January 02, 2021

Tracking and criminalising the EU's femicide epidemic

topic:	Women's rights
located:	Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Greece, Turkey, Sweden
editor:	Abby Klinkenberg

In a groundbreaking effort to better tackle gender-based violence - the “shadow pandemic” haunting the private sphere - Spain will become the first country in the European Union to formally count all femicides. As the European Institute for Gender Equality states: “we need rich and comparable data to properly measure femicide.” While the term “femicide” has been mobilised by Latin American feminists and activists since the 1990s, it has been slow to catch on in the European context. It is perhaps because of Spain’s (post-)colonial ties to Latin America that it is leading the EU in terms of data collection on femicides so as to better understand and address its root causes. 

As of 1 January, 2022, femicides will be analysed and accounted for according to a five-category framework that distinguishes between (one) femicide committed by a partner or ex-partner, (two) family femicide, (three) sexual femicide, (four) social femicide, and (five) vicarious femicide, the latter of which also takes into account the murders of minors/children as a means to harm women.

Previously, gender-based violence was only recorded for cases in which the murderer and victim were or had been in a relationship. This new system of classification is far more than a simple change in bookkeeping: as Spain’s Minister of Equality Irene Montero shared, “we have to recognise all of the victims and make visible all forms of violence… so that we can put in place policies for prevention, early detection and eradication.”

Spain is already one of two EU member states (the other being Sweden) that legally differentiate between intimate partner violence against women and the more general term “domestic violence.” This new system further cements Spain’s status as the vanguard of gender equality on the continent. 

In the ten years since the Istanbul Convention (offiically called the “Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence”) was introduced, all EU member states, and the EU itself, have agreed to combat gender-based violence. It should be noted that although Poland announced its imminent plans to withdraw from the convention in July 2020, this has yet to be realised. While Europe has made strides over the past decade (gender-related killings of women and girls in the private sphere have dropped by 13 percent) not nearly enough progress has been made. 

The COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant social distancing and lockdown measures have been often decried for amplifying the issues faced by survivors of gender-based violence. While no conclusive European trends have been traced through pandemic-era data, the picture becomes slightly clearer at the sub-regional level. From 2019 to 2020, even as the annual average of murdered women and girls decreased slightly in Eastern Europe and remained consistent in Northern Europe, this figure increased by five percent in Eastern Europe and by a world-leading 11 percent in Western Europe. 

While Spain has revamped its approach to collecting data about femicides, Greece is currently fielding calls for femicide to be legally registered as a separate crime in the wake of a spate of particularly brutal and gruesome murders (18 in total) throughout 2021. Adding femicide as a distinct motive to the country’s criminal code would be a first for a European Union member state. Furthermore, the Greek Ministry of Justice plans to “overhaul domestic violence legislation drafted more than a decade ago” to align with the standards set by the Istanbul Convention. 

Other EU member states (like Austria, France, and Germany) have been reckoning with high rates of femicide and the glaring insufficiency of their own policies aimed to combat gender-based violence. For instance, in Germany, where an EU-high 139 women were murdered in 2020, “every two-and-a-half days a woman… dies at the hands of her partner or former partner.” While this figure is harrowing, it is only the tip of the iceberg. This traditional definition of femicide (that only takes into account murders by current or former partners) is quite narrow and, unfortunately, quite common. By broadening it to include four additional contexts and descriptions, Spain’s new five-category framework is poised to expose the extent of the issue so that it can be better tackled. 

By ensuring that relevant and nuanced information is being collected about femicides, Spain is setting an example for the rest of the EU and the world: “we need evidence and data-driven policies,” said Cristina Fabre of the European Institute for Gender Equality. “If we don’t know the extent of killings and the root causes, we can’t have effective preventive measures.”

Photo by David von Diemar 

Call to Action

End the abuse of women in Botswana!

Support now