Contesting Femicide

Focusing on femicide, this book provides a contemporary re-evaluation of Carol Smart’s innovative approach to the law question as first outlined in her ground-breaking book, Feminism and the Power of Law (Routledge 1989). Smart advocated turning to the legal domain not so much for demanding law reforms as construing it as a site on which to contest gender and more particularly, gendered constructions of women’s experiences. Over the last 30 to 40 years, feminist law scholars and activists have launched scathing trans-jurisdictional critiques of the operation of provocation defences in hundreds of femicide cases. The evidence unearthed by feminist scholars that these defences operate in profoundly sexed ways is unequivocal. Accordingly, femicide cases have become critically important sites for feminist engagement and intervention across numerous jurisdictions. Exploring an area of criminal law that was not one of Smart’s own focal concerns, this book both honours and extends Smart’s work by approaching femicide as a site of engagement and counter-discourse that calls into question hegemonic representations of gendered relationships. Femicide cases thus provide a way to continue the endlessly valuable discursive work Smart advocated and practised in other fields of law: both in articulating alternative accounts of gendered relationships and in challenging law’s power to disqualify women’s experiences of violence while privileging men’s feelings and rights.

This book questions gendered readings of violence by analyzing how this paradigm has become normalized in Italy since the feminist term ‘femminicidio’, or ‘femicide’, entered the mainstream media during the 2013 general election. It also sheds light on discourses of contestation on the part of family activists, men’s rights campaigners and divorced fathers’ groups. Two counter-discourses emerge. The first is what the author terms an ‘ideology narrative’, for which discourses built around the conceptual category of ‘gender’ normalize simplistic representations of relationships between men and women. The second is a ‘female violence discourse’, which sheds light on under-represented aggressor-victim relations and modifies dominant representations of femininity and masculinity. The author argues that integrating these two discourses into public debates helps to reappropriate the complexity and biological dimensions of (violent) relationships between men and women, often overshadowed by gender/feminist perspectives. In this way, she concludes, we can address neglected social issues that contribute to violence beyond gender. This thought-provoking book will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, critical discourse studies and gender.

This is an anthology of articles analyzing femicide - the misogynist killing of women by men - in the U.S., U.K., and India. The articles in Part 1 explore the history of femicide, demonstrating that it is as old as patriarchy itself. Part 2 explodes the myth that the home provides a safe haven for women. In Part 3 the complex interactions of racism and femicide are explored, showing that femicide is no respecter of race, class or culture. Part 4 concentrates on media representations of femicide, showing that media generally fail to identify the sexual politics of femicide, and often sympathize with the male murderer at the expense of the female victim. Part 5 looks at the response of the criminal justice system to femicide, while Part 6 discusses the ways in which women have begun to fight back.

This volume explores in depth femicide and feminicide, bringing together our current knowledge on this phenomenon and its prevention. No country is free from femicide/feminicide, which represents the tip of the iceberg in male violence against women and girls. Therefore, it is crucial and timely to better understand how states and their citizens are experiencing and responding to femicide/feminicide globally. Through the work of internationally recognised feminist and grassroots activists, researchers, and academics from around the world, this handbook offers the first in-depth, global examination of the growing social movement to address femicide and feminicide. It includes the current state of knowledge and the prevalence of femicide/feminicide and its characteristics across countries and world regions, as well as the social and legal responses to these killings. The contributions contained here look at the accomplishments of the past four decades, ongoing challenges, and current and future priorities to identify where we need to go from here to prevent femicide/feminicide specifically and male violence against women and girls overall. This transnational, multidisciplinary, cross-sectoral handbook will contribute to research, policy, and practice globally at a time when it is needed the most. It brings a visible, global focus to the growing concern about femicide/feminicide, underscoring the importance of adopting a human rights framework in working towards its prevention, in an increasingly unstable global world for women and girls.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Femicide, the killing of women and girls because of their gender, was until recently included in the category ‘homicide’, obscuring the special features of this social and gendered phenomenon. However, the majority of murders of women are perpetrated by men whom they know from family ties and are the result of intimate partner violence or so-called 'honour' killings. This book is the first one on femicide in Europe and presents the findings of a four-year project discussing various aspects of femicide. Written by leading international scholars with an interdiscplinary perspective, it looks at the prevention programmes and comparative quantitative and qualitative data collection, as well as the impact of culture. It proposes the establishment of a European Observatory on Femicide as a new direction for the future, showing the benefits of cross-national collaboration, united to prevent the murder of women and girls.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This thought-provoking book conceptualizes femicide as a multifaceted human rights violation and proposes state responsibility for group-related risks of violence against women and girls. In doing so, it reassesses the concept of femicide, analysing it in view of the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, as well as several facets of human rights.

This volume brings together an interdisciplinary collection of scholars to critically examine issues around hatred and the law. With chapters on different elements of the nexus between hatred and law, the volume makes a key contribution to the field and is essential reading for legal scholars.

The field of Domestic Violence research has expanded considerably in the past decade and now includes work conducted by researchers in many different disciplines, notably political science, public health, law, psychology, sociology, criminology, anthropology, family studies, and medicine. The SAGE Handbook of Domestic Violence provides a rich overview of the most important theoretical and empirical work in the field, organized by relationship type. The handbook addresses three major areas of research on domestic violence: - Violence against partners - Violence against children - Violence against other family members. This Handbook is a unique and timely publication and a long awaited, valuable resource for the vast amount of Domestic Violence research centres and individual researchers across the globe.

In Rising Up, Living On, Catherine E. Walsh examines struggles for existence in societies deeply marked by the systemic violences and entwinements of coloniality, capitalism, Christianity, racism, gendering, heteropatriarchy, and the continual dispossession of bodies, land, knowledge, and life, while revealing practices that contest and live in the cracks of these matrices of power. Through stories, narrations, personal letters, conversations, lived accounts, and weaving together the thought of many—including ancestors, artists, students, activists, feminists, collectives, and Indigenous and Africana peoples—in the Americas, the Global South, and beyond, Walsh takes readers on a journey of decolonial praxis. Here, Walsh outlines individual and collective paths that cry out and crack, ask and walk, deschool, undo the nation-state, and break down boundaries of gender, race, and nature. Rising Up, Living On is a book that sows re-existences, nurtures relationality, and cultivates the sense, hope, and possibility of life otherwise in these desperate times.

The gap between what the law and legal processes deliver for victims of domestic abuse and what they actually need has, in some instances, arguably widened. This book provides the reader with a thorough understanding of the remedies available to victims in the civil, family and criminal law. It contends that expectations of the legal remedies have increased as the number and scope of remedies has proliferated. It further examines how legal responses to domestic abuse have evolved over the past decade and explores how the victim’s rights narrative and associated litigation, which has become prevalent in legal discourse and criminal justice reforms, has shifted expectations and impacted domestic abuse policy and law. The book presents a valuable addition to the literature in drawing on a discourse familiar to those with an interest in human rights, demonstrating its impact on a substantive area of law of great significance to both family and criminal lawyers and anyone with an interest in domestic abuse and legal responses.