What Femicide Is, and How Hatred Toward Women Leads to Murder

According to statistics, most acts of violence against women are committed by men. They are most often the killers, rapists, and abusers of those they live with or have romantic or sexual relationships with. Most often, their motives are gender-based: rooted in prejudice and hatred toward women.

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What Makes Femicide Distinct

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Sociologist and feminist activist Diana E. H. Russell introduced the term femicide in 1976, defining it as “the killing of women by men because they are women.” With this definition, she sought to distinguish femicide from gender-neutral homicide and to emphasize the patriarchal, sexist, and misogynistic motives behind it.

Femicide is also described as a policy of killing women. This refers to the fact that authorities in many countries ignore sexism as a root cause of violence, thereby tolerating it. Even after the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, this problem remains unresolved and relevant. This is because society and governments do not always take the warning signs of femicide and its prevention seriously enough.

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Preconditions of Femicide

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In the book Every Three Days. Why Men Kill Women and How We Should Respond, journalists Laura Backes and Margherita Bettoni note that femicide is a structural problem, not a “stroke of fate,” an isolated crime, or an internal conflict within a specific relationship.

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Statistics confirm this: women are disproportionately likely to be killed at home, within a family environment. Most often, femicide victims are women in romantic or sexual relationships with men. According to the UN, in 2024, about 50,000 women and girls were killed by partners or other family members. Women accounted for 53% of victims killed at home and 66% of victims killed by partners. Femicide is rooted in systemic domestic violence. Women are not killed suddenly — it often begins with seemingly “harmless” jokes, mockery, and reinforcement of stereotypes, and then escalates into increasingly aggressive actions:

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• psychological violence: humiliation, insults;

• physical violence: beatings, torture, mutilation;

• sexual violence: rape, harassment;

• reproductive violence: sex-selective abortions (if the fetus is known to be “a girl”), forced abortions, abortion bans, forced pregnancy.

Destructive traditions are also part of femicide, including so-called “honor killings,” when family members kill a woman for violating patriarchal norms: refusing marriage, behaving “too openly,” or disobeying a husband.

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What Ideas Lead to Femicide

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Femicide directly stems from sexist, patriarchal, and misogynistic beliefs about women. Beginning in the 1970s, Diana E. H. Russell and Rebecca Dobash studied the causes of domestic violence, including cases that ended in murder. Their research showed that perpetrators can be very different men, and their violence is not always linked to trauma, difficult childhoods, or substance use. Instead, what unites perpetrators are misogynistic beliefs and patriarchal attitudes.

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These findings were groundbreaking at the time, as violence had previously been explained mainly by life circumstances rather than perpetrators’ beliefs. In particular, killers believed that:

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• The man is the head of the family, and his authority cannot be challenged.

• The wife has no right to disagree, resist, or refuse her “family duties”.

• The wife can be “punished” with force if she becomes “undisciplined”.

• Women use men.

• Women must serve their partners domestically, emotionally, and sexually.

• A woman must remain faithful, stay with her partner, and never try to leave.

Femicide is an expression of the desire to establish absolute control over a woman. It arises from viewing women as objects and male property, from contempt for women’s bodily autonomy, and from the normalization of gender-based violence. Until it reaches its most extreme and irreversible form.

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It is preceded by actions often seen as harmless: jokes about a girl who “sleeps with everyone,” condemnation of female sexuality, restricting a woman’s freedom out of jealousy, and beliefs about a so-called “female nature” limited to childcare and domestic work.

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This is why it is important to pay attention even to the smallest manifestations of sexism, especially in ourselves. It is important to reflect on how women are spoken about and, when possible, to challenge sexist jokes, stereotypes, and objectifying comments. Misogynistic language (“slurs referring to women,” derogatory labels) should not be normalized. It is also important to trust women more often: listen to survivors, do not dismiss their experiences, and do not engage in victim-blaming.

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*Global study on homicide, 2019 Edition. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime — https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/global-study-on-homicide-2019.html