of Lydia Venus
It’s April 1st. On the telephone line of the Greek police, a muffled “I’m missing” is heard. Another woman has just lost her life from her former romantic partner on the steps of the police station of Aghii Anargyro.
It is only April 1st and Greek society already counts 5 femicides since the beginning of the year. It is 2024 and we are still trying to understand, decode and register the term femicide, a term that is our moral obligation to adopt both legally and socially.
But what does femicide mean and why is the legalization of the term important:
The term femicide has been scientifically established and defined by the European Institute for Gender Equality and includes, among others, “the killing of a woman as a result of intimate partner violence, the torture and killing of a woman as a result of misogyny, the killing of women and girls as ” honor crimes’ and other forms of murder’.
The term “femicide” was used as early as 1801 by John Corry (“A Satirical View of London at the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century”), to describe the murder of a woman. In 1976 women’s rights activist and academic Diana Russell referred to the concept of femicide as a criminological phenomenon resulting in the killing of a woman by a man motivated by gender, hatred or possessiveness towards women. In her opening speech at the 2012 United Nations conference on femicide, Russell presents the definition as: the killing of women by men simply because they are women.
It is clear that the concept is based on gender motives, i.e. targeted violence against women which makes it necessary to distinguish it from the common homicide of Article 299 of the Criminal Code (Whoever intentionally kills another).
In s.299 homicide there is no separation or categorization of the elements constituting “intent”, so that it becomes necessary to avoid the generality of s.299 and include the salient difference of the two crimes, namely, the offender’s sense that the murder of the woman is part of the flow of things: the bad relationship between the two, the fight, the sexual act that did not end as he wanted, the separation, the belief that the body of the woman belongs to him, that she provoked him with her behavior (data also concerning rape) and so many other stereotypical, in essence abusive excuses, that we hear every day.
And to speak with facts, in about 40% of homicides involving a female victim, the perpetrator is the male partner. The percentage of male victims of their female partners is only 6% of all homicides. According to data from the Greek police and ELSTAT, approximately 20% of homicides in Greece over the last decade or so are femicides, or almost one in five.
It is worth noting that the lack of recognition of a specific crime makes it difficult to record the cases and, at a later stage, to analyze and monitor the phenomenon and, consequently, to find effective prevention and suppression measures.
On the other hand, the inability of the existing mechanisms to adequately deal with the phenomenon, the lack of training on the handling of cases, and the often indifference towards the victims’ complaints, make the need for information and awareness even more imperative.
Starting with the narrow social structures and gradually occupying the whole of social life, the need to tighten the penalties for crimes of gender-based violence against women and femininity is underlined, through the creation of a system of distinguished crimes, the crown of which will be the institutionalized concept of femicide .
This kind of clear declaration by the state on the worthlessness of specific crimes, which will be the result of evolution and social ferment, will be a resounding expression of the need for change and progress for a society of equality, security and justice which will impose the strictest strong penalties when gender-based violence is recognized as a motive.
* Lydia Veneri is a lawyer, internationalist, PhD candidate in International Law
