Analysis of the Increase in Femicide Following Its Classification as a Crime in the Digital World

Introduction

The authors Russell and Radford (1992) use the term femicide to refer to the murder of women by men motivated by misogyny. As Heise (1989, p. 3) states, “This is not casual intimidation, the risk factor is being a woman.” Victims are chosen for their gender; the message is one of domination. Violence is the product of a structural system of oppression in which women have been positioned below men on the scale of value in a clear masculine hegemony of male virility. Aggressors feel entitled to have control over women's lives and the resulting deaths, classified as femicide, represent the most extreme form of gender terrorism (Sagot, 1994). Femicide implies a feeling of direct hatred against women and manifests itself in response to a perceived threat to two fundamental laws of masculinity and patriarchy, the first being the norm of control and possession of the female body, and the second being male superiority (Segato, 2006). It is clear that such deaths are not the result of opportunistic homicide or a sporadic encounter between the victim and her killer, it usually comes from a need to erase the identity of women in an act of manifest hatred evidenced by the viciousness and cruelty with which the victims die. These crimes occur in all societies and have occurred throughout history (Carcedo, 2006).

Deaths arising from gender-based violence are preventable since they are largely foreseeable rather than spontaneous. Victims have typically been subjected to a number of previous threats or aggressions and, when such murders are investigated, it is no surprise to find multiple allegations of mistreatment, female subjugation, discrimination and violence in the offender's record. Furthermore, women who have been beaten by their partners, or others, have often been failed by the social phenomenon of “blaming the victim” for what has happened to them (Bunch and Carrillo, 1995), which contributes to masking the extent of the problem. Consequently, the exact scale of the figures of women who are mistreated cannot be known, leading to inadequate action and resources being directed to deal with the issue and stop it effectively (Carcedo and Ordoñez, 2010). In Latin America, the term femicide or feminicide—as it is known in countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Venezuela—emerged in the 1990s and was used to describe the murder of girls and women in the city of Juarez, Chihuahua state, on Mexico's northern border, the victims of which were found with signs of violence and sexual abuse (Lagarde, 1999). In these murders, two messages were implicitly communicated by the men who committed them. There was a vertical expression of their power over women; and then a horizontal expression from the murderer to other men as a demonstration of their control of certain territories and their freedom to act with impunity and to murder again at will. The slogan, well known in Latin America, “woman's body; danger of death,” might have been coined for Ciudad Juarez (Segato, 2004). The increase in murders of women in the city was attributed by the authorities to social behavior or serial killers and there was opposition to defending the rights of women, who were, if anything, blamed for the crimes, being characterized as prostitutes, women in miniskirts, of easy virtue, fun-loving, et cetera. The response received by relatives of the victims was one of indifference or even hostility (Snaidas, 2009). After the emergence of the concept of femicide in Mexico, Guatemala was the next to focus attention on the phenomenon, having the second highest figures of violence and murder against women according to the National Civil Police of Guatemala (Carcedo, 2006). The characterization of women as the guilty party is precisely the inverse of the reality of the situation and guilt becomes a legitimizing argument for the conduct of men (Aguilar, 2006; Hagemann-White, Kelly and Rumkens, 2010).