Femicide
Abstract Submissions Closed
WG11 Violence and Society (host committee)
Language: English and Spanish
Session Type: Oral
Femicide is increasingly recognised as a critical global form of violence. Yet despite growing attention, femicide remains unevenly defined, inconsistently measured, and variably interpreted across legal, statistical, and institutional frameworks.
Critical research has also questioned dominant explanatory approaches to violence — particularly the tendency to individualise femicide through psychological, pathological, or decontextualised framings. Media and institutional narratives often compound this problem, representing killings as isolated events rather than patterns embedded in gendered inequality and social norms.
This session invites contributions that critically engage with how femicide is conceptualised, measured, explained, and represented — and with what these processes mean for prevention and policy.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Definitions and conceptualisations of femicide and gender-related killings
- Measurement frameworks, indicators, and statistical approaches
- Data gaps, classification problems, and the politics of visibility
- Structural, relational, and contextual explanations of femicide
- Critiques of individualising, psychological, or pathologising frameworks
- Media, legal, and institutional representations of femicide
- Femicide in marginalised populations and intersectional inequalities
- Prevention strategies, risk assessment, and policy responses
- Comparative and regional perspectives on femicide research
We particularly welcome papers that move beyond case-level explanations to examine femicide as a systemic and socially produced form of violence, shaped by intersecting institutional, cultural, and political conditions.
Papers are welcome in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.