labrys,
études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet / décembre 2013 -julho / dezembro 2013
Diana Russell, participating
in a mass march
organized by Eve Ensler to protest the many vicious unsolved
rape-torture-mutilation-femicides occurring year after year in Juarez,
Mexico.
DEFINING FEMICIDE: THE MOST EXTREME FORM OF VIOLENCE AGAINST
WOMEN AND GIRLS
Diana E. H. Russell
ABSTRACT
"Defining Feminism" is a revised version of the introductory
speech that Dr. Russell delivered at the United Nations Symposium on Femicide
in Vienna, Austria, in November 2012. In it she provides a brief
history of this term in the 20th century, and her public testimony about
it to a large International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women in Brussels,
Belgium, in 1976. Dr. Russell documents the evolution in definitions
of femicide, including the unfortunate competition that has arisen between
her current definition and that of the term feminicide. Both terms
are now widely used in Latin America. However, Dr. Russell maintains
that the current definition of feminicide does not meet the requirements
of an acceptable definition.
KEYWORDS
definition of femicide; intimate femicide; intimate partner femicide;
sexualfemicide; mass femicide; overt femicide; covert femicide; social
femicide; femicidal pornography; rape femicide; "honor" femicide;
gang femicides;lesbiphobic femicides; drug-related femicides; battery-related
femicides; acquaintance femicide; dowry-related femicides; familial femicide;
strangerfemicide; war-related femicide; torture-related femicides; female-perpetrated
femicides
This article is based on the introductory speech that I delivered at the United Nations Symposium on Femicide in Vienna, Austria, on November 26, 2012. There, I defined femicide as the killing of females by males because they are female. Following is a brief history of the use of this important feminist concept, starting in 1974.
I first heard the term femicide during a conversation I had with a feminist acquaintance called Sally in London in 1974. Because the term resonated so powerfully for me, I pressed Sally for more information. She told me that a U.S. writer called Carol Orlock was editing an anthology on femicide. Unfortunately, she had no idea how to contact Orlock or where she resided. I decided to adopt the term femicide and thought about how best to define it.
While attending an international feminist camp in Denmark in 1974, I came up with the idea of organizing an International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women. Since no one else was interested in my idea, I proceeded to organize it on my own. This International Tribunal finally took place in Brussels, Belgium, in 1976. This four-day radical women-only feminist global speak-out was attended by about 2,000 women from 40 countries. I decided that this was the ideal setting for me to launch the term femicide by testifying about this lethal misogynist crime in this large gathering. I was thrilled when Simone de Beauvoir saluted the International Tribunal as "the beginning of the radical decolonization of women" (Russell and Van de Ven, 1976: ii).
Following are two excerpts of the testimony on femicide that I delivered at the International Tribunal: We must realize that a lot of homicide is in fact 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 a long time. But since it involves mere females, there was no name for it" until I learned that US author Carol Orlock had used the term femicide (Merrill and Russell, 1976 ;144).
Following is an edited version of the examples of femicide
that Louise Merrill obtained from the pages of the local San Francisco
newspapers:
Mariko Sato (age 25): Stabbed, hacked and shot.
Her body was stripped from the waist down, wrapped in a blanket and stuffed
in a trunk in a San Francisco apartment.
Darlene Maxwell (age 28): Tied at the neck, wrists,
and ankles with a rope. Gagged with her own underwear, strangled
and left in an industrial area of San Francisco.
Mary E. Robinson (age 23): Stabbed eighteen times
by her boyfriend. "She called me a coward," he said. "She
said I was afraid to fight for my rights." San Francisco.
Cassie Riley (age 13): Beaten, stripped, raped,
drowned.
Sonya Johnson (age 4): Raped and
clubbed, possibly strangled. She was missing eleven days before
her body was found and identified.
Arlis Perry (age 19): Stabbed, strangled.
Raped with altar candles in a church on the Stanford campus. She
had been stripped from the waist down.
Maude Burgess (age 83): Left naked
and spread-eagled on her bed, her arms and legs tied with sheets.
It was two days before her body was found. A pillow slip had been
pulled over her head. San Francisco.
Rosie Lee Norris (age 32): Stabbed to death in
her apartment in San Francisco. Her body was discovered, with her
robe and night gown down around her waist, on December 24 (Merrill and
Russell, 1976, p. 146).
I then read the following passages written by Merrill in the hope that they would clarify the meaning of femicide still more. Men tell us not to take a morbid interest in these atrocities. The epitome of triviality is alleged to be a curiosity about "the latest rape and the latest murder." The murder and mutilation of a woman is not considered a political event. Men tell us that they cannot be blamed for what a few maniacs do. Yet the very process of denying the political content of the terror helps to perpetuate it, keeps us weak, vulnerable, and fearful.
These are the twentieth century witchburnings. The "maniacs" who commit these atrocities are acting out the logical conclusion of the woman-hatred which pervades the entire culture. Recently, this has resulted in several pornographic movies whose climax is said to be the actual killing and dismembering of a woman. These so-called "snuff" movies are now being imitated. For example, a movie shown in the U.S. is advertising that it is impossible for audiences to tell whether the killing of the woman is real or not.
"The women slaughtered in these movies have no names. The names of those I have read out to you today will soon be obliterated. No demonstrations have accompanied them to the grave, no protests rocked the city, no leaflets were passed out, no committees were formed. But today we have remembered them. And tomorrow we must act to stop femicide!" (Merrill and Russell, 1976: 146).
This testimony clearly wasn't written in the language typically used in official documents. It is the language of the women's liberation movements in the United States and some European countries in 1976. Whether or not women are aware of it, we are all greatly indebted to these movements for initiating and organizing the many and diverse struggles to combat the numerous different forms of patriarchal oppression and exploitation of women and girls.
Although this testimony does not provide an explicit definition of femicide, it nevertheless implies that this term refers to the misogynist killings of women and girls. In 1992, when the term femicide was still virtually unknown, Jill Radford and I defined it in our anthology titled, Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing, as "the killing of women by men because they are women" (Radford and Russell, 1992: xiv). We noted that "We have long needed such a term as an alternative to the gender-neutral [term] homicide" (Radford and Russell, 1992: xiv). Nine years later in 2001, I realized that the definition of Femicide should include girls and women as victims. So I redefined the term as "the killing of females by males because they are female" (Russell and Harmes, 2001: 3).
This remains my definition of femicide today. It is comparable to the definition of the most prevalent form of racist murders in the United States as the killing of people of color by white people because of their race. Thus according to my definition, murders or killings of females that are perpetrated by males, but not because of their gender, are not femicides. For example: the accidental killings of women or girls by males, or the murders of women by men in which the victims' gender is irrelevant, say, in the course of a robbery, or murders of women by their female partners, I refer to these crimes as murders or homicides.
In the overwhelming majority of cases of females who are
killed by males, the males are motivated by the gender of their female
victims. For example, murders in which males kill their wives and
unmarried female partners, are by far the most prevalent form of femicide.
Researchers on these crimes, who refer to them as intimate partner femicides,
have documented that these murders are typically motivated in whole or
in part by sexist or misogynist attitudes.
Female-Perpetrated Killings
Given my
definition of femicide that includes only the killings of females by males
because of their gender, the question emerges: How to categorize the mothers
who kill their female babies due to male-child-preference, as in China,
India, and many other Asian countries, resulting in an estimated fifty
million "missing" girls and women in India, and a similar estimate
in China?
[i]And what about the untrained women whose unhygienic methods of
genital mutilation cause the deaths of thousands of young girls in many
African and Muslim countries and sub-cultures?
These are but two examples of what I call female-on-female murders. Although these crimes are based on the gender of the victim(s), most of these women are required to act as agents of the male-dominated patriarchal societies. For example, if mothers don't impose genital mutilation on their young daughters where this form of patriarchal torture is practiced, then no man will marry them. Women who remain single and childless are typically greatly despised and disparaged in these cultures, and often mired in poverty and subject to sexist persecution. Similarly, many mothers in countries with extreme male-child-preference are at high risk of becoming victims of femicide if they refuse to kill their daughters, or starve them so that their sons can be well-fed.
I consider the women who kill other women or girls because
of their gender as collaborators, for example, East Indian mothers-in-law
who assist their sons in committing femicides of their wives because they
believe, or pretend to believe, that their daughters-in-laws' families
have provided inadequate amounts of dowry. Similarly, some Jews
became collaborators with Nazis during the Holocaust resulting in
the deaths of other Jews. This is a common phenomenon with all oppressed
peoples.
The Femicide vs. Feminicide Debate
When I was
invited to a Seminar on femicide in Juarez, Mexico, in 2004, that was
organized by feminist anthropologist and Congresswoman Marcela Lagarde,
she requested my permission to translate femicide into Spanish as feminicide
or feminicidio. Naturally, I consented to her request.
In 2006, Lagarde decided to redefine feminicide, adding the following clause to my earlier definition of femicide: the killing of women (not females) by men (not males) because they are female, and "the impunity with which these crimes are typically treated." I have since heard that Lagarde and her supporters now claim that she coined the term feminicide (Cabrera, 2010: 18).
However, it's not legitimate to consider the redefinition of a term as constituting coining it. Furthermore, a sound definition must avoid making the definition of the phenomenon being defined conditional on the response to it. So, for example, if a wife-batterer finally kills his wife because she wants a divorce, he would be guilty of femicide. But if he is arrested, prosecuted, and found guilty of this crime, then by Lagarde's definition, he is no longer guilty of feminicide because the case wasn't treated with impunity. This demonstrates why Lagarde's revised definition of feminicide doesn't meet the criterion of a sound definition.
Unfortunately, a very destructive conflict has developed in many Latin American countries based on whether feminists there have chosen to adopt the terms femicide or feminicide. The feminists who have adopted feminicide typically refuse to work with those who have adopted femicide. I don't know if the feminist activists who use the term femicide also refuse to work with those using feminicide. I do recall a Latin American woman reporting that she had adopted the term feminicide but defined it in the same way that femicide is defined.
I had a very upsetting experience in connection with these two terms when I was invited by a feminist organization in El Salvador to deliver several speeches on femicide in March 2008. Because this organization used the term feminicide, I informed them that I only use the term femicide, and that I didn't feel comfortable accepting their invitation because of the hostility that had developed between feminists in Latin America who used feminicide vs femicide. The organizer repeatedly insisted that her organization defined feminicide in the same way that I defined femicide. So I accepted the nvitation, and delivered several speeches on femicide at their conference.
After I returned to my home in Berkeley, I learned that there were two other organizations in El Salvador that also used the term feminicide, and one that used the term femicide. I was horrified to learn that while feminists from the two former organizations had been invited to attend the Conference, the activists at the organization that used the term femicide, had not been invited. This made it clear that the organizer with whom I had corresponded had deliberately lied to me.
Despite this disillusioning experience, I am thrilled by the increasing number of countries in Latin America in which feminists have adopted the term femicide and feminicide. Typically, these feminists have also founded anti-femicide/feminicide activist organizations, several of which have succeeded in their demands that their patriarchal governments pass laws against femicide/feminicide.
When I attended the United Nations Symposium on Femicide in Vienna on November 26, 2012, the speaker from Chile reported that some men there feel so threatened by feminists' adoption of the term femicide, that the statistics on intimate partner femicides -- referring to men who killed their wives and/or unmarried female partners -- has subsequently declined.
I very much hope that the hostility that has developed between feminists using the terms femicide and feminicide in Latin America won't spread to other countries. For this reason, I was very distressed to learn that Rashida Manjoo, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women, wrote in her United Nations Summary Report that "adopting feminicide in English could prove useful when State accountability was [is]at stake" (Manjoo, 2011: 4) I strongly oppose this suggestion, for reasons that are hopefully now obvious. I consider it desirable to adhere to one term, namely femicide, and one definition -- regardless of the languages spoken in different countries.
The term femicide is now spreading to Europe. Since the European Parliament has a special concern about this crime in Latin America, they have adopted the term feminicide. This is also the term used in the only book on this lethal crime published in Europe to date: Spinelli (2008). Needless to say, I'm disappointed by Spinelli's choice of this term. However, I was, and am, extremely gratified that the United Nations has adopted the term femicide (see for example, Manjoo, 2011 and 2012).
With the help of the Internet, I was able to locate Carol Orlock many years after I had adopted her term femicide -- although she could no longer remember how she had defined it. I was greatly relieved to learn how delighted she was to hear about the dissemination of her naming of this most extreme form of violence against women, and the increasing impact it is having on awareness about this misogynist crime and its role in politicizing the killing of women and girls.
notes
[i] See the website of Rita Banerji, Founder of the 50 Million Missing
Campaign in India. This shockingly high number is based on her careful
estimate of the number of femicides occurring in this exceedingly patriarchal
nation.
Bibliography
Books
Fregoso, Rosa-Linda, and Bejarano, Cynthia. (Eds.) 2010.
Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas. Durham and London:
Duke University Press.
Radford, Jill, and Russell, Diana E. H. (Eds.) 1992.
Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing. New York: Twayne Publishers;
and 1992,
Buckingham, England: Open University Press.
Russell, Diana E. H., and Harmes, Roberta. (Eds.) 2001.
Femicide in Global Perspective. New York: Teachers College Press.
Russell, Diana E. H., and Radford, Jill. (Eds.).
2006. Feminicidio: La Politica del Asesinato de las Mujeres.
Translated into Spanish by Tlatolli Ollin. Mexico, D.F.: Universidad
Nacional Autonoma de México.
Russell, Diana E. H., and Harmes, Roberta. (Eds.) 2006.
Feminicidio: Una Perspective Global. Translated into Spanish by
Guillermo Vega Saragoza. Mexico, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de
México.
Spinelli, Barbara. 2008. Femminicidio: Dalla Denuncia
Sociale al Riconoscimento Giuridico Internazionale. Milan: Franco
Angeli.
Chapters, Introductions, Testimony Caputi, Jane. 1992.
Advertising femicide: Lethal violence against women in pornography and
gorenography. In Radford, Jill, and Russell, Diana E. H. (Eds.)
1992. Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing. New York: Twayne
Publishers.
Caputi, Jane, and Russell, Diana E. H. 1992. Femicide:
Sexist terrorism against women. In Radford, Jill, and Russell, Diana
E. H. (Eds.) 1992. Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing.
New York: Twayne Publishers.
de Beauvoir, Simone. 1976. Preface. In Diana E.
H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven. Eds. and Authors, Crimes Against
Women: The Proceedings of the International Tribunal of Crimes Against
Women. Milbrae, California: Les Femmes.
Domingo, Chris. 1992. What the white man won't tell
us: Report from the Berkeley Clearinghouse on Femicide. In Radford,
Jill, and Russell, Diana E. H. (Eds.) 1992. Femicide:
The Politics of Woman Killing. New York: Twayne Publishers; and
1992, Buckingham, England: Open University Press.
Lagarde y de los Rios, Marcela. 2006. Introduction to
Diana E. H. Russell and Jill Radford (Eds.). Feminicidio: La Politica
del Asesinato de las Mujeres. Introduction to the Spanish edition
by Marcela Lagarde y de los Rios. Translated into Spanish
by Tlatolli Ollin. Mexico, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de
México.
Lagarde y de los Rios, Marcela. 2006. Introduction to
Diana E. H. Russell and Roberta Harmes. (Eds.) Feminicidio:
Una Perspective Global. Translated into Spanish by Guillermo Vega Saragoza.
Mexico, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México.
Merrill, Louise, and Russell Diana E. H. 1976. "Femicide."
In Diana E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven. Eds. and Authors,
Crimes Against Women: The Proceedings of the International Tribunal of
Crimes Against Women. Milbrae, California: Les Femmes. pp.
145-146. (Currently available from Russell Publications, 2432 Grant
Street, Berkeley, California 94703, USA.)
Radford, Jill, and Russell, Diana E. H. (Eds.) 1992.
Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing. New York: Twayne Publishers;
and 1992, Buckingham, England: Open University Press.
Russell, Diana E. H. 1990. Torture and Femicide.
In Diana E. H. Russell. Rape in Marriage. Revised/expanded edition.
Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, pp. 273-285.
Reports
Manjoo, Rashida. 2011, August 1. Report of the Special
Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences.
Submitted to the United Nations General Assembly.
Manjoo, Rashida. 2012, October 12. Report of the Special
Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences.
Summary report on the expert group meeting on gender-motivated killings
of women.
Russell, Diana E. H. 2009. Femicide: Politicizing the
Killing of Females. In Strengthening Understanding of Femicide: Using
research to galvanize action and accountability. PATH, InterCambios,
MRC, WHO: Washington DC.
Electronic Texts
Munoz Cabrera, Pamela. 2010. Intersecting Violences:
A review of feminist theories and debates on violence against women and
poverty in Latin America. Central American Women's Network (CAWN).
Videotapes
Russell, Diana E. H. 2011, December 1. The Origin and
Importance of the Term Femicide. On Diana Russell's Facebook.
Russell, Diana E. H. 2012, July 23. Why the National
Coalition Against Domestic Violence should adopt the term Femicide.
On Diana Russell's Facebook.
BIOGRAPHY
Diana E. H. Russell, Ph.D., a Professor Emerita of Sociology, is one of
the foremost experts on sexual violence against women and girls in the
world. For the last 40 years she has been deeply engaged in research and
activism on this massive social problem. She has authored, co-authored,
edited, and/or co-edited 17 books, mostly on sexual violence, which have
become authoritative sources on rape (including wife rape), incestuous
abuse, femicide, and pornography. Dr. Russell was co-recipient of
the prestigious C. Wright Mills Award for The Secret Trauma for outstanding
social science research. Check out her website at
www.dianarussell.com.
labrys,
études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet / décembre 2013 -julho / dezembro 2013