Special Issue Editors
(alphabetical order)
Santiago Boira, UNIVERSIDAD de ZARAGOZA, (Spain), sboira@unizar.es
Consuelo Corradi, LIBERA UNIVERSITÀ MARIA SS. ASSUNTA, (Italy), corradi@lumsa.it,
Chaime Marcuello-Servós, UNIVERSIDAD de ZARAGOZA, (Spain), chaime@unizar.es
Shalva Weil, HEBREW UNIVERSITY, (Israel), Shalva.weil@mail.huji.ac.il
Femicide is a scourge of humanity and a social problem which is still awaiting solutions. The term Femicide is a “neologism”, used by Diane Russell in 1976 in the first International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women in Brussels and then quickly disseminated among feminists and sociologists working in the field of violence. There are different approaches to this phenomenon. Femicide is the voluntary homicide of a woman, because she is a woman. However, femicide is intrinsically different from homicide. It is more than a way of naming the facts, it includes a cultural change and political agenda.
In 2013, the Vienna Declaration on Femicide in the United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, proposed “that femicide is the killing of women and girls because of their gender, which can take the form of, inter alia: (1) the murder of women as a result of intimate partner violence; (2) the torture and misogynist slaying of women (3) killing of women and girls in the name of “honour”; (5) targeted killing of women and girls in the context of armed conflict; (5) dowry-related killings of women; (6) killing of women and girls because of their sexual orientation and gender identity; (7) the killing of aboriginal and indigenous women and girls because of their gender; (8) female infanticide and gender-based sex selection foeticide; (9) genital mutilation related deaths; (10) accusations of witchcraft; and (11) other femicides connected with gangs, organized crime, drug dealers, human trafficking and the proliferation of small arms”.
The social context, motivations, characteristics of the perpetrator, and victim-perpetrator relationship which define the killing of a woman differentiate them from those which define the killing of a man. The Academic Council of the United Nations System has described femicide as a global issue which demands urgent public action. A great share of femicide, ranging worldwide from 45% to 65% of total female victims, is the result of intimate partner violence. Global prevalence studies show that the proportion of murdered women who are killed by a partner is six times higher than the proportion of murdered men by the same type of perpetrator.
This Special Issue aims at assessing state-of-the-art research on this contested topic, by looking at the different levels in which research can improve knowledge and action. The Special Issue seeks to bring together different theoretical perspectives explaining lethal violence against women, and especially to throw light on the theoretical underpinnings claryfying what femicide is and what is the relationship with relevant social phenomena such as poverty, margination, gender inequality and more. Country studies i.e. interpretations of available data and policies linking theory, research and action, are encouraged.
Submission deadline: end of March 2015