Femicide

Femicide
Femicide is defined as the killing of a woman, female homicide, or the murder of a person based on the fact that she is female, it serves as a form of domination, power and control formen. A femicide is differentiated from a murder when the gender is material to the perpetrator. This means that the murderer killed the woman for the fact that she is a woman.
Femicide is a feministterm redefined by Diana Russel, a known radical feminist writer and activist, to refer to misogynist murders. A misogynist is a person who hates, dislikes, mistrusts or mistreats women.
But femicideencompasses more than the actual murder, for it holds responsible not only the male killer but also the state and judicial structure that normalize this type of crimes. The state has majorresponsibility in these crimes because law enforcement mostly fails or refuses to undertake investigations; there is toleration to this violence and often omission to ensure safety of female citizens.
“Woman areexpendable and can be routinely used, abused and discarded”

Femicides include:
• Mutilation murder
• Rape murder,
• Wife killing,
• Immolation of widows in India (this means when a woman’shusband dies she is sacrificed)
• Honor crimes in Latin and Middle Eastern countries. Honor crimes are the murder of a woman by her relatives when she is believed to have shamed her family byassociating with an unrelated male.
• When females are permitted to die because of sexist attitudes, for example: many girls die of starvation because boys are more valued than girls.
• Sex-selectiveinfanticide, when baby girls are killed because of the preference to male offspring.
The brutality of the murders and the impunity of the perpetrators are two characteristic features of femicide.This term was made popular and adopted by many feminists around the world to refer to the massive numbers of these crimes in Juarez Mexico. These victims were raped, tortured and mutilated. Mexico and...