Rise of Femicide

Rise of Femicide

Can naming a deadly crime help prevent it?
Aaron Shulman December 29, 2010 | 12:00 am



Femicide. What is that? The term has a relatively obscure origin, and it has made an unlikely journey into the political bloodstream of Latin America. It was popularized in 1976 by Diana Russell, a 37-year-old professor at Mills College in Oakland, California, who heard the term when a friend told her that Carol Orlock, an American feminist, was working on a book about it. Orlockâ€™s book was never published, but, by using the term in her own work, Russell was able to give it life. That year, Russell was heading up a five-day global feminist speakout in Brussels called the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, which brought together 2,000 feminists from over 40 different countries at the cityâ€™s Palais des CongrÃ¨s, in order to denounce violence against women and mobilize those present to fight it. In an opening address, Simone de Beauvoir called the event â€œthe start of a radical decolonization of women,â€ but it quickly dissolved into an organizational disaster.



Until recently, that chaotic moment was the termâ€™s most dramatic appearance on the world stage. Russell returned to California, where she attempted to flesh out her idea in several academic papers and an anthology called Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing. By using the term â€œfemicide,â€ she intended to highlight and stigmatize a specific type of crime. Russell hoped to promote the idea that the killing of womenâ€”whether perpetrated explicitly because victims are female or simply because women as a class can be uniquely vulnerable to aggravated, lethal attacks by menâ€”is a distinctive problem that must be stigmatized and combated. Dubbing the phenomenon with a unique name, she believed, would be the first step toward reducing the killing of women worldwide.

The idea did not catch on. After debuting femicide at the Tribunal in Brussels, Russell began using the word in her work, but its impact was minimal. â€œI did various things,â€ she tells me. â€œThe books, organizing a speakout, making speeches around the country. Even right after talking about it in a keynote speech, nobody mentioned it, even though I stressed it. I really sort of despaired.â€

Then, something surprising happened. Part of the problem with â€œfemicideâ€ was that it was difficult to explain in a way that the public could easily comprehend. While horrendous killings of women, motivated by misogyny, certainly occurred around the world, the concept was still slightly amorphous. The 1989 â€œMontreal Massacre,â€ a mass shooting of women at a technical school in Canada, for example, wasnâ€™t necessarily identical to killings resulting from domestic violence, sex trafficking, or the deaths of women in sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East. Nevertheless, it turned out there were societies that understood instinctively what Russell was referring to: Certain regions of Latin America had been torn apart by epidemics of woman-killing far out of proportion with the deaths of women produced by internal civil war or drug violence. For years, activists in those areas had been battling against their own crime with no name, and when Russellâ€™s word made it into Spanish, they embraced her.

In 2004, Marcela Lagarde, a prominent Mexican politician and feminist, invited Russell to give a talk at a conference in the border city of Ciudad JuÃ¡rez after reading her anthology. Lagarde considered â€œfemicideâ€ an apt description for the mysterious, macabre mass killings of women that had been going on in JuÃ¡rez since 1993â€”a phenomenon which had attracted a great deal of international attention, inspiring numerous books and films. Lagarde wanted to turn Russellâ€™s idea into a political crusade. She chaired a commission on femicide in the Mexican congress, and promoted the term at events throughout Latin America.


Thus, the idea of â€œfemicideâ€ struck a chord. In 2008, prompted by a domestic campaign and international pressure, the Guatemalan congress passed Decree-22, the Law Against Femicide and Other Forms of Violence Against Women, which listed in 28 articles a number of prosecutable types of violence against women, including economic and psychological violence, and declared the goal of guaranteeing â€œthe life, liberty, integrity, dignity, protection, and equality of all women before the law.â€ Guatemala also set up the Office of the Presidential Commission Against Femicide, tasked with implementing the law and creating an anti-femicide unit in the national police, launching anti-femicide publicity campaigns, and standing up public prosecutorial offices that specialize in violence against women.

So femicide, an obscure and rather academic concept developed by a professor in Oakland, had been pressed into service by a nation at war with its own cultural demons. But itâ€™s worth asking: Does a new term have the power to bring safety to Guatemalan women? On the one hand, the word has certainly affected Guatemalan culture, becoming a part of the national lexicon and entering the speech of everyday people as well as sensationalist tabloids like Nuestro Diario. And there has been a significant increase in reports of violence against women brought to the policeâ€”27,000 in the first six months of 2010, according to Alba Trejo, of Guatemalaâ€™s Presidential Commission Against Femicide. Whatâ€™s more, the word has been a useful tool for people trying to roll back Guatemalaâ€™s culture of impunity, providing publicity and legitimacy to anti-femicide groups like the Survivorâ€™s Foundation, which have found it easier to send offenders to jail. It has also increased punishments, helping to secure the previously unimaginable sentences of 163 years for each of the men who participated in a high-profile set of murders of three young girls by machete.


Ultimately, the success of Russellâ€™s project will depend on political will. This is a question facing not only Guatemala, but all countries where a culture of woman-killing has taken rootâ€”an alarming proportion of the planet. â€œFemicideâ€ could be a term that changes the way people think, and act, regarding gender-based violence worldwide, or it could simply remain an interesting footnote in the annals of linguistic and legal history.

Aaron Shulman was a 2009-10 Fulbright Fellow in Guatemala.
December 29, 2010 (one we missed and still want to share)

Source URL: http://www.tnr.com/femicide-guatemala-decree-22

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