this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
317 points (98.5% liked)

World News

46584 readers
1616 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 36 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Domestic violence is violence that occurs between people who have a domestic relationship- family members, roommates, romantic/sexual partners, etc. It may or may not rise to the level of murder.

Femicide is killing a woman due to her gender, and there may or may not be a domestic relationship between the killer and the victim.

There's going to be a lot of overlap and grey areas between the two. Many femicides are domestics, but not all, and not all domestics result in femicide

To provide some examples

1. Sort of your "classic" domestic abuse situation- man beats his wife. Domestic abuse, not a femicide because he's not killing her.

1.5 He beats her to death. Domestic, and this may ruffle some feathers, but I'm going to say only probably a femicide. I'm sure I'm going to end up saying something like this a lot in this comment and expand on it as I go, but you kind of have to examine the killers thoughts and motivations, and they may not always be totally clear. In probably the vast majority of these kinds of situations you'd probably find there's sort of an underlying attitude of "I'm the man, she's the woman, so I can do whatever I want to her" to one degree or another which would make it a pretty cut-and-dry femicide, but I think there's also cases where he might be just as violent and abusive to other people regardless of gender given the opportunity, which muddies the waters and makes it a little harder to call a femicide, if he was just as likely to kill a man under similar circumstances I don't know if it necessarily warrants slapping the "femicide" label on it, but it sure as hell looks like one on the surface. I suspect that most places collecting and studying data on this kind of thing would just go ahead and call it a femicide and I'm not going to blame them for that, I don't think there's any feasible way to really examine each individual incident with the kind of attention you'd need to properly sort it out, and even if you could, in the end given the sorts of cultural imbalances between men and women that exist, you'd probably end up with the conclusion that the basically all of them do in fact qualify as femicide to some degree and the rest are just kind of a rounding error.

2. Religious extremists kill a woman they see out on the street because (take your pick, she wasn't dressed "appropriately," didn't have a male guardian with her, she dared to have a job or education, etc.) That's a femicide, but not a domestic because there was no relationship between them.

As an aside, there was a conscious decision on my part in that example to use the gender-neutral "they" in that example. You probably pictured male murderers, I did as well, but on further reflection I think it would be perfectly fair to still call it a femicide even if the perpetrators were women. The victim is still being targeted because she's a woman who's not behaving the way they think a woman should.

3. Woman kills her husband. Domestic, murder, not a femicide because the victim was a man.

4. (Here's where shit really starts getting murky.) Man kills his wife because she was having an affair with another man. Again it's a domestic, it's a murder, and its maybe/probably a femicide. It's a bit harder to nail down the motivation here. There could be a lot of underlying psychological, cultural, interpersonal, etc. baggage here. Did the man kill her just because she was cheating, or does he have, for example, some sort of underlying expectations that because she's the female partner she's supposed to be loyal and subservient to him. I don't know that there's an easy way to untangle that, and many men may not even really be consciously aware of those sorts of biases they have in the back of their minds. If hypothetically the man way gay/bit/pan/etc. would he have murdered a male partner in the same sort of situation?

5. Wife kills her husband's mistress. Murder. Kind of a domestic, maybe stretching it a bit because unless he was cheating on her with her sister or something there's not really a direct domestic relationship between the two women, but there is still an indirect link between them through the husband. Femicide? Again, maybe, for pretty much the same reasons as #4, lots of potential baggage there that would need to be unpacked.

5½. Man kills his cheating wife AND/OR wife's mistress ~(wife was cheating on him with another woman.)~ Murder✓ Domestic? See above. Femicide? Maybe, again see above, but there's also potentially an added aspect of "she cheated on me with another woman?" That, in his mind, adds extra insult to just the fact that she was cheating on him, would he have been so quick to jump to Murder if she had cheated on him with a man?

5¾? Woman kills her wife AND/OR her wife's mistress. Murder- yes. Domestic - see above. Femicide - again see above, probably not a femicide, I think in this one since we're dealing with a lesbian relationship we've kind of reached a point where we'd kind of expect a lot of "traditional" ideas about gender roles and such to be thrown out the window which would sort of take the concept of femicide off the table, but in practice that shit is really deeply ingrained in a lot of people and hard for them to shake entirely. There can still be some lingering notions that "a woman should be faithful to their partner" that they wouldn't apply equally to men, and so you could make a solid argument for it qualifying as femicide.

6. Man rapes and kills woman jogging alone in the park. Murder? Yes. Domestic? No, no relationship between them. Femicide? Almost certainly yes. I'm sure there could be some edge cases of a rapist lurking in the bushes who would be happy to target the next person who came jogging down the trail regardless of their gender, but far more often they probably specifically were preying on women.

7. Man kills woman in a carjacking. Murder? Yes. Domestic? No. Femicide? Maybe. This could be a situation where they literally just carjacked the first person in a vehicle they come across, so not a femicide, it could have just as easily been a man. Or it could be a case where they specifically targeted a woman because they perceived her as being weaker, easier to victimize, less able to defend herself, etc. which I think would make a compelling argument to call it a femicide.

That's not meant to be an all-inclusive list by any means of course.

And there's a lot of complicating factors we could go into that I'll be honest, I don't feel like digging into too deep right now and I may hit the character limit if I tried to. Like how trans and nonbinary people fit into the equation, to give a short example a transphobic person kills a trans man who they "see" as a woman, you might say that they had "femicidal intent" or something to that effect, even though the victim was a man, and if they killed a trans woman, their motivations might not have been femicidal, and in their own minds they wouldn't think they committed femicide, but to the rest of us they committed femicide anyway.

[–] Yermaw@lemm.ee 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Is there a word for killing someone because he's a man? Not trying to be "that guy" but I literally only just heard the word femicide and am curious.

[–] HK65@sopuli.xyz 16 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I guess you would call it andricide?

Like when Israel kills Palestinian kids when they are boys but not when they are girls in similar situations because they are "likely combatants".

Or the thing that happened in Paraguay where the genocide was very much focused on men because they were men.

TBH we should stop all violence, and if this categorisation helps prevention, go for it.

[–] Revan343@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Viricide or androcide; viricide is more etymologically consistent, but I expect would be less common (if either term were common at all, which they aren't)

[–] Yermaw@lemm.ee 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Viricide sounds like a topical cream for an STD

[–] Revan343@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago

That would be virucide :P

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago

Mixing Greek and Latin word fragments is so common that I don't think one more is going to make a difference.

[–] EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

From a quick search, viricide seems to mean "kills viruses" (as an alternate spelling of virucide) or killing one's husband.

I would probably use the term androcide.

[–] Revan343@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

'Alternate spelling' is a fun way to say misspelling /s

Viricide is more consistent because vir and femina are both Latin (as is -cide/-cidium, but that's less important), while andro is Greek. The Greek-rooted synonym for femicide would be gynaecide.

But yeah, androcide would be more likely to be used, because it avoids the superficial similarity to virus; kind of like how Latin and Greek numerical prefixes often get mixed together to avoid the prefix 'sex-'

[–] EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

to avoid the prefix ‘sex-’

Sexagon sounds funny

[–] Revan343@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

Sexagon sounds like an MMA-themed porno

[–] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

If you think of it, it's for the sad reason that men are kind of expected to be killed, by war, conflict, work, disease, etc. In a way the "default" for murder became related to how men most often die. This is still sexism, however.

[–] EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 3 points 2 days ago

Even the term manslaughter. Though "man" is often meant to generically mean "human", e.g. mankind or since the dawn of man.