Is the US Still Too Patriarchal to Talk About Women? The Silent Epidemic of Femicide in America

Femicide is the most extreme form of gender-based violence. Of all femicide cases in the high-income world, 70% are committed in the United States, and yet a Pew Research Center survey found that more than half of American men think sexism is over. The evidence runs counter to this, in that 1 in 4 American women have experienced severe physical violence by their partner. An estimated 40% of women in the United States have encountered sexual violence, and 20% will be raped in their lifetime; however, these estimates are likely to be severe undercounts as for every 1000 rapes in the U.S., 995  instances will go unreported and/or lead to no charges, making data collection of sexual violence difficult. Yet, strangely, high rates of femicide and violence against women receive barely any attention domestically.

First used in England in 1801, Diane E. H. Russell redefined the term “femicide” in 1976 during a period of global feminism to raise awareness of hate crimes against women. Femicide is generally defined as the murder of women by men, because they are women. While acknowledgement of femicide as a specific problem remains limited, current or former partners commit a large proportion of femicides. Calling out gendered killing in a specific term is essential due to the historical subordination of women to men and the normalization through societal and cultural norms of abusing women. The historic suppression of discussion around femicide contributes to the widespread normalization of violence today. Femicide is usually committed by men and differs from male homicides mainly by setting and perpetrator. Intimate partners commit more than 35% of all murders of women globally. For comparison, the same study estimates that an intimate partner commits only about 5% of all murders of men. For women, violence usually comes from the men who are closest to them rather than from strangers or other women. These statistics provide the link to the murder of women and societal patriarchal structures, proving why it is important to coin a term like femicide.

Last summer, a global protest emerged due to the honor killing of a 27-year-old Turkish woman. Even adjusting for the fact that the U.S. is four times larger than Turkey, the rate of women killed by men is greater in the U.S. than in Turkey. France has some of the highest rates of femicide in Western Europe. But still, 10 times more women are killed in the U.S. than in France, and even when adjusting for population size, the problem remains twice as large. At least 975 women were killed in Mexico in 2020, and the most recent available governmental data reports 2,991 women were murdered in the United States in 2019. The United States is about three times larger than Mexico, showing femicide rates in both countries have been similar in recent years; however, the discourse around femicide in Mexico seems more developed. Most Mexicans are more aware of gender-based violence and gendered killing in their communities than Americans. More broadly, these statistics of violence against women have sparked protest and outrage across the world but not in the U.S., where there have been no mass protests or prominent national discussions on femicide and violence against women.

While 80% of people in America think that men are women are guaranteed equal rights in U.S. Constitution, the U.S. is one of 28 countries out of 194 globally that does not explicitly guarantee equality of the sexes. With the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the U.S. constitution still today does not adequately protect citizens from sex discrimination, leaving American women in limbo with a legal system that was never meant to protect them. When it comes to legislation and policy protecting women from violence, the United States seems to have fallen short. Thirteen states still do not even have definitions or penalties for domestic violence in their criminal code—making the prosecution of femicide even more difficult.

The United States inherited its patriarchal system from England, where the public sphere was delegated to men and the private sphere to women. In English Common law, the wife was considered her husband’s chattel, “something better than her husband’s dog, a little dearer than his horse.” Rights, norms, and laws constructed in society are made for the public sphere and were never meant to regulate the private sphere. Therefore, the state did not mean for women to have any rights in the space it delegated them. Legal scholars have identified this lack of legal framework as contributing to women’s economic and physical insecurities. By situating political and legal institutions only in the public sphere, the state created a society where crimes such as domestic abuse and sexual assault are some of the least reported offences today. Historically, physical and sexual violence against women were considered a right reserved for men. Violence was normalized and not legally considered a form of abuse. These challenges are historical but it’s important to acknowledge that sexism as structural inequality is almost a millennium older than the founding of the modern United States. Patriarchal structures were institutionalized and cemented into society in Britain and then exported to North America as a default. This legacy remains an important marker of understanding hierarchies within societies today and one of the reasons why the home is often considered the most dangerous place for women.

Femicide is often dismissed as a problem only associated with communities that are already marginalized. In the U.S. context and that of historically colonial or slave-based political economies, state power is inevitably racialized as well as gendered and bourgeois. These divisions are associated with increasing the risk of violence against poor women and women of color. Most unsettling is the fact that the femicide rates for Indigenous women and girls in the U.S. are six times greater than the average for White women; however, the severity of femicide against Indigenous women and girls is so under-explored that it is not even accounted for in femicide reports. An estimate of half of the Indigenous femicides are missing from the FBI data, meaning that the already sparse data provided about femicide rates today doesn’t even include rates of violence for marginalized communities.

The United States has not introduced a law calling femicide a crime; however, this is not the case in many other parts of the world. Across Latin America and Europe, many countries have passed legislation to specifically prosecute femicide, which the U.S. could use as guidelines. Eighteen countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have ratified laws that criminalize femicide. Guatemala, El Salvador, and Chile have a long history of violence and oppression against women; although, they have taken steps to prosecute deadly gendered crimes in a way that is still legally impossible in the U.S. With the current lack of legal mechanisms, the U.S. government does not accurately track rates of femicides. In France, feminists have mobilized for the word femicide to become a well-known term, and in Spain, authorities have installed specific helplines for women in danger of domestic abuse. These are only a few of the numerous policies that countries across the world have implemented to prevent femicide and reduce violence against women. Although it is disappointing that authorities have not already taken the same actions, these measures can serve as blueprints for the U.S. to also counteract femicide.

Sexual exploitation is often referred to as the oldest form of oppression, but in the U.S., the term sexual harassment was first coined in 1975 by journalist Lin Farley at Cornell University. By providing a name to the phenomenon, a ripple effect went across the national discussion around sexual harassment. The term provided women with the language of their experiences that was previously not in existence. “It was something that we all talked about but because we didn’t have a name, we didn’t know we were all talking about the same thing,” Farley said. Although the term femicide is not new in the English vocabulary, having a word for gendered killing used and known by a wider audience is essential for making the dialogue move forward.

While the United States currently lacks a legal framework to counteract violence against women, historically there have been many efforts to improve equality. With Illinois and Virginia’s ratification of the ERA in 2018 and 2020, 38 states or the three-fourths majority needed for a constitutional amendment has been reached. However, due to the seven-year limit implemented on the amendment – a rarity in U.S. legal history – and only 35 states ratifying within the seven-year framework, the ERA is still not a part of the American constitution. Nonetheless, a survey by the ERA Coalition found that 94% of Americans are in favor of an amendment that would enshrine gender equality in the constitution. The implementation of the ERA would be an important component to protect women from male violence and ensure equality under the law.

Dubravka Šimonović, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women, calls violence against women a global pandemic where 1 in 3 women was subjected to an intimate partner or sexual violence by a non-partner throughout their lifetime. While the United States government has not taken measures to decrease femicide rates, many other countries have implemented tested models to reduce violence against women in other parts of the world. There are many models Americans can use as guideposts when starting the dialogue in their communities. Examples of preventative measures have been laid out in other countries that could be implemented in the U.S. The first step is to raise awareness that the United States is in no way immune to the pandemic of violence against women. Dialogue on how misogyny and gender-based violence manifests in American society receives minimal attention, leaving issues such as femicide with barely any awareness domestically. A greater commitment to improve women’s legal protection will help prevent and decrease these crimes. Creating dialogue around gendered violence, rethinking hierarchies, and calling out quotidian misogyny has proven to lower rates of femicide. It’s time for the U.S. to follow examples of other countries and challenge violent crimes against women. Otherwise, the U.S. will continue a culture that normalizes male violence against women — to the extent that the population is not even familiar with language to express lethal violence against women.