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Feminicide (murders of women): definition, types and causes

Feminicide (murders of women): definition, types and causes

March 28, 2024

Inequality and gender violence are recurrent in the history of societies. With the advance of feminist movements these issues have gained a much greater visibility than they had a few decades ago in much of the world.

In this article we will define the different types of femicide , the most extreme consequence of gender violence, and we will analyze its causes from a psychosocial perspective.

  • Related article: "The causes and effects of gender violence"

What is femicide?

The term "feminicide" refers to a specific type of homicide in which a man murders a woman, girl or girl because she is female. Unlike other types of murder, femicides often occur at home as a consequence of gender violence . They are also categorized within hate crimes, given that they occur in a context in which the feminine has been stigmatized for years.


The word "femicide" is in dispute; There are authors who claim that it includes any murder whose victim is a woman, regardless of the gender of the person who committed it or what their motivations are.

Femicide is the most extreme manifestation of abuse and violence from men to women. It occurs as a consequence of any type of gender violence, such as physical aggression, rape, forced maternity or genital mutilation.

  • Related article: "The 7 types of gender violence (and characteristics)"

Data and statistics

It is estimated that each year about 66 thousand femicides are perpetrated in the world . However, it must be borne in mind that the number of cases of gender violence tends to be underestimated and that many countries do not differentiate between homicides and femicides.


While 80% of murder victims are men, when we specifically talk about homicide or intimate homicide, the percentage of men drops to one third. This is one of the factors that explains why feminicide it needs to be distinguished from the rest of the murders .

The countries with the highest feminicide rates are El Salvador, Jamaica, Guatemala, South Africa and Russia. More than half of the 25 countries with the highest rate of femicides are in America; In addition to those mentioned, the list includes Honduras, Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil or the Dominican Republic.

Motivations of the murderer

The motivation for the crime is one of the main peculiarities of feminicide in relation to other types of homicide.

According to Diana Russell, who is attributed the popularization of the word "feminicide" ("femicide" in English "), some of the main motivations for these murders They are anger, hatred, jealousy and the pursuit of pleasure.


Other variables that Russell considers relevant are misogyny, the sense of gender superiority and the conception of women as a possession . These variables are transmitted culturally and favor the violence of men towards women.

  • Maybe you're interested: "Patriarchy: 7 keys to understanding cultural machismo"

Types of femicide

Diana Russell and other authors have proposed different types of feminicide that differ especially in the relationship between the victim and the murderer and in the motivation for the crime .

1. Intimate and familiar

While family femicides are committed by males within your close or extended family , the concept "intimate feminicide" is often used to talk about the murder of the couple or the former partner, regardless of the legal relationship between the two people.

Intimate feminicide is related to the consumption of alcohol and other substances and accounts for 35% of all murders of women (not only those committed by men), which makes it the most frequent of all types of femicide.

Murder for honor is a special type of feminicide that is committed against women who are said to have dishonored the family. Among the most common reasons for "dishonor" include being a victim of rape and being accused of adultery.

Likewise in India, Iran, Pakistan and Bangladesh murders are perpetrated by dowry. After the marriage, the husband's family harasses and tortures the wife as a method of extortion to obtain a greater dowry. In these cases the woman can be pushed to suicide or killed, often burned alive when her family does not agree to pay.

2. Lesbicide

It is not difficult to find historical periods in which the murder of women as punishment for being homosexual It was legal.For example, in France in the thirteenth century a law was passed according to which women had to have their limbs amputated the first two times they had sex with women, while the third should be burned.

A similar crime and frequently linked to lesbicide is the corrective violation ; consisting of sexually abusing a homosexual woman with the aim of making her behave as if she were heterosexual or simply as punishment. It is a way of trying to impose a supposed "natural order" through violence and power.

Today, homosexuality, in both women and men, continues to be condemned by most religions and is illegal in countries such as Iran, Libya, India, Pakistan, Morocco and Nigeria. These conditions favor violence against homosexual people , since they legitimize it from the institutions.

3. Racial femicide

In the racial feminicides the gender component adds to an ethnic factor In these cases the murderer kills the victim both for being a woman and for having cultural and physical features different from theirs. It is a mixture of elements that generate hate in a totally irrational way.

In this type of murder, racism not only influences the commission of the crime, but also the fact that the fact that the victim is of an ethnically less valued group can interfere in the resolution of the case, in the legal process and in the image that the media gives of the deceased.

4. Feminicide in series

This type of femicide usually occurs when a male kills women repeatedly to get sexual pleasure sadistic . In general, these murders are caused by trauma or suffocation.

Victims of serial feminicides, like other non-intimate femicides, are more often women who work as waitresses or prostitutes.

Sometimes serial femicide is attributed to pornography, especially that which eroticizes violence. From a gender perspective, this may be due to the normalization of the violence that occurs in these pieces of fiction. However, this relationship has not been proven at the moment.

Psychological explanations of gender violence

Although from different theoretical orientations gender violence and feminicide could be explained in very different ways, we will focus on two examples: symbolic interactionism and evolutionary psychology.

Symbolic interactionism and patriarchy

Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical current of sociology, social psychology and anthropology that proposes that people we build together symbols that give meaning to reality in its different aspects, guiding our behavior in relation to these.

From this orientation feminicide could be explained as a consequence of the differences in the roles granted to each gender by many societies: it is understood that the public sphere must be controlled by men and women are relegated to reproduction and home care.

In many occasions this social structure is called "patriarchy" , that is sustained in written laws and / or implicit norms that reinforce and condition differentiated behavior patterns based on the biological sex.

According to the sociologist Sylvia Walby patriarchal structures are manifested in the greater likelihood that women have to receive abuse, to take care of home and children, to be represented with little fidelity in the media and popular culture, to charge less than Men for the same job and for their sexuality to be seen negatively. They also tend to be underrepresented in the areas of power and decision making.

The conception of women as inferior to men makes the social meaning of these murders less negative in more patriarchal environments. From this it could be deduced that there is a greater probability of gender violence occurring and therefore femicide if the law and culture do not penalize them.

Fruit of a historical process?

The concept of patriarchy serves to introduce a very relevant dimension to the conception of the feminicide problem. Makes it not an isolated problem reducible simply to the violent tendencies of some individuals, but it has to do with the situation of submission of the female gender and the male dominance.

A) Yes, this inherited vulnerability and of economic, political and social causes is concretized in the deaths of homeless people, who do not see their rights protected by the society in which they live, since this protects privileges that have nothing to do with the way of life of most of the women. As a result, femicide should be analyzed from the perspective of gender perspective.

Evolutionist and biologist perspectives

In many occasions the differences in gender roles are attributed to the biology of men and women. In particular, it is often mentioned that men have higher levels of testosterone , a sexual hormone that influences aggressiveness, dominance and risk taking.

It has also been proposed that the fact that women are the ones who become pregnant historically influenced the development of societies since the beginning of humanity, especially after the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle.

From these perspectives the existing biological differences between genders tend to be highly valued, to the detriment of sociocultural influences, such as religion.

Bibliographic references:

  • Alvazzi del Frate, A. (2011). When the Victim Is a Woman. In Geneva Declaration Secretariat, 113 - 144.
  • United Nations (2015). The world's women 2015. Trends and statistics. New York: United Nations. Retrieved from: //unstats.un.org/unsd/gender/downloads/WorldsWomen2015_report.pdf
  • World Health Organization (2012). Understanding and addressing violence against women. Geneva: World Health Organization.
  • Radford, J. & Russell, D. E. H (1992). Femicide: The politics of woman killing. New York: Twayne.
  • Russell, D. E. H. & Harmes, R. A. (2001). Femicide in global perspective. New York: Teachers College Press.
  • Sagot, M. (2008). Strategies to confront violence against women: feminist reflections from Latin America. Athenea Digital, 14: 215-228.
  • Small Arms Survey (2012). Femicide: A global problem.
  • Walby, S. (1997). Theorizing Patriarchy. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Documenting Mexico's Most Violent Crimes (Part 1/3) (March 2024).


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