Definition: Femicide is gender related killing of women and girls because of their sex and/ or gender, because they are women and girls. It constitutes gender-based violence against women and girls and is a human rights violation.

Femicide or the gender related killing of women and girls constitutes gender-based violence against women and a human rights violation. For prevention of femicide there is a clear need for a common and action oriented United Nations (UN) position and compatible regional strategies on femicide that should be part of system wide UN strategy on prevention of violence against women. Currently different States at the national level are using different terms: “femicide” or “gender related killing of women and girls” or “homicide of women killed by intimate partners or family members” or “homicide”.

There are differences between gender neutral criminal justice systems and data collection systems; the majority of systems are gender neutral and are predominantly using the term “homicide” (Europe and other regions) while the Latin American countries (16 countries) use the gender specific term “femicide” and have specific provisions in their criminal law criminalizing “femicide” or “feminicide” . They have criminalized “femicide” or “ feminicide “as a specific gender motivated homicide crime and they count as femicide of women only court prosecuted criminal cases, which is usually lower than all gender related killings of women under the UNODC and UN SRVAW categories, since many do not reach court prosecution or are qualified as homicide at the national level.

On the other hand many States that use the term “homicide” for all intentional killings do not collect specific data for gender related killing of women and girls by their husbands, partners or family members or do not collect homicide data that are inclusive of relationship between the victim and the perpetrator and they do not have specific data on intimate parter homicide that is reveling in most States that have such data that out of 10 persons killed more than eight are women.

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