Femicide or feminicide is a hate crime which is broadly defined as "the intentional killing of women or girls because they are female", with definitions varying based on cultural context. In 1976, the feminist author Diana E. H. Russell first defined the term as "the killing of females by males because they are female." A spouse or partner is responsible in almost 40% of homicides involving a female victim. Additionally, femicide may be underreported. Femicide often includes domestic violence and forced or sex-selective abortions.
In some Latin American countries the term femicide is used in reference to the violent killings of women and girls which are frequently perpetrated by gang members in order to stoke fear and compliance among civilians.
Androcide refers to the violence or killing of men. Gendercide may refer to gender specific violence more generally.
History
Development of the term
The term femicide was first used in England in 1801 to signify "the killing of a woman". In 1848, the term was published in Wharton's Law Lexicon. The term stems from the Latin femina, meaning "female" and -cide from the Latin "caedere" meaning "to kill".
The current usage emerged with the 1970s feminist movements, which aimed to raise female class consciousness and resistance against gender oppression. The term has been used to call attention to violence against women. American author Carol Orlock is widely credited with initiating this usage of the term in her unpublished anthology on femicide.
Diana Russell publicized the term at the Crimes Against Women Tribunal in 1976 at the first International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in Belgium. She wrote: "We must realize that a lot of homicide is femicide. We must recognize the sexual politics of murder. From the burning of witches in the past, to the more recent widespread custom of female infanticide in many societies, to the killing of women for 'honor,' we realize that femicide has been going on a long time. But since it involves mere females, there was no name for it until Carol Orlock invented the word 'femicide. Femicide remains understudied in scientific literature.
Femicide may also be 'intimate.' Intimate femicide can be identified as such by using "severity of violence, such as access to and threats with firearms, forced sex, threats to kill, and strangulation" to determine whether a case can be considered an act of femicide or not. The definition of femicide also relies on "inequalities in gender 'in terms of education, economic level, and employment'".
Contemporary definition by feminists
Feminist author Diana Russell narrows the definition of femicide to "the killing of females by males because they are female". Russell emphasizes that males commit femicide with sexist motives. She replaces "woman" with "female" to include girls and infants. Russell believes her definition of femicide applies to all forms of sexist killing, whether motivated by misogyny (the hatred of females), a sense of superiority over females, sexual pleasure, or the assumption of ownership over women.
Russell says: "Femicide is on the extreme end of a continuum of antifemale terror that includes a wide variety of verbal and physical abuse, such as rape, torture, sexual slavery (particularly in prostitution), incestuous and extrafamilial child sexual abuse, physical and emotional battery, sexual harassment (on the phone, in the streets, at the office, and in the classroom), genital mutilation (clitoridectomies, excision, infibulations), unnecessary gynecological operations (gratuitous hysterectomies), forced heterosexuality, forced sterilization, forced motherhood (by criminalizing contraception and abortion), psychosurgery, denial of food to women in some cultures, cosmetic surgery, and other mutilations in the name of beautification. Whenever these forms of terrorism result in death, they become femicides."
She includes covert killings of women as well, such as the mass murder of female babies or sex selective abortions due to male preference in cultures such as India and China, as well as deaths related to the failure of social institutions, such as the criminalization of abortion or the prevalence of female genital mutilation.
Other definitions
Diana Russell's definition is not accepted by all scholars. Jacquelyn Campbell and Carol Runyan use "femicide" to reference "all killings of women, regardless of motive or perpetrator status" They argue that motive cannot always be determined, and so must be removed from the qualification for femicide to gather data.