“The Kingston Police are considering this death to be a femicide as it occurred in the context of intimate partner violence. A femicide, though not yet defined in the Criminal law, refers to the killing of women and girls because of their gender.”
Increasingly, police and the media are turning to this word or other similar phrases, such as intimate partner homicide or intimate partner violence, when they respond to incidents involving assaults or killings of women.
But where did the word femicide originate?
Some history
John Corry, an English topographer and historian, apparently was the first to use the word femicide, in his 1801 work, A satirical view of London at the commencement of the nineteenth century, which provided a look at London’s social life and customs, although I couldn’t find the specific context in which he used the word.
It appeared next in Wharton’s Law Lexicon, an impressive tome by American Francis Wharton, which carried a weighty subtitle: Forming an Epitome of the Law of England and Containing Full Explanations of Technical Terms and Phrases Thereof, Both Ancient and Modern.
Femicide began to make its way into more common use at the 1976 International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, held in Belgium. Diana Russell, a South African feminist and activist, and the lead organizer of the tribunal, 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 for a long time.”
Since 1976, the term femicide has been more and more frequently used to describe the killing of women and girls because of their gender. Some limit their use of the word to killings committed by men; many of us do not. And, while not all femicides take place in the context of intimate partner violence (IPV), almost 40 per cent of all murders of women do, as was the case in Kingston last weekend.
Where we are now
In 2015, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women called on all countries to establish femicide observatories or some other means to track and analyse the killing of women.
The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability was launched on December 6, 2017, Canada’s National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women and the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. It conducts, mobilizes, exchanges and promotes research and knowledge to prevent femicide and other forms of male violence against women and girls in Canada and globally.
Recommendation 79 of the CKW inquest calls on the federal government to “explore adding the term femicide and its definition to the Criminal Code.” So far, no action in this direction has been taken, and there are certainly arguments on both sides of doing so.
However, this recommendation, along with the jury’s first — for Ontario to declare intimate partner violence to be an epidemic (a recommendation that was reflected in recommendation V. 14 from the Mass Casualty Commission, which called on all levels of government in Canada “to declare gender-based, intimate partner and family violence to be an epidemic”) — have proven to be invaluable public education and awareness tools, leading to rich conversations involving not just the usual stakeholders, but community members at large who want to make where they live as safe as possible for everyone who lives there. While the province of Ontario has chosen — so far — not to make the declaration called for by the inquest, more than 100 municipalities have.
Language matters. Here’s just one example of a great public education campaign that shows how. In 2017, Lanark County Interval House and Community Support launched a campaign called See It Name It Change It (SINICI) to break the silence that is too often the response to gender-based violence. The campaign grew out of a series of community forums held in 2016 in four eastern Ontario counties where women and other family members had been killed in situations of IPV. It calls on people to see the gender-based violence in their communities and to name it for what it is in order to change the conversation and take steps to end it. SINICI has since been adopted and adapted in other communities in Ontario and beyond.
The word femicide – whether or not it ever becomes part of the Criminal Code – is an important tool in the work to raise public awareness about the killing of women and girls because of their gender. In the same way, declaring IPV to be an epidemic, whether at the municipal, provincial or federal level, helps people see this violence for what it is: a society-wide problem requiring a society-wide solution.
I commend the Kingston Police Force, police in other communities and the media for daring to use the right word – femicide – when writing and talking about this issue.