• What is a femicide?
• Femicide or femicide?
• Origin of the term feminicide
• Types of femicide
• Causes of femicide
• Femicide in Mexico

We explain what a feminicide or femicide is, its causes and its relationship with machismo. In addition, the situation of femicides in Mexico.

Femicide is the murder of a woman for the simple fact of being a woman.

What is a femicide?

When we speak of feminicide or femicide, we refer to the murder of a woman for the simple fact of being a woman. It is a hate crime, which occurs within the framework of the gender violence, that is, of the submission to humiliating, cruel or painful treatment towards an individual motivated by his gender or because of their sexual orientation.

In fact, femicide is often accompanied by attitudes hostile, beatings, torture, rape and other behaviors criminals against women and girls. It is usually considered part of the set of hate crimes motivated by the gender violence, legislated according to the same legal order as the murders of homosexuals or transgender people.

On the other hand, it is part of a social and political reading that highlights the patriarchal order of societies, which subjects women to a secondary place compared to men. The different schools of feminismIn this sense, they play an important role in making the cultural context that allows, encourages and tolerates femicide.

Femicide is the most extreme expression of sexism or from the call rape culture. In the specific case of femicide, the tolerance of the violence towards women, which also includes rape, discrimination and physical gender violence, especially if it occurs within the framework of an affective relationship.

Femicide or femicide?

Although both formulas are commonly acceptable, and both are registered in the Dictionary of the Spanish Language of the RAE, preference is usually given to the first term, since the second reveals its origin as Anglicism (loan of English femicide).

However, there are those who attribute to the first term a more general meaning, linked to the term genocide, and going on to mean a significant amount of femicides produced in the same country without the Condition take action on the matter or even make the crime committed visible.

Origin of the term feminicide

Femicide occurs in a greater context of sexist violence.

The term feminicide was coined by the South African feminist activist and writer Diana Russell, who has dedicated her life to making visible and combating the inequalities of genre. This term was defined as “the murder of women by men motivated by hatred, contempt, pleasure or sense of possession towards women”.

Russell herself explains that “it represents the end of a continuum of anti-female terror that includes a variety of verbal as well as physical abuse, such as rape, torture, slavery sexual abuse (particularly through prostitution), incestuous or extra-family child sexual abuse, physical and emotional beatings ”.

The term has a history in the English language since the beginning of the 19th century, but it began to be used popularly since 1976 when Russell used it before the International Tribunal for Crimes against Women.

Since then, it has been used extensively in the 1990s and has also been introduced into Spanish, as a result of the visibility of the massive murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, on the border between Mexico and the United States.

Types of femicide

Usually a distinction is made between two forms of femicide:

• Intimate femicide. That which occurs within the framework of a couple relationship, current or past: women murdered by their husbands, boyfriends, ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends. It is also the case if the crime is committed by parents, uncles, brothers or other types of relatives.
• Non-intimate femicide. That which occurs without the existence of a sentimental relationship of any kind between the victim and the murderer, nor is there a kinship link between them.

However, it is also possible to talk about other categories such as lesbicide, when it comes to crimes against homosexual women, committed as punishment for their sexual choice; or also of transfemicide, when it comes to the murder of a woman trans (or transsexual) for the simple reason that it is.

Causes of femicide

It is not simple to give the causes of the existence of femicide in the society current. Broadly speaking, the most logical explanation points to a patriarchal culture that has dominated most human societies since ancient times, and according to which it was usual to consider women as citizen second, spoils of war and part of the heritage Men's.

In the democracy Athenian, for example, neither women nor slaves could participate in public decisions. In modern Western democracy, the female vote did not take place until the late nineteenth century, and thanks to the struggle of the suffragettes.

In some eastern societies women must be hidden from public view by veils or special costumes. In addition, in some cases she is subject to the final will of her father, and then to that of her husband.

The critical current of feminism has alerted and fought the macho culture for more than a century, achieving important advances in the legal recognition of women, but still very far from a panorama of equality.

In this sense, femicides are part of the patriarchal culture's attempts to regain its dominance, that is, they are criminal attempts to subject women to a situation of obedience, submission or defenselessness against men.

There are also those who accuse the abundance of testosterone in men as co-responsible for their violent attitudes, especially in those lacking a education formal to counterbalance your impulses. There is still much debate about it.

Femicide in Mexico

In 2012, Mexico incorporated the crime of femicide into the penal code.

Mexico has been a sadly illustrious case of femicide since the mass murders of women of women in Ciudad Juárez were made public in 1993.

In 2009 the Inter-American Court of Human rights sanctioned against the Mexican State, making it responsible for not having taken any type of actions that provided Justice to the aggrieved and their families, especially those of Claudia Ivette González, Esmeralda Herrera Monreal and Laura Berenice Ramos.

Perhaps as a consequence of this, in 2012 Mexico incorporated the crime of femicide into the criminal code, being the first country to propose the classification of the crime.

It is the most active country in combating this crime. However, in 2016, 1,678 missing youths were quantified, 150 of them minors, which led to the decreeing of a state of alert in the states of Guerrero, Michoacán, Chihuahua, Jalisco and Oaxaca.