their significance for social research. Current Sociology, 64(7), 967–974.
Dayan, H., & Bitton, Y. (2022). Femicide, Criminology and the Law. Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003333272
Walklate, S., Fitz-Gibbon, K., McCulloch, J., & Maher, J. (2020). Towards a Global Femicide Index: Counting the Costs (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781138393134