Punishment and Criminalization of Femi(ni)Cide

Femi(ni)cide, generally understood as “the killing of women by men because they are women,” occurs within the patriarchal apparatus or power hierarchies of sex/gender. In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), femi(ni)cie has been discussed since the late 1990s and specific laws have been introduced to combat such crimes. As of today, seventeen countries in LAC have criminalized “femicide” or “feminicide” either by including the category in their penal code or by introducing mainstreaming laws; in any case, criminalization of this crime mostly implies an increase in the years of the sentence. In recent years, femi(ni)cide has started to gain interest in Europe, among the issues to be discussed is whether a law against femi(ni)cide is necessary or not, as in LAC. Opponents of introducing a specific law argue that the LAC case shows that crimes do not decrease by having a law on femi(ni)cide. Although this is true, feminists in LAC are not so naïve as to believe that criminalization of femi(ni)cide alone will solve the problem, this strategy is one of multiple fronts of action.

Legal criminalization of femi(ni)cide can be seen as a victory in which feminist discourse is working “from within” the system and using the tools available to make visible and penalize that system’s assignation of a particular limited value to the lives of women. But, from other critical perspectives such as abolitionism, the prison system will never be the solution to complex social problems since, on the contrary, they reinforce and contribute to the permanence of such power hierarchies. In this presentation I aim to put in conversation criminal approaches to femi(ni)cide with transformative justice theories to violence, inviting to think on alternatives from non-dualist approaches such as decolonial theory and new feminist materialism.