Reexamining Femicide: Breaking the Silence and Crossing “Scientific” Borders

Abstract

Femicide is cloaked in silence and has rarely been investigated. This article aims to break the silence by reexamining the definition of the crime. The current definition which deals only with the actual killing of the victim is quite narrow indicating that the phenomenon is still misunderstood. I will suggest how this definition can be expanded contextually grounded and improved. The current definition adequately describes the crime of killing a woman but it fails to cover the arduous process leading up to her death. In this context death needs redefining. Death in femicide is currently defined medicolegally as the inability to breathe. In the new definition that I propose death has already occurred by the time a female is put on "death row"--that is when she is effectively sentenced to death by murder and lives under the continual threat of being killed. Even at this point I consider her a victim of femicide and I thus redefine death as the inability to live. Although victims of femicide are technically alive they are in a mode of life that they never wanted and completely reject a mode that is perhaps best described as death-in-life. (excerpt)