Editor’s note: After getting angry about a definition in the bourgeois press for “femicide,” Terry Moon posted her complaint on facebook, which started a discussion that we decided to share with readers of the News and Letters Committees website. To continue the discussion, post your thoughts below.
“Protect your daughter [crossed out]. Educate your son.” Sign displayed for the femicide of Giulia Cecchetin.
Women are murdered because of who they are, but it is not only that they are women, but that they are women doing things that men don’t like, like trying to leave them, disobeying them, inconveniencing them, doing something they don’t think women should do, getting in their way.
Yes, sometimes women are killed just because they are women in the wrong place, like the Montreal Massacre, or that creep who went around killing Asian women working in salons. Somehow it seems that “murders of women targeted because of their gender” lets men off the hook. Femicide is a hate crime.
Anyway, what do you think? Any better ideas for a definition?
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Bob McGuire: “Womanslaughter” comes to mind, without the legalistic/clinical feel of “femicide” while still paralleling well-grasped terms for killing any human. The Swedish title for the book and movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo literally translates as Men Who Hate Women—too harsh for English-speaking men?
Terry Moon: It is not the word “femicide” that I see as the problem. That word has an important history, so I wouldn’t want to replace it. It’s how it is defined in the bourgeois press. If they are going to dumb it down, they should just let it stand alone.
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We Will Stop Femicide, Turkey’s largest women’s rights group
Elise: I think your definition of femicide is correct. The wording of “murders of women targeted because of their gender” doesn’t, in my mind, let the men who do murder for that reason off the hook at all. Both killing women because they are women or because they do something men don’t like are hate crimes. The men who commit either crime deserve harsh punishment and lots of mental-health care. I wish the Quakers’ penitentiary ideas were the standard because then maybe the U.S.’s prison system just might become humane.
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Anna Maillon: I agree with you, there’s a punishment involved: for having her own separate existence, her own separate thoughts, her own will. For having confidence, having skills, having beauty, for being an entity unto herself. For caring about others besides him, for not being owned by him, for speaking up, for fighting back.
Speaking of terminology, I think the word WILL, as noun, needs to be used much more regularly. In English, people use words like preference, desire, want. But I don’t hear the word “will” very often. It’s used a lot more often in French and Spanish, as volonté and voluntad.
But I’ll have to think about it; how the murders of women could be differently categorized. It’s rare for women to be targeted exclusively for being female, there are other aspects of her being that enrage the murderers.
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Susan Van Gelder: I think both definitions reflect their own reality, and it’s important to emphasize the second. It fits a lot of domestic violence situations. But when rape/murder is used in wars like Sudan and Iran, men rape and kill women they don’t even know in massacres.
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Wanda R: I share your concerns. Women are targeted for non-conformity to expectations for trad women. Men (gay) are also killed (by men) for gender non-conformity. Trans people are killed for gender non-conformity. Women, trans men and women, and gay men are targeted for non-conformity.
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“Neither forgiveness nor forgetfulness. No more femicide,” a sign on March 8, 2025, march in Mexico City. Photo: Ericka Sánchez, free use.
Miguel AGA: I hope this helps: In Mexico, femicide is defined as the murder of women for reasons of gender because it is the extreme expression of violence, hatred, or contempt, motivated by the condition of being a woman and based on patriarchal power structures. Unlike a common homicide, this crime involves gender components such as sexual violence, misogyny, superiority, or possessive relationships.
What does “for reasons of gender” mean? It implies that the victim was murdered for gender-related reasons, such as the existence of prior violence (family, workplace, school), harassment, threats, or the exposure of her body in public places.
Making structural violence visible: The term was popularized to highlight that these murders are not isolated cases, but rather the outcome of a culture of violence and systematic discrimination against women.
Difference with homicide: While homicide is the death of a person, femicide emphasizes the specific fact that the murder occurred because the victim was a woman. Context of the crime: These crimes frequently occur in the private sphere, perpetrated by current or former partners, reflecting the perpetrators’ sense of ownership over women.
In many countries, including Mexico, this crime is codified to recognize and punish gender-based violence, as the victim’s body often shows signs of particular brutality.
Terry Moon: That is so much better than the U.S. definition, or at least how the news here defines it. Even if they just stuck to the first paragraph of what you have here it would be a lot better. I know that femicide has its own sad history in Mexico and also the historic fight against it that is ongoing.
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Tina Andria: The killing of females, as the most extreme form of hate, often punishment for refusal to submit. This includes the Montreal massacre (aspiring female scientists and engineers) and women killed for the crime of being in the public square not obviously “owned” by a man. The distortion happens with diminishing the scope of the phenomenon.
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Feminist, Chicago: I agree that women aren’t targeted because of their “gender” or “sex.” We’re targeted because of men’s and this culture’s sexism, because we don’t live up to their idea of how a woman should behave (defer to the superior man, smile, keep our mouth shut, etc.) or because we do (are overly pleasing and deferential, which proves we’re manipulative liars who can’t be trusted and should therefore be killed), or neither because it is sometimes just about being women who the murderous misogynist hates as a whole group because…. Because he’s a sexist pig who can dominate and control any and all women, so it doesn’t matter which women. Whoever is in his sight will do. Or, he plans to target fat women, like the Lane Bryant murder, where five women were killed and six injured. Also, of course, the incels who just hate women because they can’t get laid. Or maybe it’s just beautiful women they hate.
I get Moon’s point and have thought about it in another context. Once I kind of hashed it out with a friend regarding trans. She said something I hear a lot that’s close to being the same thing: “Women are targeted because we’re women,” and I said something like, “Yeah, but not really. We’re targeted because of sexism.”
The fact is women’s lives matter less in our world. (That’s of course why abortion restrictions exist.) Taken to its logical conclusion, murdering us, usually by a domestic partner, seems like not such a big jump—from being believed to be inferior, subhuman, to deserving of death.