During the last decade, several countries in Latin America have enacted femicide as a gender-specific criminal figure. Legal modifications throughout the region were a corollary of political debates, broad perceptions and sensibilities regarding the increase in femicide rate, and the systematic appearance of media stories and official reports warning of an exponential growth. This article focuses upon the problem of femicide, both as a social phenomenon and a juridical figure, through a comparative socio-legal approach that takes Peru's penal reform as a case study. The aim is to account for the incidence of femicide in demographic terms and demonstrate that this is not a phenomenon of exponential growth, contrary to media stories and punitive discursive practices regarding the need of a penal reform in the country. This is achieved by recognizing an issue of increasing importance: the challenge of building gender-based indicators to measure and prosecute femicide into the criminal justice.