Working Groups

…, because they are women. Russell, a sociologist and feminist from South Africa, first introduced the term ‘femicide’ to describe the gender-specific killing of women in 1976 at the International Tribunal on Violence Against Women in Brussels as a feminist battle cry. The term spread throughout the feminist movement and research and was repeatedly redefined in the following years by Russell herself and other feminists, including as “the killing of women by men because they are women.”

The term was also taken up by the feminist movement in Latin America. There, it was the Mexican feminist and anthropologist Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos who coined the term ‘feminicide’ (feminicidio). Since the term “femicide” (femicidio) in Spanish corresponds to that of homicide (homicidio) and thus refers to the “murder of a woman” without referring to the gender-specific aspect of the killing, Lagarde y de los Ríos added the syllable “ni” to it. In Mexico, where there is a massive lack of both prevention and prosecution of feminicide, her term aims to emphasize the role and responsibility of the state in feminicide. For Lagarde y de los Ríos, feminicide is a state crime.

Since Germany also lacks protective structures, making it difficult for women to escape violent relationships and exposing them to a risk of death, we also use the term feminicide. The implementation of the Istanbul Convention, which Germany has ratified, is deficient (GREVIO 2022), state protection measures for women affected by violence are not only inadequate and underfunded, but are also not always sufficiently implemented, and trans*, inter-, and non-binary persons are excluded from the new (and fundamentally welcome) Violence Assistance Act.

Femicide, i.e. all killings and forms of death of women[1], girls and female-identified persons, is a result of patriarchal or hierarchical gender relations that devalue women, female-identified persons and female-connoted characteristics.

Femicide is characterised by the fact that women, girls and female-identified persons are (mostly) killed by men on the basis of patriarchal and misogynistic notions of entitlement, ownership and domination. This often involves punishment: the perpetrator judges certain behavior on the part of the victim—such as autonomous decisions about their own lifestyle—as illegitimate and punishes it by killing them. Examples include an (intentional) separation from the perpetrator, failure to meet the expectations of the future perpetrator, or the victim’s sexual orientation.

By including killings of trans* people (especially trans* women) and people who do not define themselves as female but are “read” as such under the term feminicide, we broaden the understanding of the gender of victims of feminicide. The reason for this is that they are affected by misogyny or trans* misogyny, albeit in different ways. For example, we know from the trans murder monitor that 94% of trans* people murdered worldwide are female.

[1] By this we mean trans and cis women.