Citation

Lewis PC, Kaslow NJ, Cheong YF, Evans DP, Yount KM. Front. Public Health 2024; 12: e1338548.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2024, Frontiers Editorial Office)

DOI

10.3389/fpubh.2024.1338548

PMID

38481840

PMCID

PMC10933122

Abstract

Femicide refers to the intentional gender-related killing of women and girls (1). Despite the high prevalence of female murder victimization in the United States (U.S.) (2, 3), the U.S. lags behind other nations in defining and documenting gender-related female homicides (4). While efforts are underway within the criminal justice and public health sectors to better track violent deaths, deficient surveillance systems limit efforts to estimate the annual incidence of femicide in the U.S. Here, we position femicide as a preventable death that should be treated as a social and public health problem and a distinct form of homicide in the legal code. This approach is especially salient, given the documented increase of non-lethal intimate partner violence (IPV) in major cities (5) and nationally (6) during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating the collateral impacts of public-health crises on violence against women (VAW).

Feminist sociologist Diana Russell coined the term femicide in her testimony about misogynist murder before the 1976 International Tribunal on Crimes against Women (7). The act of naming by Russell and other scholars and activists brought femicide to the forefront of international movements to stop VAW (8). Yet, most countries, including the U.S., lack a legal definition of femicide, complicating its surveillance, and by extension, prevention and response (9). Countries throughout Latin America have led the way to criminalize femicide through legal statutes that mandate accountability (10). The U.S. does not have a separate penal code for gender-related killings (4), making it difficult to track femicides. According to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), an estimated 4,970 female victims were murdered in 2021, one third of whom were documented to have been killed by an intimate partner (2). This is likely an underestimate, as municipal reporting to the central system is not mandatory (6, 11, 12) and data from <63% of police agencies were included in the 2021 report (2). Other estimates utilizing multiple data sources suggest that half of female victims of homicide in the U.S. are killed by intimate partners (13, 14). Importantly, reports of women being murdered are not always categorized as a homicide (15), and the motivations for a homicide and the victim's relationship to the perpetrator often go undocumented. ...

Language: en

Keywords

femicide; gender; homicide; intimate partner violence (IPV); United States; violence against women (VAW)