Femicide: Pathways for research and mobilization across the world

Prof Consuelo Corradi, Department of Human Studies, Lumsa University (Rome, Italy)

The Crime, Justice and Society presents:

Femicide: pathways for research and mobilization across the world

Prof Consuelo Corradi, Department of Human Studies, Lumsa University (Rome, Italy)

About the seminar:
In the last two decades, the notion of femicide has increasingly been used in criminology and the social sciences. It was coined to reveal the sexual politics of the murder of women and over the years it has proven to be strong in raising awareness on this social problem. This lecture will start by presenting the notion today, as well as the context in which the term femicide was first formulated. Next, it will present the impact on the mobilization of women’s movements in different countries and cultural areas of the world, in particular in Mexico and Argentina, Italy and South Korea. Finally, the presentation will analyse problems arising when femicide is applied to empirical research. Today, the most frequent meaning of femicide is killing a woman because she is a woman, emphasising gender and misogyny as the main motive. However, available literature on homicide, family and intimate partner violence offers a more complex picture on why men kill women. The gender interpretation embedded in the activist use of term femicide is powerful towards mobilisation, but it may be imprecise when it is applied to criminological research. In conclusion, the presentation will address some of these empirical problems and how to solve them.