Think Change

What will it take to end femicide?

• ODI

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 35:30

Femicide – the intentional killing of women and girls with a gender-related motivation – affects every society around the world.

According to UN Women, nearly 89,000 women and girls were killed intentionally in 2022 – the highest number recorded in the past 20 years. And over half of all female homicides were committed by family members or intimate partners.

This episode puts a spotlight on this global atrocity. Experts from Italy, Kenya and Mexico share insights on how femicide is impacting their countries. We examine its root causes, how women’s movements are countering it, and what further action is urgently needed to bring about truly lasting change.

While comprehensive legislation is a critical starting point, we hear why challenging gender norms which make misogyny so deeply entrenched in society is fundamental if we are to curb femicide and see transformational change.

Speakers

  • Sara Pantuliano (host), Chief Executive, ODI
  • Dinah Musindarwezo, Co-CEO, Womankind Worldwide
  • Diana Jiménez Thomas Rodriguez, Senior Research Officer, ODI
  • Nicoletta Mandolini, Researcher, CECS, Universidade do Minho, Portugal


Related resources

Welcome to Think Change. I'm Sara Pantuliano. Today, I want to focus on an issue that is really close to my heart. In my home country of Italy, a young woman named Giulia Cecchettin was recently murdered at the hands of her ex-boyfriend.

Giulia's brutal death was just the latest high-profile case in what is a very long history of men's violence against women that saturates our society.

This crime has a name. It's called femicide. And of course, Italy is not alone. This aberration affects every society around the world.

We've seen recent cases in Kenya, in Mexico, that led feminist movements to take the streets and really call for introduction of new policies and measures to try and stem the violence.

But what will it take to truly bring about lasting change? I've brought in three experts who work on these issues to explore this question today.

I'm really delighted to introduce Dinah Musindarwezo. Dinah is the co-CEO of Womankind Worldwide, Nicoletta Mandolini, researcher at Universidade do Minho, Portugal, and our very own Diana Jiménez Thomas Rodriguez, senior research officer at ODI.

Diana, let's start by setting out the scale of the problem. What are some of the recent trends you've seen around the world? And is femicide on the rise, or are we just becoming more aware about it?

It's a bit tricky to say. On one hand, it does seem to be on the rise. According to UN Women, the number of women and girls killed intentionally in 2022 was 89,000 women worldwide.

And in 2021, this was 81,000. So it's clearly sort of increasing. And just to say, the number of 2022 is the highest recorded in the past 20 years.

However, this figure and that's why the reason I said that it's a bit complicated, this figure is not necessarily a figure for femicide, which is the intentional killing of women and girls because of gender related factors.

And if we complicate this a little bit more, this, this number obviously only accounts for cases that have been reported and filed.

And I say this because in Mexico, 55% of disappearances, which account now to over a 110,000, so 55% of these are girls and young women between the ages of 10 and 19.

And this approximately, 61,000 women that we don't know where they are and what has happened to them.

And many of these are probably femicides or have been killed, murdered, but they are filed as ‘disappeared’, not as ‘murdered’. And so They're staggering figures. Yeah. They are.

And so this is only to put this caveat in it that this is obviously only about the cases that we know, and there may be many more filed under different categories, one of disappearances, for example, that make this figure much more sort of worrying.

This journalist in Mexico, Lydia Carrion, says that in Mexico, there is, sort of, to talk about femicide is this black hole because we don't have enough data.

And I think we can say this more generally, sort of globally, not only about Mexico. I think it's a figure that applies here as well. We just don't know enough.

You all come from countries where this is currently a very live issue. Can you tell us about some of the flashpoints that have renewed national attention on femicide in recent months, and how have people responded to these cases?

Dina, why don't you start? 

Yeah. You you must have heard on news that here where I'm based in Nairobi, Kenya, but also Kenya widely as a as national wide.

There have been reported increased reported cases of femicide. And so beginning of this year, we saw increased cases being reported within, like, the first two weeks of the year.

And these are mainly young women that are being killed, some of them, or, when they have gone on dates with men, but also a previous I've also seen cases of women that have been killed, in their homes mainly by, you know, their Internet partners. 

And and so, yeah, I think what you're talking about is true. So here, the, the only one you talked about, the fact that oftentimes these cases are not are not reported, data is not adequate.

It's also something that we are seeing here that, actually, the government does not, the government of Kenya does not have data that records cases of femicide.

So we cannot even know for sure how many cases of femicide that we're talking about, but we know that the numbers are definitely increasing, and is, and we also know that feminist movements are mobilising to, to tackle and address cases of femicide as part of the work that feminist movements are doing in addressing gender based violence and violence against women.

Nicoletta. Yes.

In Italy, I would say that femicide has been a popular topic since 2012, which is the year that I have defined as the year of mainstreaming of femicide discourse, of feminist discourse on femicide, which is to say, like, is the year basically when, feminist activists managed to, make femicide kind of famous or infamous among journalists. 

So journalists started to use the word, the expression, in a kind of widespread way, in order to identify killings of women.

So it's a topic that, is generally treated by Italian media and, in the in the context of public discourse, to the extent that even a kid would know in Italy what femicide is.

So this is related to the kind of work that feminist movements made before 2012 and that in 2012 started giving its fruits, let's say.

Of course, there are moments, and I would say that this one is one of those, the present one, the current one, in which femicide becomes even more present in the public discourse.

In media and communication studies we would say that this is a discursive event.

And a discursive event happens when there are atrocious cases. And atrocious cases was definitely one of those, with those cases that kind of, brought attention back, to the issue.

It is not a case that generally, and this is one of the pitfalls, I believe, of Italian discourse on femicide, public mainstream discourse on femicide, that these atrocious high profile cases are generally cases that involve young Italian, cisgender, white, and, middle class women.

While we know full well that femicide in Italy, that's where, abounds, unfortunately, as a crime among, for example, migrant sex workers were highly invisible when we talk about media coverage of this crime.

You're raising some really important points, which I would follow-up on. But, Diana, you also obviously have had recent flashpoints in Mexico. 

Yes. So in Mexico, femicide has really been, sort of on the public agenda since the nineties with the horrendous wave of killings that happened in Ciudad Juarez.

And since then, I think they've picked up again in sort of 2010s in the context of increasing generalised violence in the country because of organised crime.

And since then, every year, there are a handful of cases that make it to the media, first of all.  I completely agree with Nicoletta that there is a bias in the cases that spark outrage.

It is often young, middle-class women who were studying, who were on their way to work and to school. This kind of virtuosity of them is highlighted in the media, and that's partly what sparked the outrage.

I think we have a lot to question ourselves of why we don't become as outraged in the femicide of sex workers who are 18 times more likely to be killed.

To come back, every year we have a handful of cases. The second half of 2022, there was that of Milagros Moncerat who was stabbed close to her house, and the murder was caught on a CCTV camera.

So that caused a lot of sort of media attention and outrage. There was that of Sylvia Fernanda Villalobos, a university student who was shot outside of a football field in Chihuahua.

That of Montserrat Juarez, who was killed in her flat in Mexico City by her partner and family member. That of Ana Maria Serrano, who was murdered in her house by her ex-boyfriend.

And in 2022, I can tell you another list of names and before that, another list. So, sadly, there's always a handful of cases that make it to the media and, for some reason or another, spark the debate again, spark outrage.

And the feminist movement in Mexico is stronger than ever. This is at the forefront, and protests in the streets are you know, this is one of the pressing issues and they do mobilise against it.

But there's also so much resistance on the part of the Mexican state and authorities to take it seriously and to do something about it.

Let's explore these issues of the movements. You know, the movements are strong in Kenya and Italy, in in Mexico. But, Dinah, I'll ask you first. What role can civil society really play in fighting femicide? 

Yeah. Here in Kenya, definitely, I've seen the role of civil society organisations, especially feminist movements, women's organizations, young feminist movements and LGBTQ movements, sex workers' movements, all of them really coming together, one, to advocate for registration against gender based violence, because we know that femicide is a form of gender based violence and against women and girls, but also apart from advocacy to pass laws and policies, they are advocating to end impunity, to make sure that perpetrators are held accountable, but also to make sure that, survivors, survivors and the victims of gender based violence are centered in every action that are, that are taking place.

And when these things continue to happen even when there are progressive laws in place, which is the case in Kenya, because in Kenya we have really good policies and laws on paper.

Internationally, we have also Kenyan government assigned on to international laws and conventions such as the Convention on Elimination of Violence Against Women.

But when it comes to implementation and making sure, actually, those policies and laws protect lives of women, we are seeing little being done.

And so the feminist movement has really been at the forefront in holding also government accountable, and other duty bearers such as, you know, such as the police, the justice system in terms of courts of law to really make sure that the issues of femicide, the issues of gender based violence are taken really, really seriously.

There's still a gap, but the feminist movement have shown that they they remain brave. They remain courageous. They they are the one that are mobilising, communities and societies and media to go on the street and protest and protest femicide cases. And we were in in the 1,000 just beginning of this year.

On 27th January, we went on the street to demonstrate and to march against femicide cases that are rising in Kenya. So apart from mobilising, they are also, you know, they are also shaping the narrative, raising awareness.

Because, also, something that really, not shocking but disappointing was the fact that amidst women dying in the in the hands of men, the narrative then turned into victim blaming. You know?

Why did this go? Because, many of the cases, that happened that took place in January this year were of women that went on dates with men, or they were invited in, in apartments with men, and then they were killed.

And so the victim blaming turned into, you know, discussions of where did she go on a date when she didn't know him, why did she ask for money, even when there is no evidence that she was going after the man's money.

And so the feminist movement at the forefront to also change those narratives to stop, and speak against the victim blaming and actually make it very clear that violence is not acceptable.

There's no reason for it. There's no justification no matter no matter what. And really locating femicide to the fact that it's because of patriarchal system that must be dismantled. It's because of male dominance.

It's because of violence. It's because of discrimination against women that femicide is happening, and there is no actors that are at the forefront of fighting those systems of oppression than feminist movements.

And so the struggle continues, but I have seen feminist movement, especially young feminist, LGBTQ, sex workers, really being at the forefront of this fight against femicide.

Thanks, Dinah. This really refers to what we were saying, you know, before about the atrocity of the victims.

That's where, you know, the outrage is sparked because otherwise it's almost accepted. We look for faults in the victim rather than looking at the cultural context in which this takes place.

And, Nicoletta, you've done a lot of work on, you know, exploring cultural context and media, you know, popular culture in the way in which they enable femicide or an enabling environment, you know, for violence both in Italy and other parts of the world.

Can you tell us more about how this really becomes the fertile ground for femicide? 

Yes. I think that, in order to understand what is the role that media and popular culture play when it comes to either legitimizing or challenging femicide, gender based violence, and violence against women, we need to go back to understand what femicide is.

Diana gave us some, some definitions, which, of course, I do agree on. But I would like to focus on other specific aspects of femicide. So femicide is the extreme form of violence against women.

And what is violence against women? Violence against women, the way I see that and not only not only me, of course, I base my ideas on the work of philosophers, worked on the issue.

Violence against women is an act of objectification that, as Diana said before, is based is carried out because the victim is a woman.

So because of the victim's gender. When we talk about the victim being a woman, I want to stress that we include transgender women.

Okay? This is very important and is not always clear for everybody unfortunately. So the victim of violence against women is generally reduced by your perpetrator to an object.

This is what objectification is. Right? And, so the violence is a means through which someone, the perpetrator, deprives a woman of her agency, of her subjectivity, okay, and denies her personhood.

So true violence, we can say the perpetrator reduces the woman victim to a passive object while affirming its position as an active subject.

Okay. So this division between passive object and active subject is crucial when we want to understand what violence against women is.

So what the perpetrator is basically doing, the perpetrator of violence against women is, to try to confirm or to reaffirm the position, the role that women have always had in our society and culture, which is the role of a part of the passive object.

Cultural representations do sustain all the time, do sustain and delegitimise violence against women, whenever they portray women, and girls, of course, as passive objects, and they do that all the time.

I can make examples. I work a lot at the moment on comics, comics and graphic novels.

And, of course, we know full well, that's one of the, let's say, realms of comics, which is the superhero genre, the superhero narratives, which now kind of contaminated other media, film, the Marvel, DC Universe that we're all aware of, is, of course, a genre that is based on, on high level of sexism.

Things are changing, luckily so, but slowly. This is what scholars who work on this, on this topic showed.

And in the superhero genre, it's pretty clear that the victim is generally a woman, the victim of murders, or whatever happens is generally a woman, and the woman is portrayed as a weak subject who needs to be rescued by a strong superhero.

So this opposition between the strong man and the weak woman does equate with the subject, the active subject, passive object, dynamics, and binarism.

Or another example that is we'd like to make is the portrait that we constantly make of female sexuality as being passive, and which is completely and constantly reproduced, for example, in mainstream pornography.

So these are some examples. There are many others. What I want to say that, of course, as many detrimental representations of women and girls as passive objects exist, but at the same time there is a lot of work, and that's what I work on at the moment, that has been done by feminist artists, and producers of, whatever kind of type, cultural product, that aims at challenging the role of women and girls as passive objects.

You know, now that we're getting to a discussion of kind of what's the root causes of femicide, I just agree a lot with what Nicoletta was saying.

Sort of, I guess, out of line, we would say that it's gender norms in a way that it's at the core of GBV that well, first of all, that, as you said, femicide is kind of at the end of the spectrum of gender based violence, and so we need to understand it as a pack, almost, as a whole, not as an isolated, issue.

But the other one is this that I think femicide is at the same time the result of gender oppression and inequality, but at the same time, it's a mechanism to maintain it.

But the other thing that I wanted to say is that I think besides gender norms there, I think we also need to potentially look at it from a political economy angle.

So Jackie True, for example, has written a lot about this, how GBV can be anti-femicide, can be fuelled by precarity, by poverty, since it hinders sort of men's fulfilment of gender expectations of themselves and that sort of people have of them, of, for example, being, a family's sole breadwinner, of having authority through economic fulfilment, and how this threatens, in a way, their own sense of masculinity and the authority that they associate to that.

And so violence against women becomes almost an outlet of that, of that frustration and a way to prove, reassert that masculinity that has been denied through other ways.

I don't wanna say, however, that or I'm not trying to say that femicide is necessarily linked to precarity, but rather that it sort of sits within this political economy.

You also have it at the other side of the spectrum where it's very much entwined with class privilege, where it's actually economic power that emboldens men to see marginalised women as disposable and to abuse them.

I think the issues of power, and, as you say, you know, so it's on the other side on the other side of whether it's precarity or is a class sort of issue are very much at the heart of a lot of the cases that we have seen.

But there is something around this denying masculinity that I think is important to explore further as well because that has also been at the heart of the narrative of a lot of high profile cases.

The issue is more of what we do about it.

You know, you've talked about legislation. Is legislation effective? You know? Obviously, we've seen the movements, the feminist movements really trying to, you know, not just create awareness, but really try to lead to societal change.

And they have clearly not, you know, succeeded enough, but is legislation effective? Can you give me some examples of where this has worked? And if that doesn't work, what do we need to do to also change the gender norms?

There was a law that was introduced in 2013 on femicide. It was called law on femicide and introduced to kind of higher penalties. However, it was a law that was harshly criticised by feminist movements.

There is a huge history in Italy since the seventies, the 1970s of feminist movements criticising or being, let's say, strongly critical about, let's say, a legalistic or punitive approach to tackling gender based violence.

And I honestly do endorse this type of, this type of thinking, because I believe as a scholar works in cultures in the field of cultural studies that femicide as whatever type of violence against women is something that needs to be challenged from the root.

And, in order to challenge it from the root, we need to, we need to invest even, at a financial level, not on the punitive side, but on the educational side.

I'll start by saying that I think legal and policy frameworks are important. They send messages. They kind of say whether something is acceptable or not and how much a priority it is for the state.

So I think when it comes to femicide we absolutely need comprehensive legislation that sends a very strong and clear message that it is not okay and that the state won't sort of abide by it.

But I think legislation is, in a way, the starting point not the end point. And so, as a feminist movement, it's really, in a way, just the place where then we must or more like, it's not the endpoint of our struggles. 

We need to keep sort of mobilising after to make sure that it is implemented, that it translates into, sort of, effective policy. And I don't know if I have a clear example of what an effective legislation is at a national level.

But if I can give another sort of lens to that answer, I think we can really see in the case of femicide how important regional instruments are.

And so with the Inter American Convention to Prevent, Punish, and Eradicate Violence Against Women of 1994, which is also known as the Belem do Para Convention, it has really led to legislation on femicide across Latin America.

And so it has sort of cemented femicide as an issue in the in public's agendas across Latin America. It, now all countries except Cuba and, I think, Haiti have approved laws that that penalise gender motivated killings.

12 of them specifically use the term femicide in their criminal codes, and 13 of them have sort of more robust legislation on GBV more generally.

And so I think in this sense, it has triggered something. At least now we can name it and we can identify it. It's not perfect, but, you know, I think this convention does show that legal frameworks do have do have an impact.

But now, you know, if we take it to the national level, in Mexico, the, what is called or what would be called in English, the law on the right of women to a life free of violence was was passed in 2007.

And this, on one hand, introduced femicide in the criminal code, and it also created this gender alert mechanism, which is a public policy mechanism to kind of reroute and prioritise resources going into GBV.

But if I mean, it clearly hasn't decreased femicide, and I think this needs to be understood.

And and I'm and I'm just giving this case as kind of a national grounded example, but it needs to be understood, one, in the context of just wide-ranging impunity for crimes.

1% of crimes in Mexico are penalised, prosecuted, and kind of see a resolution.

And then two, I was saying, a lot of resistance from state actors to recognise this form of gender based violence still. In many cases, the police will actively discourage and or refuse to pursue investigations.

They are often quick to assert still that women killed themselves or that it was an accident or that something else happened as opposed to do their job and investigate it as as femicide.

Prosecutors also might also not want to pursue femicide as a crime because it's trickier to prove.

And so sometimes they feel that they may risk losing a case if they go for femicide as opposed to homicide. And we've sort of found this in some of the research that we're doing with a partner in Colombia.

So there's also about, something about legislation that we could do, in this case, for example, better so that we don't put prosecutors, for example, in this tricky position.

Yeah. I mean, I I do agree with what has been said in terms of the importance of laws and policies at at all different levels, at international level, regional, and national level.

And, I don't have a specific example of where the laws have reduced femicide, but I have an example of where a regional convention at the African Union, the Maputo Protocol, which is the African Union Charter on People and Human Rights, but specific focusing on women's rights, where a girl in Zambia used that Maputo Protocol to actually, go to the Africa court to report a sexual violence case that she experienced in school by a school teacher, and it was taken up by, again, a regional coalition of women's rights organisations to actually help with providing legal aid in supporting this girl to actually access the African court, and, and she won the case.

It it was such a good example of actually showing that policies and laws do work even when you have a regional instrument that is extremely strong, but yet there is a lack of law at the national level that emulate that.

But I also do agree that policies and laws cannot work alone, one, they have to be resourced and implemented, but, also, there has to be a critical mass holding those supposed to implement those laws accountable, and that's the role of society that is doing.

But there also has to be, you know, actors supporting women to actually access justice and to use those laws as tools and instruments to access justice, to protect their human their human and women's rights.

And so, I do think that there's a need to use a mixture of different strategies. Then you talked about social changing gender social norms. So without that, I don't think the laws can work alone.

So there is a need to have laws, but there's also there's also a need to change the harmful gender social norms and gender stereotypes that continue to marginalise women, devalue women as human beings, discriminate against them.

So how do we change those perceptions? That is a whole piece of work that definitely has to go hand-in-hand with passing of laws. But, also, yeah, really asking you the questions of what causes femicide, what causes gender inequalities?

And and I think there's a mixture of strategies to address those to get transformational and lasting changes. 

I would just reiterate, I think, the importance of working with people within the judicial system.

I think it has been, both Dinah and Nicoletta said it, but we really need to work with them to transform their prejudices and biases and, in a way, the gender norms that they that they hold.

Because if it's going to be effective we need authorities to kind of move away from their entrenched misogynistic sort of attitudes.

And I think if we also understand femicide as Nicoletta was saying, as part of a continuum of GBV and often femicide doesn't happen out of the blue.

It's really the result of kind of prior forms of GBV have happened before reaching that point. Either the person has committed other forms of GBV or the victim has experienced other forms of GBV before reaching that point.

But if the authorities have this entrenched misogyny, then they usually don't go to the police. Right? Because if they go, they're not believed.

They're revictimised. They're not taken seriously. So why would they go? So, hopefully, in dismantling these attitudes, we also allow women to feel more comfortable and safe reporting them and being taken seriously.

And then, hopefully, less cases would reach that stage. 

I wanted just to add something briefly, because, like, if as we saw, femicide is in the continuum of gender based violence.

So it's the extreme act or manifestation of gender based violence. This means that, like, it stems, it originates from something that is pervasive.

It's among everybody. So I believe it is problematic to some extent to talk about victims of gender based violence and perpetrator of gender based violence in absolute terms.

And we need to understand that as women and gender non-conforming people, we are all in her life subjected to types of gender based violence and discrimination as well as, as men, gender nonconforming person and as women because we are also daughters of patriarchy, and we do interiorise patriarchal dogma.

We are all perpetrators of gender-based violence all the time, in a small way, of course. We don't arrive at the femicide extreme, or to other extremes like rape, sexual violence, domestic violence.

But gender-based violence is something that is definitely widespread, and it has to do with our behaviours and the behaviour that all of us, women included, do to some extent perpetrate at a daily basis.

Yeah. I think the only thing I would like to add is also, like, really being mindful of the intersectional feminist approach. When we were doing a report at WomanKind, which was looking at femicide across the world.

We found out that, for example, indigenous women were experiencing femicide. Like, in Australia, there were indigenous women experiencing femicide eight times more than non-indigenous women.

In Canada, that was five times more for Indigenous women. And in the US, a black woman experienced femicide three times more than the white women.

So I think it is really important to think about the intersectional approach and think about the fact that, you know, for some women, they are more, they're affected by gender discrimination, but also there are multiple other these forms of discrimination that exist because of other identities whether based on age, based on skin colour, based on, where they live, the economic, status, like we talked about before.

And I think all the strategies, really have to think about that approach.

Thank you so much, Dinah, Nicoletta, and Diana. You know, every year we celebrate International Women's Day that actually marks the killings of women that were fighting to see their rights recognised.

The rise of killings of women, which are even more intentional and targeted, you know, through femicide, I think really requires that all of us, women and men, continue to work to instigate effective legislation as we've heard, but even more importantly, you know, to help change the cultural assumptions and the social norms that are really the breeding ground for this crime.

Thank you to everyone for listening. If you've enjoyed the episode, please do like, subscribe and rate it. It helps us a lot and we hope you'll join us again next time.

Head Shot

Sara Pantuliano

Host