Status: 02/19/2022 10:00 a.m
When women are killed by their partners, it is often referred to as a “relationship crime”. But the phenomenon has a term: femicide. The first evidence-based study is now starting in Germany.
In Esslingen a man kills his wife. Two shots in the chest because she wanted to divorce him and move out with her two daughters. Now he has to answer to the district court of Stuttgart.
Such cases should not be dismissed and played down as “marital drama,” “family tragedy” or “relationship crime,” says psychologist Deborah Hellmann: “It’s either murder or manslaughter and it’s systematically aimed at women.” Hellmann is a professor at the Police University in North Rhine-Westphalia. Together with two criminologists from Baden-Württemberg and Lower Saxony, she is leading the first evidence-based study on femicides in Germany.
Femicide means killing a woman because she is a woman. This is the best-known definition of the US sociologist and feminist Diana Russell from 1976. However, to this day there is no consensus, neither in science nor in society, about the precise use of the term, and neither is there scientific data. Hellmann and her research team now want to change the latter.
First systematic study
Man kills his own wife, girlfriend or ex-girlfriend – this crime happened 139 times in 2020, according to crime statistics. In comparison: 30 times men were victims of deadly partner violence in the same year.
Hellmann and her colleagues from the Criminological Research Institute in Lower Saxony and the Institute for Criminology at the University of Tübingen want to go beyond violence in partnership and also shed light on the previous gray areas of the statistics, such as misogynist murders by acquaintances, colleagues or in the prostitution milieu. To do this, they will analyze the 2017 criminal proceedings files from the federal states of Berlin, Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Lower Saxony.
They will investigate 352 killings of women. How many of these were femicides? How did the prosecutors deal with the cases? What roles do financial and socio-demographic circumstances or alcohol consumption play? Legal scholars, sociologists and cultural scientists should also be consulted for the evaluation of these questions. It is designed for three years. In the end, the researchers hope to find out whether there are typical risk constellations that lead more frequently to femicides.
reactions in Germany
Women’s associations such as the German Women Lawyers Association have been calling for more education and prevention for a long time. In the Bundestag, the Left Party parliamentary group has been campaigning for an observatory for femicide and regular status reports since 2020. So far, however, without success.
Hildegard Kusicka from the Baden-Württemberg State Women’s Council agrees that the data from the study is urgently needed to stimulate the political and social debate: “These acts of violence must no longer be trivialized in the private sphere. After all, the most dangerous place for a woman is her At home.”
Abroad is already further
In the USA, all acts of a relationship are summarized as femicides, in the streets of Latin America the word “femicidios” has been in use for years. The “Zapatos Rojos” women’s movement is protesting against violence against women in several countries with symbolic red shoes. In Spain, in 2004, the parliament enacted a first law explicitly to protect women, and since this year misogynistic killings have been recorded separately there.
Violence against women and girls is an expression of unequal power relations, said Federal Women’s Minister Anne Spiegel. The government is therefore planning more places in women’s shelters to better protect women and girls. However, the Green politician has so far shied away from the term femicide.
Deborah Hellmann hopes the use will become more common, primarily to drive prevention. With the results of her study, she wants to make a decisive contribution to ensuring that the topic is even better perceived in Germany. This could also result in a different legal classification in the judiciary. Femicide is not yet a criminal offense in its own right. The basis on which the judges in Stuttgart judged in the Esslingen murder trial is still pending.