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. What is Femicide
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.
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.” APA