Making femicide visible

Abstract

The sociological literature on femicide, compared to intimate partner and other forms of gender violence, is scarce. While feminist sociology has addressed the inaudibility of women, femicide remains invisible. Femicide rates are social facts worthy of sociological attention. Like suicide, femicide has to be defined and analysed according to type. The article postulates possible reasons for the invisibility of the phenomenon, such as the unpleasantness of the subject, scope, its conception as a radical feminist idea, fuzziness, its identification with other concepts like genocide, and methodological difficulties in researching it because of the impossibility of researching dead women first-hand, missing data and the difficulties in comparing data cross-nationally. None of the seven posited hypotheses could account for the dearth of sociological literature on the subject. Suggestions for enhancing the visibility of femicide are made, with a call to unearth the phenomenon and remove its invisibility in sociology.

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