Martin Suchanek
International organisations and research institutes record at least 50,000 femicides every year—figures which include only murders committed in partnerships or by relatives, and only those countries that compile separate statistics. Nevertheless, even these partial figures show that more than 135 women are killed every day.
Problems with the survey
These figures do not reflect the full extent of this extreme manifesto of women’s oppression for several reasons. Firstly, many surveys do not include trans people and other people with a non-binary gender identity. Secondly, the categorisation of femicide is often based on a relatively narrow definition, meaning that many intentional murders of women are not included in the statistics. The figures—including the frequently cited figure of 50,000 femicides in 2017—primarily relate to a specific, albeit very significant form of femicide, that of intimate femicide (within a partnership) and femicide within a relationship (e.g. honour killings). However, even according to the 2017 surveys, these two categories only account for around half of all intentional femicides, i.e. all crimes where there was a conscious, deliberate intention to kill a woman, a girl, or a trans person because of their gender or gender identity.
Secondly, intentional murders of women or gender oppressed people that take place outside this sphere and are linked to the enforcement of private capitalist, neocolonial or state interests are not included in the statistics. A number of left-wing, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist, feminist authors have coined the term ‘feminicide’ for such murders of women and LGBT+ people in order to counteract the narrowing of the view of femicides in the private and domestic context. We therefore use the terms femicide and feminicide in this sense in the following text, knowing full well that a clear classification is itself problematic, as illustrated by the phenomenon of honour killings, for example.
Thirdly, although crime statistics are a key source for cross-national comparisons, there is no common methodology and femicides are often not recorded as such. The extent of this form of intentional killing of women or LGBT+ people can therefore only be estimated. The high proportion of crimes that are not reported, and thus not registered in official statistics, or in cases of war or civil conflict where data collection breaks down, further obscures the true picture.
Fourthly, only a few countries have ratified formal agreements to combat femicide. For example, the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (better known as the Istanbul Convention) was not only revoked by Turkey. Numerous European countries only ratified it years later (e.g. Germany and Switzerland only in 2017). Other signatory states have still not done so (the UK, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia), meaning that the convention is not legally binding. In Bulgaria, it was declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court. Poland has announced its withdrawal, although it has not yet finalised it.
Scope and comparison
Despite these difficulties, we would like to take a closer look at the figures below. There are still relatively reliable statistics on intimate and familial femicide in Europe. These show a persistently high level and, in some cases, even an increase in recent years. In Austria, for example, the number has risen massively from 18 (2014) and 17 (2015) to 28 in 2016 and has remained between 31 and 41 since.
For the EU as a whole, a slight decrease in murders of women from 0.75 to 0.69 per 100,000 inhabitants can be observed between 2015 and 2018, albeit with significant differences between different countries.
As there are no separate statistics for femicides in a number of European countries, the trajectory of femicides as a whole must also be considered as an indicator of their extent and for comparison. Where data is available, it is always clear that, viewed globally, murders by partners and relatives represent a significant proportion, often between half and a third.
In Europe, countries such as Italy, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands have recorded around 0.5 murders of women per 100,000 inhabitants for several years. However, even this comparatively low figure still amounts to more than 100 murders a year in these countries. Germany, France and Austria sit in the middle of the European average with murders ranging between 0.6 to 1 per 100,000 inhabitants. Countries such as Russia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine have had particularly high rates over the years, with 1.5 to 4 murdered women and girls per 100,000 inhabitants.
Far less statistical material is available for Asia and Africa. For example, the UN database on crime contains no official statistics from Iran, Pakistan or China, to name just a few populous countries. Furthermore, there is often a lack of differentiation between murders of women in general and femicides by partners and relatives. In general, however, many countries have high to very high figures. South Africa has one of the highest rates in the world: in 2018, there were 2,771 or 9.46 per 100,000. India had rates of 2.47 to 2.81 women per 100,000 in the years 2015–2020, which corresponds to around 17,000 murders per year.
Comparatively extensive data and a rich literature exists in Latin America. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it reflects the scale of the problem and secondly, the existence of large and politically dynamic women’s movements on the continent, which have placed the fight against violence against women at the centre of their activities for many years.
Finally, the figures on femicides and feminicides in Latin America and the Caribbean are also worth comparing with the situation in the USA. In the years 2015–2020, 0.8 to 0.84 women per 100,000 inhabitants fell victim to a domestic or familial femicide, or 1,420 in 2020 alone. The number of femicides per 100,000 inhabitants during this period was constantly above 2, and in absolute figures was never less than 3,333 (2015).
Even if data on the increase in femicide and femicides during the pandemic is patchy, the significant increases seen in Mexico are also likely to apply to most other countries and regions, especially in the semi-colonial world. This is suggested by other studies or evidence of the increase in domestic violence, which is also expressed in the massive increase in emergency calls. Secondly, the economic crisis and pandemic in 2020 and 2021 have generally exacerbated the causes of violence against women and femicide and at the same time tied the former more closely to the household.
Explanations and causes
The official statistics on femicides, intimate partner murders and familial murders reveal the pervasive and normalised extent of domestic, patriarchal violence, even if we accept they obscure the scale of those that take place outside the family, and the disproportionate impact on the ethnically, or sexually oppressed.
But let us first look at intimate, partner or kinship femicide. It takes place in a specific social setting, within the framework of a specific institution: the bourgeois family or a relationship similar to it (the intimate partner relationship). Femicide often forms the end point of a long period of intimate partner violence and abuse. Violence and oppression are fundamentally inherent to the family, whether as a direct, ‘private’ relationship between male perpetrators and female victims, or as a place where norms, rules, moral values and gender roles are communicated and justified. However, this does not absolve us of the need to differentiate between the manifestation, form and cause between different classes against the background of different overall social and economic situations. Only in this way can we understand historically specific developments and consciously lead the fight against femicide as the most extreme expression of violence against women.
Firstly, there are differences between the families of different classes. Those of the ruling classes naturally enjoy the privilege of not being forced to work. All their members live from the appropriation of the labour of others, and can also have others work for them in the private household. For the working class, the situation is fundamentally different. The man or father of the family functions, at least in terms of ideology, as the breadwinner who earns the majority of the household or family income. The woman is regarded as the housewife. Even if this bourgeois family form was only established for the proletariat in the course of the development of capitalism and never existed in some prior ‘pure’ form, it became the defining ideological form and thus also a core prop of reactionary gender roles. The generalisation of this ideology is based on a gender-specific division of labour.
However, the establishment and reproduction of this form among wage-earners is tied to a certain level of capital accumulation. After the Second World War, this family form was established in the imperialist metropolises, in the degenerated workers’ states and even among the better-off strata of wage earners in the semi-colonies, albeit often only rudimentarily. At the same time, the development of capital accumulation actually undermined the bourgeois family as economic expansion required women to be drafted into the workforce.
This objectively undermined the role of men, and was one of the reasons for the emergence of the second wave of the women’s movement and for the fight for legal equality as well as for the wider publicisation of domestic violence against women and children from the end of the 1960s. However, these changes took place against the backdrop of growing capitalist accumulation, which had enabled the expansion of the working class’s consumption and widened the scope for redistribution during the postwar boom.
With the turn to neoliberalism and capitalist globalisation, the picture has fundamentally changed. Today, the growth of the working class is concentrated among the insecure, precarious or informal sectors. This applies particularly to the female labour force. At the same time, for increasing sections of the working class, wages have declined to the point that male workers can no longer support their families on a single wage. The wage labour of women, and often also children, is becoming a precondition for the reproduction of the class—and even this is often not enough.
This is no mere cyclical phenomenon. A massive wave of attacks on working class living standards in the form of privatisation, deregulation, wage cuts and the destruction of social security systems has been launched in order to counteract the general decline in profit rates, and to secure the profits of imperialist finance capital in particular.
The fact that ever larger sections of the working class are being forced to sell their labour below the cost of reproduction is a fundamental characteristic of the current period, especially for wage earners in the global south and for racially oppressed and migrant workers. Since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, this has become a feature for the mass of wage earners in the imperialist metropolises, and, increasingly, for parts of the labour aristocracy.
The economic crisis undermines the role of the head of the family, the male breadwinner. Regardless of his will, he is unable to fulfil his allotted social role of providing for the family. In contrast to the period of economic expansion, in which the family’s income rose above the subsistence level and thus permitted the economic independence of women, under conditions of structural crisis more and more women from the working class are denied this path. They are economically chained closer to the family.
This crisis of the family, from which there is no escape thanks to falling incomes and the destruction of public and social services, forms the structural basis for the increase in domestic violence and femicide in the proletarian family or partnership. While capitalism undermines the economic foundations of working class families and thus also the associated gender roles, it is incapable of resolving this contradiction. Bourgeois society itself proves to be the greatest obstacle to overcoming this untenable form. Only the struggle of wage earners and above all proletarian women offers a progressive way out. Where this perspective is lacking, the contradiction in which the family is trapped comes to the surface in the form of ‘private’ violence. Murder is the ultimate, most extreme form in which the demoralised breadwinner, failing in his own role, once again proves his ‘superiority’ to himself and his wife.
Here it becomes clear how closely the struggle against femicide and domestic violence is linked to the capitalist crisis, and why this particularly affects the poorest, most oppressed and most exploited sections of the working class. The barbarising tendencies of the current structural crisis are manifested in the increase in femicides. The crisis, which is essentially also a crisis of the conditions of reproduction of the class, naturally promotes an increase in violence and its extreme forms, chauvinism and sexism. However, this is not an automatic process that occurs independently of the consciousness, degree of organisation and mobilisation of the working class. Whether the reactionary tendencies prevail, whether they lead to a deepening of the division within the working class and the oppressed, depends largely on whether it is possible to unite the class in the struggle against femicide and its deeper social causes.
Liberalism and the right
For the ‘democratic’, liberal wing of the bourgeoisie and large sections of bourgeois western feminism, the increase in femicides and domestic violence appears to be primarily a phenomenon of male backwardness. This is undeniably recognisable in the motives of the individual perpetrators. The problem with bourgeois feminism, however, is that this backwardness and even open hatred of women is not understood as the result of social conditions, but rather as an individual characteristic and a personal lack of education, enlightenment and ‘culture’. The perpetrators and social contexts of these crimes for bourgeois feminists therefore disproportionately focus on proletarian or sub-proletarian men, and on supposedly ‘backward’ countries, religious or minority communities.
Liberal, bourgeois feminism presents Western democracy and the market economy as the solution to combating femicide. It presents the problem as one of individual violence. Of course, it is always an act of violence. Neither Marxists nor left-wing feminists deny this. But the main difference is that we are concerned not only with the individual act, but also with the social context which conditions the commission of, and responses to, such acts.
This is considered by bourgeois-liberal or even bourgeois-reformist forces as, at best, a subordinate factor, and is generally ignored. And for good reason. If the social context of violence against women (the economic and ideological subordination of women within the family) were taken into account, then the beneficiaries of these conditions—the exploiting class, their corporations and governments—would be held at least co-responsible. But since bourgeois feminism itself takes the standpoint of capitalist class relations, it is necessarily incapable of grasping the deeper roots of femicide and violence against women and girls more broadly. On the contrary, it must ultimately gloss over and defend the social conditions that repeatedly give rise to systematic violence against women and femicide.
But that is not all. In the wake of the economic crisis and the undermining of families and their role models, a reactionary, bourgeois and petty bourgeois counter-offensive is also emerging as part of a general shift to the right.
As a rule, no one goes so far as to openly justify individual femicides. However, right-wing and reactionary, anti-feminist forces glorify them as a reaction to the destruction of the supposedly natural role of men (and women). ‘Feminism’, ‘gender ideology’, women’s movements and queer activism have, according to this worldview, destroyed the natural order of things, suppressing and marginalising ‘normal’ men (and women) who want to preserve the ‘traditional’ norms, division of labour and way of life, along with a certain dose of machismo and sexism.
This ideology, this ‘narrative’, not only turns reality on its head, it also ignores the real causes of the undermining of bourgeois families by capital, the market and competition. This is no coincidence. Various right-wing populist, right-wing conservative and far-right forces, whether Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro, the German AfD, Austrian Freedom Party, Identitarians or reactionary Islamists, advocate aggressive anti-feminism. At the same time, they defend the market economy—be it in an idealised, petty bourgeois, nationalist or ethnic version.
The very real crisis of the family and the associated undermining of traditional gender roles are not understood as the consequence of the contradictions placed on it by the logic of capitalist development. Instead they appear to express an apparent assault on the ‘natural’, supposedly harmonious relationship between men and women. From this standpoint, femicide is understood, and ultimately excused, as the tragic result of the ‘unnatural’ overturning of the ‘natural order’. This reactionary standpoint has a no less reactionary cure: return to the traditional order! If women behaved according to their allotted ‘natural’ role (and if society was organised in such a way that they were not economically obliged to become wage-earners, or legally entitled to personal and financial independence), there would no longer be ‘provocations’ leading to femicides. Naturally, this narrative is supplemented by a good dose of racism, especially in the West, by differentiating between femicides committed by men from the ruling imperialist nation and those of supposedly ‘backward’ peoples. Among white Germans or Americans, femicide is therefore ultimately the act of a lone perpetrator, preferably from ‘broken’, asocial backgrounds.
The glorification and trivialisation of femicide by right-wing movements is itself a material factor in the growth of such murders because it creates the corresponding political and ideological climate that encourages them. By idealising the patriarchal head of the family—whose role is undermined by capitalism itself—as a ‘victim’ of the advance of women’s rights, they proclaim his restoration to his former status as a central goal. In doing so, they not only accept that some men see this as an additional justification for taking the restoration of ‘order’ into their own hands. They also act as a movement that takes up the cause of rolling back women’s rights and tries to aggressively police this counter-revolution. Furthermore, many of these movements actually favour certain forms of femicide that take place outside the sphere of partnership, family and kinship relationships.
Feminicides
So far, we have dealt with femicides committed by partners, intimate partners and relatives. The perpetrator is usually male and has a personal relationship with the victim. The perpetrator does not want to publicise his crime, but rather hopes to escape prosecution.
Phenomena such as honour killings, which are generally attributed to this form of femicide, represent a transitional category in some respects, as the perpetrators do not necessarily have to be partners of the victim, and the perpetrators must have some public acknowledgement in order for the killing to serve its purpose of restoring family ‘honour’, i.e. reasserting male prerogatives to police ‘moral transgressions’.
However, this form of femicide only accounts for a proportion of all deliberate murders of women and girls. A second, and substantial proportion consists of those committed outside the family, partnership or kinship group in order to enforce an interest in exploitation and/or domination. Such ‘feminicides’ that are directly linked to economic interests include, for example, the violence and murder of women in the course of trafficking and forced prostitution. Violence, including feminicide, is inflicted on women or trans people in order to send a signal to others. Anyone who resists abduction and enslavement must expect to be killed. The murder is therefore a message to other potential victims who are to be made compliant for an economic purpose—the enrichment of the pimps, other criminals and illegal traffickers who profit from this control of prostitution and trafficking in women. It is therefore part of the purpose of these feminicides that the perpetrators are known to others, if not personally, then at least as an identifiable group. After all, intimidating others only works if potential victims know who wields power over them and can enforce it.
This also applies to other forms of capitalist oppression. For example, feminicides also serve as a means of appropriating land from indigenous or agricultural communities by agribusiness or mining companies in Latin America and Africa. In these cases, the rape or murder of women is intended to demonstrate to the community being displaced that any resistance will be crushed with demonstrative violence. In this way, the perpetrators demonstrate the powerlessness of the oppressed and reinforce a patriarchal division of roles by making it clear to the male members of the village or indigenous community that they are not even in a position to protect ‘their’ women. This form of feminicide has a long colonial history that continues today in neo-colonial and imperialist exploitation. Even if the perpetrators are hired killers, they are not acting on their own account, but on behalf of a particular capital and corporate group, a landowner, a multinational corporation or their middlemen.
Less direct, but nonetheless related to the enforcement of a social and economic position, are feminicides by criminal gangs, for example when it comes to controlling a neighbourhood. They pursue an economic purpose. Public murder serves as a deterrent.
Another form of public feminicide is the increase in so-called ‘witch murders’ in some African countries and India. In order to appropriate the property of a usually older, widowed woman, she is accused of witchcraft—in some African countries with the connivance of evangelical sect leaders—and punished with death. After the execution, the woman’s property (e.g. land) is passed on to younger relatives or to local entrepreneurs who want to use it for other purposes, for production that is geared less towards self-sufficiency and more towards an urban or global market. In this case too, the feminicide is carried out publicly, as the result of an (illegal) accusation carried by a reactionary mob. It is usually carried out in public.
In all these forms, there is not only a close connection to business and capitalist interests, but often also to state institutions like the police—be it by seeking to emphasise their position through murder even in oppressed communities or by not or only token prosecutions of feminicides against marginalised people, sex workers, trans people or black and migrant people. As with murder by the gang, feminicide here is closely linked to the establishment of the perpetrators’ violent or ideologically secured dominance over a particular community.
We also find indirect or direct forms of state-sanctioned feminicide. These include either public killings of women triggered by reactionary, often religious institutions and forces, e.g. stoning by Islamist mobs, but also witch burnings encouraged by evangelical fundamentalists or Hindu chauvinists. Other forms include the rape and feminicide of nationally or religiously oppressed women, e.g. Muslim women in India by right-wing and proto-fascist Hindu fundamentalists. In certain cases, the death penalty can be a feminicide, e.g. public stoning. In all these cases, the act takes place openly and publicly. The perpetrators form a reactionary, aggressive and murderous crowd or a cheering crowd at a state-orchestrated execution.
In these cases, feminicide is an element in securing power, be it to intimidate political and social opponents by mobilising a petty bourgeois mass and to bring an arch-reactionary political force to power or to consolidate an existing regime through ritualised murder. The most brutal and extreme form of this is certainly rape, torture and feminicide as a deliberate means of war and civil war.
The link between feminicides and the interests of capital and state institutions also explains why there are far fewer reliable figures available. The publication of reports and figures is itself often only the result of struggles and public investigations forced by protests movements. The book Feminicides and Global Accumulation (Common Notions, 2021), documents important examples and struggles that were presented and discussed at an international feminist conference. The fact that these feminicides have only just entered the public consciousness and have to be ‘recognised’ as such illustrates how stubbornly feminicide in particular is subject to a political taboo in the interests of capital and reactionary forces.
Conclusions
The fight against all forms of femicide and their causes is clearly a central task in the fight against the oppression of women worldwide. There is no doubt that the fight to outlaw these murders, which in many countries begins with the public acknowledgement of their existence, is an indispensable starting point. Femicides, their extent and their causes must not only not be relativised or talked away, but their entire dimension must often be brought to the attention of the public and, above all, the working class. Linked to this, the fight for the effective prosecution of these offences is also an important point of reference.
From the point of view of the working class, however, this is not about demanding the most draconian punishment, but, to begin with, ensuring perpetrators do not escape justice entirely, or escape with lenient treatment. We therefore advocate for investigations into femicide to be carried out under the control of women’s organisations, the popular election of judges and at least half of judges to be women.
The prevention of violence against women and girls itself is no less important. This includes urgent and immediate measures, including but not limited to the public financing of housing and financial aid, including women’s refuges, run under the democratic control of women’s organisations.
The fight against femicide and domestic violence in general is intimately linked to the fight to improve the conditions of social reproduction of the working class as a whole. This means fighting against poverty wages, informal labour, and the dismantling of social security systems, which all tend to increase the dependence of women and children on male wage earners or family members.
We therefore demand minimum incomes paid according to a working class cost of living index and adjusted for inflation; the replacement of informal and precarious employment with trade union contracts and rates; unemployment, sickness benefits and pensions paid at a living rate, and a programme of progressive taxation of the rich and corporations to fund the expansion of childcare, laundry, cleaning, care and public canteens to begin the socialisation of domestic work.
These demands are directed against capital as a class and are fundamentally in the interests of all oppressed people, regardless of their gender. Nevertheless, it would be mechanical and naive to assume that proletarian men as a whole would automatically renounce their privileges or abandon sexist behaviour and ways of thinking that are closely linked to their gender role. Proletarian women must therefore have the right to organise their own meetings within the workers’ movement in order to advance the struggle and combat male chauvinism. They must build a proletarian women’s movement around these struggles in order to fight backwardness and chauvinism, but also to take the lead in the struggle for the liberation of women of all oppressed classes.
The struggle against the causes of intimate and kinship femicide is integrally linked to the struggle against capitalist exploitation of wage earners. While the perpetrators of feminicide in a family or partnership context are individuals or small groups, in the second form of ‘feminicide’ the perpetrators are agents acting in the interests of an exploiting and oppressing social force a social force—certain types of company, a reactionary movement, etc, etc. In order to confront such forces, organised self-defence supported by masses or mass organisations is required, ultimately the creation of armed militias of workers and the oppressed, allied to campaigns for the expropriation of such companies under workers’ control.
But reforms and self-organisation can only bring about a temporary improvement. In order to put a stop to gangs of landlords, right-wing populists or proto-fascist forces, attacking the position of women in order to deepen the overall exploitation of the working class, we must deploy means of class struggle that necessarily raise the question of power. Once again, the struggle against women’s oppression in all its forms is inextricably linked to the struggle against capitalism.