Female homicides, laws, and women's empowerment: An early warning of retaliation effect

Abstract

This paper studies whether the toughening of the laws to regulate violence against women can adversely generate a retaliation effect that temporary increases female homicides. Using a panel of 2167 solved female homicides in Ecuador from 2010 to 2020, I first analyze the characteristics and trends of female gender-violence victims and I compare them with the evolution of other-violence victims. Second, I analyze the effects of a reform of the penal code introduced in 2014 that modified the consideration of gender violence and increased the penalty for femicides. I exploit the fact that women empowerment and the enforcement of the law was not homogeneous across municipalities to test whether these policies were associated with a backlash effect that temporarily increased female homicide rates. My analysis finds an increment in the gender-violence rates in municipalities that enforced the introduction of the new femicide penalty type, and in municipalities exhibiting an increased level of women empowerment. Specifically, I obtain that in municipalities that introduced the new femicide type and with an increased level of women empowerment, there was an increase of gender-violence rates of 1.49 points, relative to those that experienced gender-violence but not enforced the new femicide type. These results suggest evidence for an early formation of the retaliation effect hypothesis that consider that gender equality policies and legislation reforms to toughening the penalties for femicides can generate (at least temporarily) an increase of gender violence.