Femicide And The Law

Focusing on femicide, this book draws upon, whilst also providing a contemporary re-evaluation of, Carol Smart's innovative approach to the law question as first outlined in her ground-breaking book, Feminism and the Power of Law (Routledge 1989).

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This thought-provoking book conceptualizes femicide as a multifaceted human rights violation and proposes state responsibility for group-related risks of violence against women and girls. In doing so, it reassesses the concept of femicide, analysing it in view of the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, as well as several facets of human rights.

Focusing on femicide, this book provides a contemporary re-evaluation of Carol Smart’s innovative approach to the law question as first outlined in her ground-breaking book, Feminism and the Power of Law (Routledge 1989). Smart advocated turning to the legal domain not so much for demanding law reforms as construing it as a site on which to contest gender and more particularly, gendered constructions of women’s experiences. Over the last 30 to 40 years, feminist law scholars and activists have launched scathing trans-jurisdictional critiques of the operation of provocation defences in hundreds of femicide cases. The evidence unearthed by feminist scholars that these defences operate in profoundly sexed ways is unequivocal. Accordingly, femicide cases have become critically important sites for feminist engagement and intervention across numerous jurisdictions. Exploring an area of criminal law that was not one of Smart’s own focal concerns, this book both honours and extends Smart’s work by approaching femicide as a site of engagement and counter-discourse that calls into question hegemonic representations of gendered relationships. Femicide cases thus provide a way to continue the endlessly valuable discursive work Smart advocated and practised in other fields of law: both in articulating alternative accounts of gendered relationships and in challenging law’s power to disqualify women’s experiences of violence while privileging men’s feelings and rights.

This book explores femicide, and scrutinizes the three key American criminal doctrines usually applied in its cases: provocation; the felony murder rule; self-defence. The book also explores the influence of the American Model Penal Code, and proposes, connected to the various criminal doctrines applicable to femicide, a focused and detailed amendment to the Code containing unique features and a formula providing a socio-legal response to issues that the author believes have not yet been adequately addressed. Though primarily focused on femicide in America, the issues discussed are of global relevance due to the tragically widespread nature of femicide, and the book also makes significant contributions to the legal discourse of many other countries with similar legal structures.

This book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on femicide, using Israel as an illuminating case study, given its diverse communities and common-law-based legal system. Utilizing analytical alongside practical perspectives, the book offers a novel crimino-legal approach to femicide. In addition to its interdisciplinary novelty, the book presents originality in going beyond the more usual focus on the central victims and the common legal tools. Here, the authors extend the analysis to secondary victims of femicide and examine the applicability of second-tiered relevant legal tools, mostly tort law, as a means for gaining justice for the victims. This explorative journey culminates with the authors’ definition of femicide as a quintessential "crime of distinct nature". In the context of current international pledges to better understand and consequently better fight femicide, this work allows readers to comprehend the phenomenon and the ways to abolish it. The book will be an invaluable resource for academics, researchers and policy makers working in the areas of criminal law, tort law, family law, criminology and gender studies, as well as for legal theorists and criminologists seeking integration of both disciplines.

The World Bank Group’s Women, Business and the Law examines laws and regulations affecting women’s prospects as entrepreneurs and employees across 190 economies. Its goal is to inform policy discussions on how to remove legal restrictions on women and promote research on how to improve women’s economic inclusion.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Femicide, the killing of women and girls because of their gender, was until recently included in the category ‘homicide’, obscuring the special features of this social and gendered phenomenon. However, the majority of murders of women are perpetrated by men whom they know from family ties and are the result of intimate partner violence or so-called 'honour' killings. This book is the first one on femicide in Europe and presents the findings of a four-year project discussing various aspects of femicide. Written by leading international scholars with an interdiscplinary perspective, it looks at the prevention programmes and comparative quantitative and qualitative data collection, as well as the impact of culture. It proposes the establishment of a European Observatory on Femicide as a new direction for the future, showing the benefits of cross-national collaboration, united to prevent the murder of women and girls.

"... More than 300 women and men gathered in August 2008 at a conference entitled Missing Women: Decolonization, Third Wave Feminisms, and Indigenous People of Canada and Mexico. Here, personal stories and theoretical tools were brought together, as academics, activists, family members of missing and murdered women, police, media, policy-makers, justice workers, and members of faith communities offered their perspectives on the issue of racialized, sexualized violence."-- Back cover.