title: Femicide

text: The current usage emerged with the 1970s feminist movements, which aimed to raise feminine consciousness and resistance against gender oppression. The term was also used by radical feminists to call attention to violence against women. American author Carol Orlock is widely credited with initiating this usage of the term in her unpublished anthology on femicide. Diana Russell publicized the term at the Crimes Against Women Tribunal in 1976 at the first International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in Belgium. She wrote: "We must realize that a lot of homicide is femicide. We must recognize the sexual politics of murder. From the burning of witches in the past, to the more recent widespread custom of female infanticide in many societies, to the killing of women for 'honor,' we realize that femicide has been going on a long time. But since it involves mere females, there was no name for it until Carol Orlock invented the word 'femicide. Until recently, femicide was invisible in much of the scientific literature. Intimate femicide can be identified as such by using the "severity of violence, such as access to and threats with firearms, forced sex, threats to kill, and strangulation" to determine whether a case can be considered an act of femicide or not. The definition of femicide also relies on "inequalities in gender 'in terms of education, economic level, and employment'".


title: Femicide

text: Feminist author Diana Russell narrows the definition of femicide to "the killing of females by males because they are female". Russell emphasizes that males commit femicide with sexist motives. She replaces "woman" with "female" to show that femicide can occur to girls and infants as well. Russell believes her definition of femicide applies to all forms of sexist killing, whether motivated by misogyny (the hatred of females), a sense of superiority over females, sexual pleasure, or the assumption of ownership over women. Russell says: "Femicide is on the extreme end of a continuum of antifemale terror that includes a wide variety of verbal and physical abuse, such as rape, torture, sexual slavery (particularly in prostitution), incestuous and extrafamilial child sexual abuse, physical and emotional battery, sexual harassment (on the phone, in the streets, at the office, and in the classroom), genital mutilation (clitoridectomies, excision, infibulations), unnecessary gynecological operations (gratuitous hysterectomies), forced heterosexuality, forced sterilization, forced motherhood (by criminalizing contraception and abortion), psychosurgery, denial of food to women in some cultures, cosmetic surgery, and other mutilations in the name of beautification. Whenever these forms of terrorism result in death, they become femicides."


title: Femicide

text: She includes covert killings of women as well, such as the mass murder of female babies due to male preference in cultures such as India and China, as well as deaths related to the failure of social institutions, such as the criminalization of abortion or the prevalence of female genital mutilation.


title: Femicide

text: Diana Russell's definition is not accepted by all scholars. Jacquelyn Campbell and Carol Runyan use "femicide" to reference "all killings of women, regardless of motive or perpetrator status" They argue that motive cannot always be determined, and so must be removed from the qualification for femicide to gather data.


title: Femicide

text: Feminists Desmond Ellis and Walter Dekesedery take a different approach, viewing the definition of femicide as "the intentional killing of females by males". They require that femicide be intentional, unlike the inclusion of covert femicide in Diana Russell's definition. Femicides are also identified "as 'slip-ups' in a power struggle in which men strive to control women and deprive them of their liberty and women struggle for autonomy".


title: Femicide

text: Most of these definitions imply that the perpetrator is a man. Still, South Asian feminists differ, stating that femicide is "the intentional killing of females by men, and of females by other females in the interests of men". Examples include neglect of female children in preference of males as well as dowry-related murder, where female in-laws kill women due to dowry disputes. Moreover, COST Action 1206 provides definitions of femicide.


title: Femicide

text: These definitions distinguish femicide from non-gendered descriptions of murder and homicide. Instead, femicide exemplifies that women are killed for different reasons and motives from those associated with typical descriptions of murder. Globally, femicide has seldom been investigated separately from homicide, and the goal of many of these authors is to make femicide a separate category. In 2013, COST set up Action IS-1206 entitled "Femicide across Europe".


title: Femicide

text: Defined by Diana Russell, femicide includes intimate partner femicide, lesbicide, racial femicide, serial femicide, mass femicide, honor killing related femicide, dowry and more. Any act of sexual terrorism that results in death is considered femicide. Covert femicide also takes form in the criminalization of abortion leading to death of the mother, intentional spread of HIV/AIDS, or death as a result of female genital mutilation.


title: Femicide

text: The most widespread form of femicide in the world is that committed by an intimate partner of a female. This accounts for at least 35% of all murders of women globally.


title: Femicide

text: Different areas of the world experience femicide varyingly, i.e., the Middle East and South Asia have higher rates of honor killing: the murder of women by their family, due to an actual or assumed sexual or behavioral transgression, such as adultery, sexual intercourse, or even having been raped.


title: Femicide

text: Intimate partner femicide, sometimes called intimate femicide, or romantic femicide, refers to "the killing of a woman by her intimate partner or her former intimate partner". These can include former or current boyfriends, husbands, and common-law husbands.


title: Femicide

text: 5-8% of all murders committed by male perpetrators are cases of intimate partner homicide. For example, an examination from media and internet sources of every single murder of an elderly woman committed between 2006 and 2015 revealed that all the cases of female geronticide in Israel were exclusively intimate partner femicides, and perpetrated in the domestic arena.


title: Femicide

text: Acts of incest, sexual harassment, rape, battering, and other forms of violence are also found to escalate over time within a familial relationship, possibly resulting in femicide. The prevalence of intimate partner femicide is said to dispel the myth that women have the most to fear from strangers, and instead are most often killed within the private sphere of the home. Argued by Jacquelyn Campbell, a common motive that causes men to kill their intimate partners is jealousy, a result of male efforts to control and possess women to display ownership and reinforce patriarchy.


title: Femicide

text: A "feminist reconceptualization" of intimate partner violence viewed as "a crime against humanity" claims a structural system is to blame for the murder of women rather than violent individuals. It is cross-cultural on a mass scale, and is suggested to be considered as a human rights violation by the Women's Studies International Forum. While authors acknowledge "crimes are committed by individuals and not by abstract entities", the prevalence of domestic violence constitutes it as an epidemic. Contemporary feminists believe that re-framing intimate partner violence as a state crime and a crime against humanity will have a "transformative effect" on the reduction of violence against women committed by their significant others, as it is already recognized as a violation of the international human rights law. Intimate partner violence by women on men is rare, and tends to be self-defense. Some controversial research finds that most intimate partner violence is bidirectional, or female upon male, but most studies find that, where men are the victims of domestic violence, their abusers tend to be male.


title: Femicide

text: Risk factors that increase the likelihood of intimate partner femicide include: when a male has previously threatened to commit suicide or kill the woman if she cheats on him or leaves him, when there is elevated alcohol or drug abuse by either partner, or when a male attempts to control a woman's freedom. Two-fifths of intimate partner femicide is related to the use of intoxicants. Other factors commonly associated with male perpetrators of femicide include gun ownership, forcing sexual intercourse, and unemployment. Women's risk factors include: if they are pregnant, have faced prior abuse from their partner, are estranged from their partner, or are attempting to leave a relationship, their likelihood of femicide increases. The presence of firearms within a home is a large factor in intimate partner femicide, and worldwide, firearms are used in one-third of all femicides.


title: Femicide

text: As often reported in the public eye, male perpetrators are seen as "being driven" to commit femicide, due to a "breakdown in love attributed to the female". In defense trials, the defense of provocation is often used to reduce the time men serve in prison. Conversely, women are not often as successful with using this idea of provocation in their murder trials, and judges are statistically less likely to accept claims of self-defense, showing biased judging standards.


title: Femicide

text: Factors that decrease the risk of intimate partner femicide include a separate domicile for women and other societal factors, such as more police, as well as mandated arrest for violation of restraining orders related to intimate partner violence. Karen D. Stout found that there is a correlation between the number of women's shelters in a state, the number of rape crisis centers, and a lowered rate of femicide. One explanation of this correlation is that implementing these measures has positively affected lowering the femicide rate. Other effective legislation against femicide include legislation that defines civil injunction relief, defines physical abuse as a criminal offense', allows arrest without a warrant, requires data collection and reporting, and provides funds for women's shelters.


title: Femicide

text: There has been an increase in the amount of femicides linked to intimate partner violence. About 67% of the women killed by their partners are killed with a gun. Access to guns therefore plays an important role in this. On average, 70 women are "shot and killed" by their intimate partner every month.


title: Femicide

text: The Hope Movement defines racist femicide as the racially motivated killing of women by men who are members of a different race. According to Diana Russell and fellow writer Jill Radford, "Racism interacts with violence against women, and shapes both femicide itself, and the ways it is addressed by the local community, the police, the media, and the legal system."


title: Femicide

text: Russell, Radford, and many other feminist activists assert that when looking at femicide within the United States specifically, one must consider the politics of both sexism and racism in the murders of black women and the little justice that is often served. Media coverage can especially exhibit bias when covering the murders of Black versus white women. Jaime Grant writes on the murder of 12 young women in Boston, Massachusetts, and exposes the "racism in media coverage, which virtually ignored these killings initially, and later depicted the victims in racist and sexist stereotypes, such as runaways, drug addicts, or prostitutes." In addition, police response and investigation can often differ based on the victim's race.


title: Femicide

text: Engaging in work with Black Feminist Studies, author Manshel claims that the narrative which is formed around domestic violence is traditionally associated with a white, middle class, female victim, leaves victims of different races and social classes to receive unequal care, and it can also lead to more victimization of the woman who is murdered/abused due to "narrative resistance", not aligning with the vulnerability which is typically expected by female victims. Manshel also traces the history of assaults of Black women, and she makes the distinction that "the circumstances" of white victims were "wholly different" from those of "enslaved women" in the 19-20th century, and she proposes that anti-racist frameworks about sexual violence should be put into writing.


title: Femicide

text: According to Diana Russell and Jill Radford, lesbicide, also known as homophobic femicide, has a long history of legalized murder of lesbians in many different cultural contexts:


title: Femicide

text: Today, lesbianism is no longer a capital crime, but it remains criminalized by many governments, and is condemned by most religions. Torture and murder of lesbians occurs in every part of the world, even in "developed" countries. According to Dr. Susan Hawthorne of Victoria University, "domination is exemplified in the punishment of lesbians as outsiders in patriarchal culture" Dr. Hawthorne goes on to elaborate that lesbians are often killed, tortured, or generally denied rights, due to their invisibility in terms of political power and social representation: "When it comes to campaigns on violence against women, lesbians are either left out or included only in a footnote".


title: Femicide

text: A case study conducted in 2014 deeply analyzing multiple anti-LGBT cases of violence suggests that crimes like lesbicide can at least, in part, be explained by existing hyper-masculinity theories that observe the "accomplishment of gender". This confirms how scholars have theorized how "constructing masculinity is relevant to bias crime offending". One common occurrence the sociological researchers had found was the escalation of violence towards LGBT members when they were met with "unwanted heterosexual advances". The community agrees that violent crimes and homicides are heterogeneous phenomenons.


title: Femicide

text: According to political scientist and women's studies scholar Susan Hawthorne, corrective rape is a hate crime that constitutes forced sexual activity with a person who is either a woman, gender non-conforming, or identifies as a lesbian. The goal of corrective rape is to "correct" the victim's sexual orientation and make them heterosexual or behave in a more gender-conforming manner. This has led to death in some cases. There are documented cases of corrective rape in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ecuador, and Thailand. Eudy Simelane was a famous soccer player who played for the South Africa women's national football team and LGBT rights activist; her murder was a highly publicized instance of simultaneous corrective rape and lesbicide in South Africa.


title: Femicide

text: Serial femicide is defined as "the sexually sadistic killing of women", also called "sexual terrorism". Although over 90% of serial killers are male, not all are male; about 7% are female.


title: Femicide

text: Male serial murderers tend to use more brutal methods of killing, such as suffocation and beatings. In contrast, women use poison or less violent measures. In addition, while a large percentage of male serial killers focus on women as their targets, female serial killers are less likely to focus exclusively on males. Some male serial killers focus on males as targets, such as Jeffrey Dahmer and Wayne Williams The ways serial murderers are portrayed in the media reflect the views on femicide and gender in society. Often, murders of prostitutes, low-income women, and women of color by serial killers receive less attention in the media than the killings of younger, prettier, more affluent women, usually married, engaged, or in relationships with much handsome, affluent, younger men their age.


title: Femicide

text: According to the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Report, local police reported that about 33,000 homicides of women remain unsolved.


title: Femicide

text: Feminists such as Diana Russell and Jane Caputi believe in a link between the rise of serial murders and the advent of pornography. Specifically, the advent of films that eroticize violence and murder of women has been correlated to the desires of serial killers. Numerous serial murderers filmed their victims as they violently killed them. However, the link between pornography and serial murders is not proven.


title: Femicide

text: Female infanticide is the killing of female infants. It is found all over the world regardless of a country's sophistication. A common misconception is that it is only related to abortions, but it also includes "girl-child murders". Female infanticide plays an important role in the imbalance of gender populations. In countries where female infanticide is practiced, the male populations is higher than the female population.


title: Femicide

text: Every year, an average of 66,000 women are violently killed globally, accounting for approximately 17% of all victims of intentional homicides. In


title: Femicide

text: 2017, 87,000 women and girls were killed globally. This means that 238 women are killed daily. According to a 2000 report by the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), approximately 5,000 women are murdered each year in honor killings. The rates of femicide differ depending on the specific country, but of the countries with the top 25 highest femicide rates, 50% are in Latin America, with number one being El Salvador. Also included in the top 25 are seven European countries, three Asian countries, and one African country, South Africa. In a UN study, 1 in 4 women in the top 25 countries agreed that it was justifiable to be beaten or hit for arguing with their husband, or refusing to have sex with him. Overall, data on femicide worldwide is poor, and often countries do not report gender differences in murder statistics. In addition, reporting data on migrants is particularly scarce.


title: Femicide

text: The continent varies in the manifestations of femicide depending on the country or region. Rarely Muslim women become a commodity in the fight between two factions and are killed when one faction (dis)approves of the wearing of the prescribed traditional dress.[14]


title: Femicide

text: One of the biggest health problems in Africa is the epidemic of HIV/AIDS which affects 25.7 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa as of 2017. Whenever AIDS results in the death of a female due to misogyny or sexist male behavior, it is considered a form of femicide according to Diana Russell's definition of femicide.


title: Femicide

text: Female genital mutilation is defined by the World Health Organization as "the removal of part or all of the external female genitalia and/or injury to the female genetic organs for cultural or other non-therapeutic reasons". Female genital mutilation results in femicide when women and girls die, due to unhygienic practices of FGM that result in infection or death, as well as the increased likelihood of contracting HIV/AIDS because of FGM.


title: Femicide

text: Cases of femicide have been common in the Middle East and North Africa region. In June 2022 surfaced one such story where a girl, Nayera Ashraf, who refused the advances of a man was stabbed to death by him publicly in broad daylight. The incident sparked widespread outrage amongst social media users about growing cases of femicide, after the video of the stabbing outside Nayera's university went viral online. Whereas, Egyptian preacher and controversial TV presenter Mabrouk Attia, garnered criticism for suggesting women cover and remain veiled when stepping outside to avoid being subjected to such unfortunate incidents. As a result, social media users spurred a campaign demanding Attia's arrest.


title: Femicide

text: In Japan, violence against women does not, at first sight, appear to be a big issue, overall homicide rates in the country are among the lowest in the world — below 1 per 100,000 people — and street crime is rare. Harassment is also uncommon: women generally feel safe when going out alone at night. Nevertheless, the jurisdiction has one of the highest rates of female homicide victims in the world, as a percentage of total homicides. According to a report by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), published in 2014, Japan, together with Hong Kong, top the ranking — with women comprising 52.9% of the total homicide victims — followed by South Korea at 52.5%.


title: Femicide

text: Rita Banerji, feminist author and founder of The 50 Million Missing Campaign to end female gendercide in India, has said that there are also millions of girls and women killed through various forms of femicides that extend across various age groups. In a U.N. Symposium on Femicide in Vienna on 26 November 2012, she talked about the six most widespread forms of femicide in India. These included female infanticide, the killing of girls under six years through starvation and violence, the killing of women due to forced abortions, honor killings, dowry murders, and witch lynchings. Many of the femicides in India are perpetrated against girls.


title: Femicide

text: Despite progressive legal reforms in many parts of the region, strong patriarchal values are maintained, and help perpetuate the subordination of women. According to the Special Rapporteur on violence against women for the Human Rights Council, key factors behind gender-motivated killings of women in Asia are the high level of importance placed on women's chastity and their subordination in the greater society. For example, while the Penal Code of India now specifically prohibits dowry, the reported number of dowry-related deaths of women has almost doubled from 4,836 to 8,383 over the past twenty years (1990–2009). The code is also criticized for having a low impact on the criminalization of perpetrators, noted in the low conviction rate of ten percent. Suicide is the leading cause of death for Nepalese women in the reproductive age group, with causes ranging from domestic abuse, forced marriage, casting out of widows, and lack of property rights. In this context, there is minimal acceptance and respect of young girls and women, and often an absence of family support. This results in a variety of context-specific versions of femicide and gender-based violence in the region: honor killings, acid attacks, witch-hunting, foeticide, and gender-based violence during caste and communal conflict.


title: Femicide

text: The country has attempted to manage femicide through some policy enactment. India has primarily focused on creating legislation related to population control, resulting in pressures to have a son. Some regions in India have incentivized parents to birth daughters by offering money to families with girls, in order to offset the expenses associated with having a daughter. However, there have been research studies analysing femicide policy, specifically in relation to India, that have found "the criminalization of sex selection has not been successful".


title: Femicide

text: Female infanticide was common in traditional China, where natural hardships such as famines reinforced cultural norms favoring sons, and encouraged hard-pressed families to abandon or kill their infant daughters. Furthermore, daughters became liabilities, as gender was also crucial to the system of ancestor worship, in which only sons were allowed to carry out ritual sacrifices. Thus, "if a couple failed to produce a son, its crucial links to the past and future were broken".


title: Femicide

text: In present-day China, despite official condemnation and outrage, female infanticide continues. In late 1982, the Chinese press was the first to indicate that female infanticide was being practiced as the final option to circumvent the one-child policy. An expert from the City University of New York, however, disagrees with the tendency to characterize female infanticide as "the unfortunate consequence of Chinese population control and modernization policies". She defines female infanticide as "part of a crime of gender", which she refers to as "social femicide", and relates it to the broader problem of gender inequality in Chinese society.


title: Femicide

text: A gender-based discriminatory notion of honor is sometimes the cause of serious cases of health deterioration or mutilation among women in Turkey. According to the "Report on Custom and Honor Killings" by the country's General Directorate of Security, 1,028 custom and honor killings were committed between the years of 2003 and 2007. It is important, however, that according to the World Data Bank, femicide rates in Turkey were 0.9 women killed due to violence against women per 100k women. Which ranks it about the same femicide rate as Istanbul-convention ratifiers such as Germany & Austria, but still significantly higher than most of the other ratifiers. Since 2019, Turkeys femicide rate have seen a significant drop of 44.9%.


title: Femicide

text: According to the data of the General Directorate of Security covering killings in Turkey until 2007, honor killings happen predominantly in the Southeastern part of the country. The rates of murderers born in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia are much higher than murderers born in other regions. With 24% of the murderers born in Southeastern Anatolia and 21% in Eastern Anatolia, they share the top spot. While in comparison, only 8% of the murderers are born in the Marmara region. Even though that region has the highest rate of honor killings, which means that the killings are primarily committed by people born outside that region. The reason behind this is the fact that honor killings are still receiving support in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia. According to a survey in Diyarbakir, a city in Southeastern Anatolia, 40% of the respondents supported honor killing. In some court cases this has led the court to decide to send the entire family to prison. For example, in 2009, an entire Kurdish family was sent to prison for life, because they were involved in the honor killing of their daughter, who got pregnant after being raped.


title: Femicide

text: In 2020, 300 women died as a result of femicide in Turkey, which is 174 (36%) less than the year before It is important to note that the source started differentiating between confirmed femicides and suspicious deaths in 2020, so the more representative numbers to compare are: 474 in 2019 and 471 in 2020, a decrease of about 0,5% . According to the same source, suspicious deaths have been rising for the past years. Totaling the numbers from confirmed and suspicious deaths in 2021 497 have been killed, in 2020 471 have been killed and in 2019 474 have been killed.


title: Femicide

text: In March 2021, via presidential decree, the Turkish government made the decision to leave the Istanbul convention, making it the first and only country in the Council of Europe to have withdrawn from any international human rights convention. This has sparked outrage in the population, as according to polls, only 26% of the population voted in favor of leaving. In the past the president has stated, that the women's rights movement is diverting women from their original roles as mothers and wives, while also normalizing tolerance to homosexuality. National women's rights organizations, who had been criticizing lack of implementation of the convention for years, now have concerns about rising femicide rates in Turkey.


title: Femicide

text: In South Korea, violence towards women has been increasing.  In 2012, a man named Oh Won-choon killed a women while attempting to sexually assault her while going home. In 2014, while waiting for a bus, a woman was stabbed to death by a drunk man. Then in 2016, a 34-year-old whose surname is Kim randomly murdered a women in her twenties in a Gangnam Station bathroom . Kim stated he murdered the woman  because “women have always ignored me”.


title: Femicide

text: The rise in victimization towards women has made women fearful of crime. In 2019 The South Korean government released the 2019 Domestic Violence Survey Study that found that only 27.6 percent of women over 13 feel society is safe for them. The study also found that women accounted for 98 percent of victims in intimate partner femicide (domestic violence) cases. In 2019 32,000 sex crimes against women were reported, that’s 12,000 more cases than in 2010. All the while domestic violence cases have reached 50,000 in 2019 compared to 6,800 cases in 2011.


title: Femicide

text: While these numbers may not be completely accurate; it is estimated that there are more femicide, and intimate partner femicide cases not being reported due to South Korea’s Confucianism influences in society. Confucianism believes women should be subordinate to men and assumes women's status as inferior from men. These values also believe that women have only three roles: Daughter, wife, and mother and have to follow the head of the family which is her father before marriage and husband after marriage. South Korea’s traditional patriarchal culture/values which assigns roles to female members and their strong belief that a woman's place should be with her family no matter what cause women to be wary of reporting violence towards them due to fear of bringing shame to the family or affecting the family’ social status.


title: Femicide

text: In a study focusing on the experiences of 14 female victims of intimate partner femicide in getting help with domestic violence found that victims didn't talk to their family or sought them out for support. Only one participant escaped their abusive relationship because their parents saw the bruises and called the police. Victims were scared to talk to their families. They were scared their parents would get angry and sad seeing their daughters get abused. It is also taboo to talk about their romantic relationships with their parents.


title: Femicide

text: In the study four victims chose the police as a support to escape their abuser. They decided to call the police when the relationship became a risk for their health. Two out of the four victims shared their negative experience with the police. The police refused to get involved because they thought that what they were experiencing were normal relationship conflicts. These victims saw that current laws in South Korea are inadequate for protecting them from domestic femicide victims. They were deeply frustrated about it and they felt anxious and scared since they felt no one could protect them.


title: Femicide

text: The legal system does not favor women suffering from femicide and intimate partner femicide. Victims find it hard to report an aggressive male behavior, domestic partner violence, and violence towards women due to the idea that sexual assault and domestic violence is a matter that should be handled “privately”. In South Korea two legislations that protected women were enacted for the first time in 1997. “Special Action Punishment of Domestic Violence Crimes” legislation was established to punish the perpetrators. This law states if someone is found to be guilty of psychological, mental and physical violence the perpetrator will be fined or face jail time. The “Act on Prevention of Domestic Violence and Protection of Victims” legislation is used to protect the victims by reporting systems, provision of protection facilities and support services for victims.  Even though this law protects victims it is limited since it only protects married couples and does not address couples who are not married and face intimate partner violence.


title: Femicide

text: Olivia Shieber a senior program manager of foreign and defense policy studies describes Korean courts as lenient with sex crime punishments.  In 2013 the Korean Supreme court upheld the country’s first spousal rape conviction which is something South Korea was behind when compared to other first world countries and it wasnt until the year 202 when the age of consent was raised from 13 to 16. Additionally, the fact that just 30% of judges and less than 4% of police personnel are women clearly affects how crimes of this sort are handled by the Korean judicial system. Even in cases where prosecutors successfully prosecute a defendant for a sex offense, the offenders are usually given a suspended sentence. Additionally, due to the country's strict legal definitions, it is still challenging to prove rape and other sex crimes in South Korea and some defendents have even exploited South Korea’s tough defamation laws to sue their alleged victims for defamation making victims scared to come forward. Ultimately, women that face intimate partner violence or femicide in Korea are left feel isolated, disenfranchised from the legal system and socially outcast while having to increasingly worry about femicide rates rising.


title: Femicide

text: In 2019, a recent statistic from the Australian Institute of Criminology indicated that on average, one woman a week is murdered in an act of femicide in Australia.


title: Femicide

text: In Europe, agencies have funded initiatives on gender and violence but not specifically on femicide. Research is in its infancy and uncoordinated. A COST Action IS1206 has established the first pan-European coalition on femicide with researchers who are already studying the phenomenon nationally to advance research clarity, agree on definitions, improve the efficacy of policies for femicide prevention, and publish guidelines for the use of national policy-makers. EU reports show that additional support has been needed during the period of pandemic lockdown in many countries


title: Femicide

text: Available data are limited: Eurostat covers only 20 countries and there are discrepancies in the way in which the data is collected. According to available data in Western Europe, the average annual rate is 0.4 victims of femicide for every 100,000 women. The worst situations are found in Montenegro, Lithuania, and Latvia. In most countries, the partner is the most common perpetrator. However, there are exceptions: in Lithuania and Bosnia and Herzegovina, most femicides are committed by family members. Also, while male victims of homicide have been in a sharp decline in recent years, the number of women murdered in Europe, not necessarily at the hands of a partner or family member, remains constant, with a slight increase from 2013 to 2015. From 2013 to 2017, 30 European countries joined a COST (Cooperation on Science and Technology) project called "femicide across Europe.


title: Femicide

text: The European Union first enacted COST (Cooperation on Science and Technology), a program known as COST Action. COST Action led to four different femicide research groups: definitions, data collection, cultural issues, and advocacy and prevention. Thirty countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding with COST that promoted international efforts to address femicide and the Action program. The Istanbul Convention was a gathering of multiple independent states who had a common goal of acknowledging and addressing femicide. However, the convention "is not a treaty, and not legally binding for all states", and thus is not an official policy.


title: Femicide

text: Depending on the sources, between 122 and 149 women were killed in France in 2019 by their partners or ex-partners.


title: Femicide

text: Interest in reporting and analyzing levels of femicide in the United Kingdom has grown in recent years, and several national organizations provide support In 2021, a campaign began in the UK led by "The Observer" and the Femicide Census to better identify femicide, to improve the knowledge of it, and to encourage improved methods to end it. This included raising awareness of the data produced by the Femicide Census The organisation, led by Karen Ingala Smith and Clarrie O'Callaghan, justifies it as bringing data together in this way "significantly improves upon currently available data by providing detailed comparable data about femicides in the UK since 2009, including demographic and social factors and the methods men selected to kill women. By collating femicides, we can see that these killings are not isolated incidents, and many follow repeated patterns." By taking an intersectional approach to the data campaigners, academics and journalists are able to highlight patterns of concern, such as the numbers of older women being killed, those killed by partners and ex-lovers, or those killed during lockdown. On average, in the UK, a woman is killed by a man every three days, or by a current or former partner, every four days. The data is not gathered in Scotland. Data published in 2022 shows that in year ending March 2021, 177 women were murdered in England and Wales( for comparison, 416 men were killed in this period). Where there was a known suspect, 92% of the women were killed by men.


title: Femicide

text: Feminists in Latin America have been among the first to adopt the term "femicide", referring to the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. This term inspired feminists in Latin America to organize anti-femicide groups to challenge this social injustice towards women. The use of the term femicide, and the creation of anti-femicide feminist organizations, spread from Mexico, to many other Latin American countries, like Guatemala. In Latin America, femicide is an issue that occurs in many countries, but most predominantly in Central America, in countries such as El Salvador and Honduras, and other places, such as Brazil and Mexico. The Latin American region includes 5 of the 12 countries with the highest rate of femicide in the world. According to Julia Estela Monárrez-Fragoso of the Colegio de la Frontera Norte based in Ciudad Juárez, victims are often blamed for being out late at night, or for hanging around "questionable" areas, such as discotecas or nightclubs. Between 2000 and 2010, more than five thousand Guatemalan women and girls were murdered. Guatemala's historical record reveals a long history of acceptance of gendered violence, and the military, government, and judiciary's role in normalizing misogyny. In a Report on the Violations of Women's Rights in Guatemala by a United Nations Human Rights Committee, the state's failure to enforce laws protecting women from femicide is seen as highly problematic. The report argues that enforcing laws against the murder of women is a low priority of state governments, due to patriarchal beliefs, and assumptions about the role of women in society.


title: Femicide

text: Various activists and scholars, such as Monárrez, have argued that connections exist between the femicides and neoliberal policies, namely North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). They believe that the treaty has served to open trade borders, and to increase foreign investment targeted at manufacturing low-cost garments in maquiladoras.


title: Femicide

text: Intimate partner femicide is the most common form of femicide, and high violence and crime rates in these countries also contribute to this issue. There is a lack of an organized system to record information and statistical data to support this issue. Machismo, a history of civil wars, and other cultural influences can also contribute to this issue, specifically in Latin America. Torture, mutilation, defacement, sexual assault, and the dumping of bodies is a common trend with femicide.


title: Femicide

text: It has been observed that many of the women killed in Ciudad Juárez are young mothers who migrate to this region seeking employment in maquiladoras. They then become easy targets, due to the fact that they are separated from their family, and are typically alone when traveling home. Policy solutions in Central America have tried making transportation safer (see below for policy solutions). Other scholars, such as Itallurde, point to the culpability of corporations "based on the concepts and doctrines of tortuous negligence, failure to protect, and aiding and abetting". Other scholars, such as historians Steven Volk and Marian Schlotterbeck, hypothesize that there may be a "macho backlash" behind these killings: "Certainly male egos, of fathers and would-be boyfriends, must suffer some deflation from this dramatic change in the economic influence of these young women."


title: Femicide

text: In 2015, Mexican Supreme Court required the police to reopen and investigate a murder case from a femicide "perspective".


title: Femicide

text: However, there have been some actions taken to address this issue. The criminalization of femicide and various laws passed in specific countries have aimed to stop this problem. In addition, the United Nations has taken a role in stopping this with a commission that calls for action to be taken. There is a growing social awareness around this issue with #NiUnaMenos (Not One Woman Less) or #NiUnaMas (Not One More Woman). Lastly, female friendly urban zones have been created as a concrete solution. These zones include female-only transportation, and government centers offering services specifically for women.


title: Femicide

text: Central American policymakers have experimented with creating "female-friendly urban zones" over the past decade. "Pink" public transportation networks have been established in Mexico, Brazil, El Salvador, and Guatemala to provide women-only forms of public transportation to stem sexual harassment, and to provide safety for women. These efforts have received substantial praise and criticism.


title: Femicide

text: Criticism from feminists and others often point to the efficacy of gender segregation in changing gender norms of oppression - specifically the Latin American cultural conventions of "machismo" and "marianismo", which are potent social regulators throughout the region.


title: Femicide

text: Amnesty International estimates that there have been around 34,000 female homicides in Mexico between 1986 and 2009. According to the National Citizen Observatory on Femicide, only 49 percent of the 800 cases of women killed in Mexico between June and July 2017 were investigated as femicide. In 2018, "93 percent of crimes were either not reported or not investigated." One activist, Natalia Reyes, reported that only 8 percent of femicides in Mexico are punished. Almost 35,000 people were murdered in 2019, Mexico's most violent year on record. Additionally, in 2012, Mexico was ranked as the 16th country in the world with the highest rates of femicides. In August 2021, a total of 108 femicides occurred in Mexico, the highest since 2019.


title: Femicide

text: In 2016, Mexico had a rate of female homicides of 4.6 femicides per 100,000, and there were a total of 2,746 female deaths with the presumption of homicide, but that has more than doubled in the past 5 years. On average, about 10 women are killed everyday. In this year, the top three states with the highest rates of female deaths with the presumption of homicide were Colima (with 16.3 deaths per 100,000 women), Guerrero (13.1 per 100,000), and Zacatecas (9.7 per 100,000). The top three municipalities in 2016 were Acapulco de Juárez (24.22 per 100,000), Tijuana (10.84 per 100,000), and Juárez (10.36 per 100,000). During the years 2002–2010, the state of Chihuahua had the highest rate of female homicides in the world: 58.4 per 100,000. The rates of femicide in the municipality of Juárez have decreased significantly in just five years; in 2011, the rate of female deaths with the presumption of homicides was 31.49 per 100,000, and by 2016 it had decreased to 10.36 per 100,000.


title: Femicide

text: There has been large demonstrations in Mexico against femicides; however, most took place after 11 February 2020. This was the day seven-year old Fatima Cecilia was kidnapped from school. She was found dead in a plastic bag a couple of days later. A movement called "Un Dia Sin Mujeres" (a day without women) spread all over the world right after Fatima's murder.


title: Femicide

text: Femicide is a crime provided for in the Brazilian Penal Code, item VI, paragraph 2, of art. 121, when committed "against a woman on grounds of female condition". The Paragraph 2-A, of art. 121, complements the section, by stating that there are reasons of female condition when the crime involves domestic and family violence or contempt or discrimination against women. The penalty for this crime is 12 to 30 years in prison.


title: Femicide

text: Colombia has followed 16 other Latin American countries by passing a law defining and punishing femicide for being a specific crime. On 6 July 2015, the government of Colombia passed a law that legally defines femicide as a crime with 20 to 50 years of jail time. This new law is named after Rosa Elvira Cely, a Colombian woman who was raped and murdered in 2012. Cely's death sparked national outrage, and caused thousands to march down the streets of Bogotá. Her murderer was found guilty, and was sentenced to 48 years in prison. The challenge now becomes implementing the law. Miguel Emilio La Rota, head of public policy and planning at Colombia's attorney general's office, said that the prosecutor's office must change how it investigates femicide. Colombia prosecuted a transgender woman's murder as a femicide for the first time in 2018, sentencing Davinson Stiven Erazo Sánchez to twenty years in a psychiatric center for "aggravated femicide" a year after he killed Anyela Ramos Claros, a transgender woman.


title: Femicide

text: In El Salvador, an endeavor has been made to create multiple government centers that house many gender-specific services in one place, to cut down on commute time, and to increase the physical safety of women as they seek services such as counseling, child care, and reproductive health. "The first center hopes to provide access to an estimated 162,000 women from the neighboring departments of La Libertad and Sonsonate. Supported by former Chilean president and head of UN Women Michelle Bachelet, the initiative cost $3.2 million, with an additional $20 million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank earmarked for the construction of new sites."


title: Femicide

text: Critics of this action point to the contradictory abortion laws in El Salvador that are some of the harshest in the world: abortion is completely illegal, even to save the life of the mother, or to help a survivor of incest or rape. "Coupled with the judicial system's weaknesses, violence is abetted by the same government that aims to protect and defend. High levels of impunity leave many crimes unresolved or unreported."


title: Femicide

text: Guatemala has championed the use of femicide as a concept by incorporating the term in its constitution: Decree 22. Lawmakers in this country passed Decree 22 in 2008 that defined Laws Against Femicide and Other Forms of Violence Against Women. These laws include 28 articles about prosecutable types of violence against women. They also created the Office of the Presidential Commission Against Femicide, enforcing the concept in the government and an anti-femicide unit of the National Police. Some results of the laws have proved encouraging, allowing many women to now report violence perpetrated against them. In the first month of 2010, a total of 27,000 women reported violence against them to the state, a large increase in the number of reported crimes. The laws also have helped several people jail their assailants, and have increased the severity of punishments for perpetrators. However, the actual enforcement of the new laws has been varied. Few offenders are ever actually convicted for the specific crime of femicide, and there are only three public prosecution offices in the entire country able to deal with the issue of femicide. In fact, only 127 convictions in 2010 occurred for female violence even though 46,000 cases overall were registered. Also, from 2000 to 2008, 98 percent of all femicide cases have remained in impunity. Some feminists argue that the culture in Guatemala is to blame. They cite that many male judges and other male government officials are sympathetic to the view that men's actions are justified, because they remain within the private sphere of the home. Attorney Romeo Silverio Gonzalez argued for this viewpoint when he stated that the new laws of Decree 22 were unconstitutional. He said that the laws were in contradiction to the private affairs of marriage. Attorney General Claudia Paz countered his viewpoint, ultimately defending the laws by justifying their existence because they protect women's rights. Overall, the legislation of these new laws has helped Guatemala improve the awareness of femicide and reporting of the crime, but enforcement and justice for femicide still have not been achieved. Femicide as the socially tolerated murder of women in Guatemala relies on the presence of systematic impunity, historically rooted gender inequalities, and the pervasive normalization of violence as a social relation.


title: Femicide

text: Femicide in the United States accounts for the deaths of more than five women daily, and 70% of the total deaths of women among high-income countries. One of the largest predictors of femicide in the United States is the appearance of physical abuse, which was found in 79% of all femicide cases in North Carolina. Gun availability in the United States has also had a substantial effect on femicide, correlating to 67.9% of deaths in a study by Karen D. Stout. Living in neighborhoods with increased poverty, ethnic heterogeneity, and decreased collective efficacy (social cohesion among neighbors) are all found to be linked to increased femicide rates in that area. Also, reporting of female victims of femicide in the US is stymied, due to the assumption that female victims are not an anomaly, but are driven by their perceived vulnerability and passivity.


title: Femicide

text: Proper statistics of femicide in Canada can be difficult to come across, since possible acts of femicide are regularly labelled as the killing of a spouse. However, femicide is a widespread violent act that takes place in countries all over the world, and Canada is no exception. In 2019, there was a total of 678 homicides Canada-wide, of these cases 144 of the victims were female. Additionally, the rate at which female victims were killed by a spouse or intimate partner, was over eight times greater than the number of males killed by a spouse or intimate partner.


title: Femicide

text: Historically speaking, less data exists regarding femicide in Canada; however, what is available shows a disproportionate amount of violence and femicide towards Indigenous women. Reports of the last few decades indicate over 600 murders of Indigenous females in Canada. Unfortunately, in many cases, homicidal acts towards Indigenous females often aren't characterized as femicides, indicating that not all victims of femicide are treated in the same framework. Yet the research indicates that certain ethnic groups are at a greater risk for femicide compared to the rest of the population. To understand these statistics in Canada, an intersectional approach must be considered, to recognize the historical and ongoing effects of colonialism that disproportionately target Indigenous peoples within the country. Canada's continued negligence as a state to examine the effects of colonialism on Indigenous peoples has related to the high risk of femicide, and violence for Indigenous women and girls. Failure to acknowledge the deaths of Indigenous women ignores the decades of inequality and injustice that have, and continue to be, perpetuated by colonialism.


title: Femicide

text: Colonialism produces a sense of dominant authoritative power that allows for the disregard of Indigenous individuals, and in this case, a disregard for the murders of Indigenous females. Indigenous women are reported to be five times more likely to experience violence and death compared with other groups in Canada. These murders are acts of racialized violence, in addition to the gendered violence of femicide. However, more often than not, these murders are regarded as a spousal homicide, rather than femicide, disregarding the violence and oppression Indigenous women face. In the mid-twentieth century, Indigenous women and girls were forced and coerced into undergoing sterilization procedures as an act of femicide, as well as genocide, at fourteen different Indian Hospitals across the state that were federally operated. Sterilization policies were implemented as a way to reduce the size and influence of Indigenous communities, resulting in there being about 1,200 cases of forced or coerced sterilization, that directly targeted the reproductive rights and properties of Indigenous women and girls. Exclusionary politics and legal discrimination throughout the history of Canada, means that the violence faced by Indigenous women and girls has gone unacknowledged, serving to further state-controlled colonial power over Indigenous peoples. The scattered reports of femicide in Canada indicate a lack of understanding of how various acts of gender, race, class, and sexuality all intersect to create the environment of violence Indigenous women are subjected to. While femicide in Canada affects all women, it disproportionately targets the lives of Indigenous women and girls due to historical and ongoing actions of colonialism within the state.


title: Femicide

text: One prominent instance of femicide occurring in Canada is the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre, which was an antifeminist mass shooting, which killed fourteen women, and injured ten women and four men.


title: Femicide

text: Another example of a femicide attack in Canada is the 2018 Toronto van attack, a vehicle-ramming attack which saw eleven casualties, and fifteen injured. The perpetrator is a self-described "incel", whose goal was to exact revenge on women, after self-perceived social rejection.


title: Femicide

text: In 2013, the United Nations General Assembly updated their policy by recognizing that "gender-related killing of women and girls was criminalized in some countries as 'femicide' or 'feminicide', and has been incorporated as such into national legislation in those countries." Currently, Dr. Dubravka Šimonović is the special rapporteur to the UN. She has been an advocate of anti-femicide policy implementation. She has presented the UN with reports such as "Modalities for the establishment of femicides/gender-related killings". Dr. Šimonović has also proposed a "femicide watch" program to monitor femicide practices across the globe. The goal of Simonovic's academic program is to analyze data on femicide cases, to identify risk factors and any issues in public policy.


title: Femicide

text: The rates of femicides has drastically increased during the time of lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Around 50,000 women are being murdered every year. This is due to the stay-at-home measures, that have increased the levels of isolation for women and girls. This becomes a life-or-death situation if they are locked in with violent partners or relatives. "The increasing economic instability and unemployment rates worldwide" has led to "heightened violence" for women. Additionally, there has been an increase in calls to domestic violence hotlines in various countries since the lockdown began.


title: Femicide

text: Most countries also "diverted" resources and efforts "from violence against women response to immediate COVID-19 relief".


title: Femicide

text: Femicide, as the word suggests, specifically targets females. However, there are still methods to preventing the act, such as implementing laws that would specifically work to improve the safety of women. For example, harsher punishments for those that partake in the act of murdering a woman solely based on their gender could face a minimum sentence of two hundred and fifty years, discouraging anyone from attempting to do so.


title: Femicide

text: Other methods of prevention would be to bring awareness to femicide. Any sort of crime that would be committed against a woman would be interpreted as an act of femicide; from there, people would be more aware of the act, and in turn, help the prevention of femicide.


title: Femicide

text: All officials involved in a gender-based crime should be adequately trained in order to offer support. Service workers, police officers, and legal professionals are some of the groups that should receive extensive training on signs of violence in different social groups, including minorities and migrants. Training is the first step to creating policies to prevent femicide.


title: Femicide

text: Today, many females around the world are killed as a result of intentional killings towards them. Solutions to this problem include making laws and policies for violence against women. Techniques that can be developed include crime prevention policies that are aimed at domestic and family violence. Additionally, countries worldwide should consider developing the status of women in their countries and create laws on gender equality. For example, in Latin America there have been many new laws to label the murders of women as femicide or feminicide. Femicide is defined as the killing of a woman by a man based on misogyny. At the same time, feminicide goes beyond this definition and implicates the state's complicity in maintaining violence against women. These changes have been made due to global human rights norms, like the 1994 Inter-American Convention on the Prevention and the Eradication of Violence against Women, which expresses that gender violence is the state's responsibility. Nevertheless, these international norms are not regulated. They do not implement how a state should exercise new laws and policies to enforce violence against women.


title: Femicide

text: Some countries have passed laws belonging to femicide or crimes labeled as feminicides. In Mexico and Nicaragua, female activists became involved in legal activism so their state could increase responsibility for female violence. During a small political opportunity with a strict regime in Nicaragua, Femicide resulted from the countries' responsiveness to feminist demands. In Mexico, feminicides became successful because of good campaigning by local feminists connected to national arenas and through the intervention of feminist federal legislators. A known Mexican female activist, Marcela Lagarde, saw the rise of women being murdered in Mexico and demanded that the state take responsibility for the killings. She brought in the concept of femicide (the murder of females through violence and the state as complicit), which quickly spread to Latin America, and as of 2017, femicide and feminicide became crimes in 18 countries.


title: Femicide

text: A 2019 German documentary by Karen Naundorf with the title "Frauen gegen Männer-Gewalt" or in the French version "La révolte des femmes" (English: Women Against Male Violence) shows the effect of violence and murder targeted towards women in Argentina. The film was made freely available to watch on arte.tv, from 25 October 2019 to 8 October 2022.


title: Femicide

text: "Darlings" (2022) on Netflix is an Indian film which examines spousal abuse and retaliation against the abusers in an "offbeat" way.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The Sacred Band of Thebes (Ancient Greek: , "Hierós Lókhos") was a troop of select soldiers, consisting of 150 pairs of male lovers which formed the elite force of the Theban army in the 4th century BC, ending Spartan domination. Its predominance began with its crucial role in the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC. It was annihilated by Philip II of Macedon in the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The earliest surviving record of the Sacred Band by name was in 324 BC, in the oration "Against Demosthenes" by the Athenian logographer Dinarchus. He mentions the Sacred Band as being led by the general Pelopidas and, alongside Epaminondas who commanded the army of Thebes (Boeotia), were responsible for the defeat of the Spartans at the decisive Battle of Leuctra (371 BC).


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: Plutarch (46–120 AD), a native of the village of Chaeronea, is the source of the most substantial surviving account of the Sacred Band. He records that the Sacred Band was originally formed by the boeotarch Gorgidas, shortly after the expulsion of the Spartan garrison occupying the Theban citadel of Cadmea. The 2nd century AD Macedonian author Polyaenus in his "Stratagems in War" also records Gorgidas as the founder of the Sacred Band. However, Dio Chrysostom (c. 40–120 AD), Hieronymus of Rhodes (c. 290–230 BC), and Athenaeus of Naucratis (c. 200 AD) credit Epaminondas instead.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The exact date of the Sacred Band's creation, and whether it was created before or after the "Symposium" of Plato (c. 424–347 BC) and the similarly titled "Symposium" by his rival Xenophon (c. 430–354 BC), has also long been debated. The generally accepted date of the Sacred Band's creation is between 379 and 378 BC. Prior to this, there were references to elite Theban forces also numbering 300. Herodotus (c.484–425 BC) and Thucydides (c. 460–395 BC) both record an elite force of 300 Thebans allied with the Persians, who were annihilated by Athenians in the Battle of Plataea (479 BC). Herodotus describes them as "the first and the finest" () among Thebans. Diodorus also records 300 picked men () present in the Battle of Delium (424 BC), composed of "heníochoi" (, "charioteers") and "parabátai" (, "those who walk beside"). Though none of these mention the Sacred Band by name, these may have referred to the Sacred Band or at least its precursors. Historian John Kinloch Anderson believes that the Sacred Band was indeed present in Delium, and that Gorgidas did not establish it, but merely reformed it.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: In the old debate surrounding Xenophon's and Plato's works, the Sacred Band has figured prominently as a possible way of dating which of the two wrote their version of "Symposium" first. Xenophon's Socrates in his "Symposium" disapprovingly mentions the practice of placing lovers beside each other in battle in the city-states of Thebes and Elis, arguing that while the practice was acceptable to them, it was shameful for Athenians. Both Plato and Xenophon were Athenians. According to the British classical scholar Sir Kenneth Dover, this was a clear allusion to the Sacred Band, reflecting Xenophon's contemporary, albeit anachronistic, awareness of the Theban practice, as the dramatic date of the work itself is c. 421 BC.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: However, it is the speech of the character Phaedrus in Plato's "Symposium" referring to an "army of lovers" that is most famously connected with the Sacred Band; even though it does not technically refer to the Sacred Band, since the army referred to is hypothetical. Dover argues Plato wrote his "Symposium" first since Plato's Phaedrus uses language that implies that the organization does not yet exist. He acknowledges, however, that Plato may have simply put the hypothesis in the mouth of Phaedrus according to the supposed earlier dramatic date of the work (c. 401 BC). It only shows that Plato was more mindful of his chronology in his "Symposium" than Xenophon, and proves that he was actually quite aware of the Sacred Band in his time.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: According to Plutarch, the 300 hand-picked men were chosen by Gorgidas purely for ability and merit, regardless of social class. It was composed of 150 male couples, each pair consisting of an older "erastês" (, "lover") and a younger "erômenos" (, "beloved"). Athenaeus of Naucratis also records the Sacred Band as being composed of "lovers and their favorites, thus indicating the dignity of the god Eros in that they embrace a glorious death in preference to a dishonorable and reprehensible life", while Polyaenus describes the Sacred Band as being composed of men "devoted to each other by mutual obligations of love". The origin of the "sacred" appellation of the Sacred Band is unexplained by Dinarchus and other historians. But Plutarch claims that it was due to an exchange of sacred vows between lover and beloved at the shrine of Iolaus (one of the lovers of Heracles) at Thebes. He also tangentially mentions Plato's characterization of the lover as a "friend inspired of God".


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The Sacred Band was stationed in Cadmea as a standing force, likely as defense against future attempts by foreign forces to take the citadel. It was occasionally referred to as the "City Band" (), due to their military training and housing being provided at the expense of the Boeotian "polis". Their regular training included wrestling and dance. The historian James G. DeVoto points out that Gorgidas previously served as a hipparch (cavalry officer), therefore equestrian training was also likely provided. The exact ages of the unit's members are not recorded in ancient testimonies. However, comparing them with the Spartan elite unit "hippeis" () and the Athenian "epheboi" (ἔφηβοι) recruits, DeVoto estimates that trainees were inducted as full members to the Sacred Band at the ages of 20 to 21, whereupon they were given a full set of armor by their "erastai". They likely ended their service at age 30.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: According to Plutarch, Gorgidas originally distributed the members of the Sacred Band among the front ranks of the phalanxes of regular infantry. In 375 BC, the command of the band was transferred to the younger boeotarch Pelopidas, one of the original Theban exiles who had led the forces who recaptured Cadmea. Under Pelopidas, the Sacred Band was united as a single unit of shock troops. Their main function was to cripple the enemy by engaging and killing their best men and leaders in battle.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The Sacred Band first saw action in 378 BC, at the beginning of the Boeotian War. It was during the famous stand-off between the Athenian mercenary commander (and later "strategos") Chabrias (d. 357 BC) and the Spartan King Agesilaus II (444 BC–360 BC). Prior to the creation of the Sacred Band under Gorgidas, the Athenians had helped the Theban exiles retake control of Thebes and the citadel of Cadmea from Sparta. This was followed by Athens openly entering into an alliance with Thebes against Sparta. In the summer of 378 BC, Agesilaus led a Spartan expedition against Thebes from the Boeotian city of Thespiae (then still allied to Sparta).


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The Spartan forces were held up for several days by Theban forces manning the earthen stockades at the perimeter of Theban territory. The Spartans eventually breached the fortifications and entered the Theban countryside, devastating the Theban fields in their wake. Though the Athenians had by this time joined the Theban forces, they were still outnumbered by the Spartans. With the fall of the stockades, they were left with two choices, either to retreat back to the defensible walls of Thebes or to hold their ground and face the Spartans in the open. They chose the latter and arrayed their forces along the crest of a low sloping hill, opposite the Spartan forces. Gorgidas and the Sacred Band occupied the front ranks of the Theban forces on the right, while Chabrias and an experienced force of mercenary hoplites occupied the front ranks of the Athenian forces on the left.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: Agesilaus first sent out skirmishers to test the combined Theban and Athenian lines. These were easily dispatched by the Theban and Athenian forces, probably by their more numerous cavalry. Agesilaus then commanded the entire Spartan army to advance. He may have hoped that the sight of the massed Spartan forces resolutely moving forward would be enough to intimidate the Theban and Athenian forces into breaking ranks. The same tactic had worked for Agesilaus against Argive forces in the Battle of Coronea (394 BC).


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: It was during this time that Chabrias gave his most famous command. With scarcely separating the two armies, Agesilaus was expecting the Theban and Athenian forces to charge at any moment. Instead, Chabrias ordered his men to stand at ease. In unison, his mercenary hoplites immediately assumed the resting posture—with the spear remaining pointing upwards instead of towards the enemy, and the shield propped against the left knee instead of being hoisted at the shoulders. Gorgidas, on seeing this, also commanded the Sacred Band to follow suit, which they did with the same military drill precision and confidence. The audacity of the maneuver and the discipline of the execution was such that Agesilaus halted the advance. Seeing that his attempts to provoke the Theban and Athenian forces to fight on lower ground were unsuccessful, Agesilaus eventually thought it wiser to withdraw his forces back to Thespiae.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: Shortly after the stand-off in Thebes, Agesilaus disbanded his army in Thespiae and returned to Peloponnesos through Megara. He left the general Phoebidas as his harmost (military governor) at Thespiae, the same general responsible for the Spartan seizure of the citadel of Cadmea in 382 BC. Phoebidas began making various raids into Theban territory using the Spartans under his command and Thespian conscripts. These forays became so destructive that by the end of the summer, the Thebans went out in force against Thespiae under the command of Gorgidas.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: Phoebidas engaged the advancing Theban army with his peltasts. The harrying of the light infantry apparently proved too much for the Thebans and they started to retreat. Phoebidas, hoping for a rout, rashly pursued them closely. However, the Theban forces suddenly turned around and charged Phoebidas' forces. Phoebidas was killed by the Theban cavalry. His peltasts broke ranks and fled back to Thespiae pursued by Theban forces. Aside from Polyaenus, none of these accounts mention the Sacred Band by name, but given that they were under the command of Gorgidas, they are likely to have been part of Theban forces involved.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: Not long afterwards, Agesilaus mounted a second expedition against Thebes. After a series of skirmishes which he won with some difficulty, he was forced again to withdraw when the Theban army came out full force as he approached the city. Diodorus observes at this point that the Thebans thereafter faced the Spartans with confidence. Gorgidas disappears from history between 377 and 375, during which the command of the Sacred Band was apparently transferred to Pelopidas.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: As a single unit under Pelopidas, the first recorded victory of the Sacred Band was at the Battle of Tegyra (375 BC). It occurred near the Boeotian city of Orchomenus, then still an ally of Sparta. Hearing reports that the Spartan garrison in Orchomenus had left for Locris, Pelopidas quickly set out with the Sacred Band and a few cavalry, hoping to capture it in their absence. They approached the city through the northeastern route since the waters of Lake Copais were at their fullest during that season. Upon reaching the city, they learned that a new "mora" had been sent from Sparta to reinforce Orchomenus. Unwilling to engage the new garrison, Pelopidas decided to retreat back to Thebes, retracing their northeastern route along Lake Copais. However, they only reached as far as the shrine of Apollo of Tegyra before encountering the returning Spartan forces from Locris.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The Spartans were composed of two "morai" led by the "polemarchoi" Gorgoleon and Theopompus. They outnumbered the Thebans at least two to one. According to Plutarch, upon seeing the Spartans, one Theban allegedly told Pelopidas "We are fallen into our enemy's hands" to which Pelopidas replied, "And why not they into ours?" He then ordered his cavalry to ride up from the rear and charge while he reformed the Sacred Band into an abnormally dense formation, hoping to at least cut through the numerically superior Spartan lines. The Spartans advanced, confident in their numbers, only to have their leaders killed immediately in the opening clashes. Leaderless and encountering forces equal in discipline and training for the first time in the Sacred Band, the Spartans faltered and opened their ranks, expecting the Thebans to pass through and escape. Instead, Pelopidas surprised them by using the opening to flank the Spartans. The Spartans were completely routed, with considerable loss of life. The Thebans didn't pursue the fleeing survivors, mindful of the remaining Spartan "mora" stationed in Orchomenus less than away. They stripped the dead and set up a "tropaion" (τρόπαιον, a commemorative trophy left at the site of a battle victory) before continuing on to Thebes. Having proven their worth, Pelopidas kept the Sacred Band as a separate tactical unit in all subsequent battles.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: An account of the battle was mentioned both by Diodorus and Plutarch, both based heavily on the report by Ephorus. Xenophon conspicuously omits any mention of the Theban victory in his "Hellenica", though this has traditionally been ascribed to Xenophon's strong anti-Theban and pro-Spartan sentiments. An obscure allusion to Orchomenus in "Hellenica", however, implies that Xenophon was aware of the Spartan defeat.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The exact number of the belligerents on each side varies by account. Diodorus puts the number of Thebans at 500 against the Spartans' 1,000 (each "mora" consisting of 500 men), apparently basing it on Ephorus' original figures. Plutarch puts the number of the Thebans at 300, and acknowledges three sources for the number of Spartans: 1000 by the account of Ephorus; 1,400 by Callisthenes (c. 360–328 BC); or 1,800 by Polybius (c. 200–118 BC). Some of these numbers may have been exaggerated due to the overall significance of the battle. The battle, while minor, was remarkable for being the first time a Spartan force had been defeated in pitched battle, dispelling the myth of Spartan invincibility. It left a deep impression in Greece and boosted the morale among Boeotians, foreshadowing the later Battle of Leuctra. In Plutarch's own words:


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: Shortly after this, the Athenians initiated the Common Peace of 375 BC (Κοινὴ Εἰρήνη, "Koine Eirene") among Greek city-states. According to Xenophon, they were alarmed at the growing power of Thebes and weary of fending off Spartan fleets alone as the Thebans were not contributing any money to maintaining the Athenian fleet. However this broke down soon after in 374 BC, when Athens and Sparta resumed hostilities over Korkyra (modern Corfu). During this time period, Athens also gradually became hostile to Thebes. While Athens and Sparta were busy fighting each other, Thebes resumed her campaigns against the autonomous pro-Spartan Boeotian "poleis". Thespiae and Tanagra were subjugated and formally became part of the reestablished democratic Boeotian confederacy. In 373 BC, Thebans under the command of the boeotarch Neocles attacked and razed its traditional rival, the Boeotian city of Plataea. The Plataean citizens were allowed to leave alive, but they were reduced to being refugees and sought sanctuary in Athens. Of the pro-Spartan Boeotian "poleis", only Orchomenus remained.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: By this time, Thebes had also started attacking Phocian "poleis" allied to Sparta. Pelopidas is again mentioned as the commander of the abortive Theban siege of the Phocian city of Elateia (c. 372 BC). In response to the Theban army outside the city's walls, the Phocian general Onomarchus brought out all the inhabitants of the city (including the elderly, women, and children) and locked the gates. He then placed the non-combatants directly behind the defenders of Elateia. On seeing this, Pelopidas withdrew his forces, recognizing that the Phocians would fight to the death to protect their loved ones.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: By 371 BC, there was another attempt to revive the King's Peace to curb the rise of Thebes. It was initiated by either the Athenians or the Persians (perhaps at the prompting of the Spartans). The Spartans also sent a large force led by King Cleombrotus I (Sparta having two kings simultaneously for most of its history) to Phocis, ready to invade Boeotia if the Thebans refuse to attend the peace conference or accept its terms.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: Epaminondas' refusal to accept the terms of the peace conference of 371 BC excluded Thebes from the peace treaty and provided Sparta with the excuse to declare war.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: Shortly thereafter the army of Cleombrotus was ordered to invade Boeotia. Cleombrotus' army crossed the Phocian-Boeotian border into Chaeronea then halted, perhaps hoping that the Thebans might change their mind. The Thebans however were committed to a fight. Cleombrotus then moved inland, following the eastward road towards Thebes, until he reached the Boeotian village of Leuctra (modern Lefktra, Plataies) near the southwestern end of the Theban plain. There they were met by the main Theban army. The two armies pitched their camps opposite each other on two low ridges respectively. The battleground between them was about wide.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The Spartan army numbered about 10,000 hoplites, 1,000 light infantry, and 1,000 cavalry. However, only about 700 hoplites of the Spartan army were composed of spartiates (Spartan citizens), the rest were conscripted troops from Spartan subject states (the perioeci) forced to fight. They were arrayed traditionally, in which the hoplites were formed into phalanxes about eight to twelve men deep. Cleombrotus positioned himself and the spartiate hoplites (including the elite royal guard of 300 "Hippeis") in the Spartan right wing, the traditional position of honor in Greek armies. Cleombrotus' only tactical innovation was the placing of his cavalry in front of his troops.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The Theban army was outnumbered by the Spartans, being composed of only about 6,000 hoplites (including the Sacred Band), 1,500 light infantry, and 1,000 cavalry. Anticipating the standard Spartan tactic of flanking enemy armies with their right wing, Epaminondas concentrated his forces on his own left wing, directly opposite the strongest Spartiate phalanx, led by Cleombrotus. Here, the massed Theban phalanx was arrayed into a highly unconventional depth of fifty men. The rest of the Theban lines were reduced to depths of only four to at most eight men because of this. Epaminondas also copied Cleombrotus by placing his cavalry in front of the Theban lines. The original position of the Sacred Band being led by Pelopidas is unknown. Some military historians believe Epaminondas placed Pelopidas and the Sacred Band behind the main hoplite phalanx, others believe he put it in front of the main hoplite phalanx and behind the cavalry, while others put it on the front left corner of the main hoplite phalanx (the most likely). Either way, the Sacred Band is definitely known to have been on the left wing, close to the main Theban forces and detached enough to be able to maneuver freely.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The battle opened with a cavalry charge by both armies. The Spartan cavalry were quickly defeated by the superior Theban cavalry and were chased back to their own side. Their disorderly retreat disrupted the battle lines of the Spartan heavy infantry and, because of the resulting chaos and the dust stirred up, the Spartans were unable to observe the highly unusual advance of the Theban army until the last moment. Epaminondas had ordered his troops to advance diagonally, such that the left wing of the Theban army (with its concentration of forces) would impact with the right wing of the Spartan army well before the other weaker phalanxes. The furthest right wing of the Theban phalanx was even retreating to make this possible. This is the first recorded instance of the military formation later known as the oblique order. The Theban cavalry also helped by continuing to carry out intermittent attacks along the Spartan battle lines, holding their advance back.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: By the time the Spartans realized that something unusual was happening it was already too late. Shortly before the Theban left wing made contact, the Spartans hastily stretched out their right wing in an attempt to outflank and engulf the rapidly approaching Thebans. This was a traditional tactic and, once the Thebans were in range, the stretched wing would then be brought back in an encircling movement. Acting under his own initiative, Pelopidas quickly led the Sacred Band ahead of the Theban left wing to intercept the Spartan maneuver before it could be completed. They succeeded in fixing the Spartans in place until the rest of the Theban heavy infantry finally smashed into the Spartan right wing. The sheer number of Thebans overwhelmed the Spartan right wing quickly. The number of Spartan casualties amounted to about 1,000 dead, among whom were 400 Spartiates and their own king. The Spartan right flank were forced to retreat (after retrieving the body of Cleombrotus). Seeing the Spartiates fleeing in disarray, the Perioeci phalanxes also broke ranks and retreated. Although some Spartans were in favor of resuming the battle in order to recover the bodies of their dead, the allied Perioeci of the Spartan left wing were less than willing to continue fighting (indeed some of them were quite pleased at the turn of events). The remaining "polemarchoi" eventually decided to request a truce, which the Thebans readily granted. The Spartan dead were returned and a "tropaion" was set up on the battlefield by the Thebans to commemorate their victory.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: According to Pausanias (c. 2nd century AD), the Battle of Leuctra was the most decisive battle ever fought by Greeks against Greeks. Leuctra established Theban independence from Spartan rule and laid the groundwork for the expansion of Theban power, but possibly also for the eventual supremacy of Philip II of Macedon.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: Defeat came at the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC), the decisive contest in which Philip II of Macedon, with his son Alexander, extinguished Theban hegemony. The battle is the culmination of Philip's campaign into central Greece in preparation for a war against Persia. It was fought between the Macedonians and their allies and an alliance of Greek city-states led by Athens and Thebes. Diodorus records that the numbers involved for the two armies were more or less equal, both having around 30,000 men and 2,000 cavalry.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The traditional hoplite infantry was no match for the novel long-speared Macedonian phalanx: the Theban army and its allies broke and fled, but the Sacred Band, although surrounded and overwhelmed, refused to surrender. The Thebans of the Sacred Band held their ground and Plutarch records that all 300 fell where they stood beside their last commander, Theagenes. Their defeat at the battle was a significant victory for Philip, since until then, the Sacred Band was regarded as invincible throughout all of Ancient Greece. Plutarch records that Philip II, on encountering the corpses "heaped one upon another", understanding who they were, wept and exclaimed,


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: Though the significance of the battle was well-documented by ancient scholars, there is little surviving information on the deployment of the armies involved. Most modern scholars (including N.G.L. Hammond and George Cawkwell) credit Alexander as having led a cavalry wing. James G. DeVoto, likewise, says in "The Theban Sacred Band" that Alexander had deployed his cavalry behind the Macedonian hoplites, apparently permitting "a Theban break-through in order to effect a cavalry assault while his hoplites regrouped". Other historians however argue that Alexander actually commanded hoplites armed with sarissas (pikes), rather than cavalry, especially since Plutarch also mentions that the Sacred Band fell to "lances of the Macedonian phalanx". Plutarch and Diodorus both credit Alexander as being the first to engage the Sacred Band.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: After the defeat of Cleombrotus' forces in the Battle of Leuctra, a "tropaion" was set up on the battlefield by the Thebans to commemorate their victory. The "tropaion" was later replaced by a permanent monument, an unprecedented move by the Thebans as "tropaia" were designed to be ephemeral. The original appearance of the monument is attested by contemporary coins of the period and showed that it took the form of a tree trunk mounted upon a cylindrical pedestal carved with metopes, triglyphs, and a series of stone shields. On the tree trunk itself is affixed the shields, weapons, and armor of the defeated Spartans. The base of the monument still survives to this day.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: Pausanias in his "Description of Greece" mentions that the Thebans had erected a gigantic statue of a lion near the village of Chaeronea, surmounting the "polyandrion" (, common tomb) of the Thebans killed in battle against Philip. The Greek historian Strabo (c. 64 BC–24 AD) also mentions "tombs of those who fell in the battle" erected at public expense in Chaeronea.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: In 1818, a British architect named George Ledwell Taylor spent a summer in Greece with two friends at Livadeia. On June 3, they decided to go horseback riding to the nearby village of Chaeronea using Pausanias' "Description of Greece" as a guidebook. Two hours away from the village, Taylor's horse momentarily stumbled on a piece of marble jutting from the ground. Looking back at the rock, he was struck by its appearance of being sculpted and called for their party to stop. They dismounted and dug at it with their riding-whips, ascertaining that it was indeed sculpture. They enlisted the help of some nearby farmers until they finally uncovered the massive head of a stone lion which they recognized as the same lion mentioned by Pausanias. Parts of the statue had broken off and a good deal of it still remained buried. They immediately reported their discovery when they returned to Athens.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: A common story, still often reported to this day, is that the lion was smashed to pieces during the subsequent Greek War of Independence (1821–1829), even using dynamite, by the klepht leader Odysseas Androutsos, who supposedly hoped to find it filled with treasure. This tale was current already in the 1830s, but has been strongly refuted. The five pieces (head, neck, chest, and forelegs) into which the statue was divided for most of the 19th century, before its reconstruction in 1902, bore no evidence of an explosion, but were cleanly cut, likely being the original pieces that formed the statue. Androutsos is held to have been the one to unearth the statue during his tenure as local military governor by Ali Pasha of Yanina in 1819, but the statue had likely fallen apart due to the poor quality of the pedestal's material.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: Offers in the late 19th century by the British archeologist Cecil Harcourt Smith to fund the restoration of Lion of Chaeronea were initially refused by the Greeks. In 1902, however, permission was granted and the monument was pieced back together with funding by the Order of Chaeronea. The lion, which stands about high, was mounted on a reconstructed pedestal about high.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: In the late 19th century, excavations in the area revealed that the monument stood at the edge of a quadrangular enclosure. The skeletons of 254 men laid out in seven rows were found buried within it. A tumulus near the monument was also tentatively identified as the site of the Macedonian "polyandrion" where the Macedonian dead were cremated. Excavation of the tumulus between 1902 and 1903 by the archeologist Georgios Soteriades confirmed this. At the center of the mound, about deep, was a layer of ashes, charred logs, and bones about thick. Recovered among these were vases and coins dated to the 4th century BC. Swords and remarkably long spearheads measuring about were also discovered, which Soteriades identified as the Macedonian sarissas.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The skeletons within the enclosure of the lion monument are generally accepted to be the remains of the Sacred Band, as the number given by Plutarch was probably an approximation. However, historians such as Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond, Karl Julius Beloch, and Vincenzo Costanzi do not believe that the lion monument marks the location of the Sacred Band dead. Hammond claims it was the place where Philip turned his army around during the Battle of Chaeronea and believes that it contains the members of the Macedonian right flank who perished. He argues that it is highly improbable that the Thebans would be able to commemorate their dead within Philip's lifetime with such a massive and obviously expensive monument.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The historian William K. Pritchett criticizes Hammond's rationale as "subjective" and counters it with a passage from "Historiarum Philippicarum Libri XLIV" of the 3rd-century AD Roman historian Justin. In addition to Pausanias and Strabo, Justin also clearly says that Philip forced the Thebans to pay for the privilege of burying (not cremating) their dead. Therefore, the cremated remains are likely to be Macedonian, while the remains around the lion were the Sacred Band. Philip, after all, was known for his ability to inflict unnecessary cruelty when it served a greater purpose. He further points out that questioning the honesty of Pausanias is unwarranted, as any well-informed Greek then would probably know the ascription of the monument even centuries after the battle; Pausanias' knowledge of topography was not second-hand and his testimony was echoed independently by other ancient sources such as Strabo and Justin. Indeed, Pausanias' "Description of Greece" has proved to be an accurate and important guide to modern archeologists in rediscovering the locations of other ancient Greek monuments and buildings.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The historicity of the Sacred Band is largely accepted by historians; it is detailed in the writings of numerous classical authors, especially Plutarch. Noted classical historians such as John Kinloch Anderson and George Cawkwell accept Plutarch's "Life of Pelopidas", which contains the most detailed account of the Sacred Band, as a highly reliable account of the events, in contrast to Xenophon's patchy treatment of Theban history. Other noted classical scholars like Frank William Walbank and Felix Jacoby have also defended Callisthenes' descriptions of land battles in the past. Walbank commented that his depictions of the Battle of the Eurymedon, Gaugamela, and Tegyra (all surviving through Plutarch) are quite adequate. While Jacoby, responding to claims that Callisthenes was unreliable in accounts of land battles in contrast to Xenophon, pointed out that Callisthenes did accurately describe the details on the Battle of Tegyra. He summarized his opinion of Callisthenes' account with ""Sie ist panegyrisch gehalten, aber sachlich nicht unrichtig." [It is panegyrical, but it is not factually incorrect.]" This is echoed by the historians John Buckler and Hans Beck who conclude that "In sum, Plutarch's description of the battle of Tegyra does justice both to the terrain of Polygyra and to the information gleaned from his fourth-century sources. There is nothing implausible or unusual in Plutarch's account, and every reason to consider it one of the best of his battle pieces." They also had the same opinion of his account on Leuctra, dismissing assertions that his accounts were confused or rhetorical.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: The historian Gordon S. Shrimpton further provides an explanation for Xenophon's silence on much of Theban history. He notes that all the surviving contemporary accounts of Thebes during the period of Theban hegemony between 371 and 341 BC were often highly critical; with their failures ridiculed and their accomplishments usually being downplayed or omitted altogether. For instance, the Athenian Isocrates (436–338 BC) in his "Plataicus" (which details the destruction of Plataea by the Thebans), makes no mention of the Theban victory in Leuctra, and harshly reviles Thebes throughout. His later work "Archidamus" mention Leuctra briefly, and only to criticize Thebans as being incompetent and incapable of capitalizing on their rise to power. The same sentiments are echoed by the Athenians Demosthenes (384–322 BC) and Antisthenes (c. 445–365 BC). Xenophon, another Athenian, is the only contemporary who grudgingly notes some Theban accomplishments, and even then, never in-depth and with numerous omissions. His only mentions of Pelopidas and Epaminondas by name, for example, were very brief and shed no light on their previous accomplishments. Indeed, the historians Bruce LaForse and John Buckler have noted that the character and accomplishments of Epaminondas were so unassailable that there is no known hostile account of him in ancient sources. The most unfriendly writers like Xenophon and Isocrates could do was omit his accomplishments in their work altogether.


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: Shrimpton believes that the apparent indifference of earlier authors was due to the general hatred by other Greeks against the Thebans who had medized (i.e. allied with the Persians) in the second Persian invasion in 480 BC and again in 368 BC. Athenians, in particular, held a special contempt for Thebes due to the latter's actions in the Peloponnesian War; as well as the Thebans' destruction of Plataea in 373 BC, and the invasion of the Athenian-allied Boeotian city of Oropus in 366 BC. Demosthenes records this sentiment very clearly in a disclaimer in his speech "On the Navy" (354 BC): "It is difficult to speak to you about [Thebans], because you have such a hearty dislike of them that you would not care to hear any good of them, even if it were true."


title: Sacred Band of Thebes

text: This sentiment changed in 339 BC, when Thebes abruptly severed its alliance with Philip II (after being convinced by a speech from Demosthenes) and joined the Athenian-led Pan-Hellenic alliance against Macedonia, with the result being the annihilation of the Sacred Band in Chaeronea and the destruction of the city of Thebes itself in 335 BC by the Macedonians. In light of these actions, Athenians eventually changed their opinions on Thebes, now regarding it in a sympathetic light as a fallen ally. It was during this period that much of the accounts favorable to Thebans were at last written. Works by authors like Anaximenes of Lampsacus, Aristoxenus, Callisthenes, Daimachus, Dinarchus, and Ephorus are believed to have been written between 330 and 310 BC. Except for Dinarchus, almost all of them have been lost to history or survive only in fragments. Among them are Ephorus and Callisthenes, who were contemporaries of the Theban hegemony and the Sacred Band. The works of the latter two, however, survived long enough for later authors like Plutarch, Diodorus, and Polyaenus to base their works on.


title: Nature (journal)

text: Nature is a British weekly scientific journal founded and based in London, England. As a multidisciplinary publication, "Nature" features peer-reviewed research from a variety of academic disciplines, mainly in science and technology. It has core editorial offices across the United States, continental Europe, and Asia under the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature. "Nature" was one of the world's most cited scientific journals by the Science Edition of the 2019 "Journal Citation Reports" (with an ascribed impact factor of 42.778), making it one of the world's most-read and most prestigious academic journals. , it claimed an online readership of about three million unique readers per month.


title: Nature (journal)

text: Founded in autumn 1869, "Nature" was first circulated by Norman Lockyer and Alexander Macmillan as a public forum for scientific innovations. The mid-20th century facilitated an editorial expansion for the journal; "Nature" redoubled its efforts in explanatory and scientific journalism. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the creation of a network of editorial offices outside of Britain and the establishment of ten new supplementary, speciality publications (e.g. "Nature Materials"). Since the late 2000s, dedicated editorial and current affairs columns are created weekly, and electoral endorsements are featured. The primary source of the journal remains, as established at its founding, research scientists; editing standards are primarily concerned with technical readability. Each issue also features articles that are of general interest to the scientific community, namely business, funding, scientific ethics, and research breakthroughs. There are also sections on books, arts, and short science fiction stories.


title: Nature (journal)

text: The main research published in "Nature" consists mostly of papers (articles or letters) in lightly edited form. They are highly technical and dense, but, due to imposed text limits, they are typically summaries of larger work. Innovations or breakthroughs in any scientific or technological field are featured in the journal as either letters or news articles. The papers that have been published in this journal are internationally acclaimed for maintaining high research standards. Conversely, due to the journal's exposure, it has at various times been a subject of controversy for its handling of academic dishonesty, the scientific method, and news coverage. Fewer than 8% of submitted papers are accepted for publication. In 2007, "Nature" (together with "Science") received the Prince of Asturias Award for Communications and Humanity.


title: Nature (journal)

text: Nature mostly publishes research articles. Spotlight articles are not research papers but mostly news or magazine style papers and hence do not count towards impact factor nor receive similar recognition as research articles. Some spotlight articles are also paid by partners or sponsors.