Abstract
Femicide across Europe is the culmination of a 4-year project funded and facilitated by European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) in association with the European Union, involving collaborating academics from the 28 member states plus two others to address the issue of femicide on a number of levels.
The concept of femicide has its roots in 1970s radical feminist activism and theorizing, which revealed the extent of male violence against women in the context of patriarchy and highlighted the killing of women by men purely by virtue of the fact that they are women as part of this. Indeed, a gendered analysis of lethal violence highlights the differing motivations and relationship dynamics inherent to men killing women. For instance, women are much more likely to be killed by an intimate partner/former partner. Activism in response to the mass murder, with virtual impunity, of marginalized women in Ciudad Juarez in Mexico in the late 1990s into the 2000s, linked to state actors and organized crime, focused further attention on femicide.
The purpose of the COST project outlined in this volume was to collaborate across institutions and states to define, analyze, and evidence femicide across Europe, ensuring its recognition as a gender-specific form of lethal violence by governments, media, and the wider citizenry. The project addressed these aims by way of a number of activities: a “training school” for postdoctoral and doctoral researchers, conferences and networking events, data gathering and awareness raising at state level, and the lobbying of politicians, legislators, and service providers.
The project was based on four working groups focusing on definitions, data collection, cultural issues, and advocacy and prevention, which form the basis of four of the chapters in this volume. The key messages that emerge from the book relate to these concerns. So, for instance in Chapter 2, Grzyb et al. ask, “How prevalent is femicide” (p. 45), acknowledging that inconsistent data gathering and the failure of states to recognize and record femicide accurately mean that it remains invisible. So, for instance, official crime statistics often may not record and present the gender of perpetrators alongside victim statistics; likewise, the relationship between victim and perpetrator may not be presented alongside gender characteristics.
The book also offers a comprehensive analytical framework. In Chapter 4, Kouta et al. present a multifactorial approach to the causes of femicide, highlighting how a range of factors can potentially coalesce in the perpetration of woman killing. However, the authors also recognize how a broader set of gendered conditions, such as poverty, neglect, and a lack of social protections, may also play a part in bringing about the death of women. Kouta et al. apply an ecological framework to understand femicide in terms of the links between individual risks and mid-level cultural factors set within the wider context of patriarchal structures. The authors also stress how an ecological approach can inform policy and prevention strategies, such as the training of professionals to recognize and understand femicide.
In terms of its limitations, I felt that although the emphasis on culture was crucial to the analysis in the book, at times, it served to detract from the fact that femicide should, first and foremost, be understood as constitutive of systemic violence against women. In addition, the survey of awareness and data-gathering practices at the state level in the penultimate chapter needed more work in terms of a more coherent and integrated commentary and evaluation of the evidence available to highlight best practice(s) in the recording of accurate data for Europe as a whole. That said, this is a vital and timely book which achieves its main ambition to mobilize at the European level to address lethal violence against women.
More specifically, it is a valuable resource for social work students, practitioners, and academics interested in violence against women and girls, which highlights the gendered nature of homicide. The book is especially useful in regard to its analysis of social and cultural context and prevention and safeguarding where the ability to recognize the causes and risk factors associated with femicide will be invaluable to social work practitioners.
