Women, Violence, and the Media: Readings in Feminist Criminology

Part II: Debating the Issues: Femicide and Sexual Terrorism

·  · PART II DEBATING THE ISSUES FEMICIDE AND SEXUAL TERRORISM Femicide is a term that refers to the killing of women by men because they are women. It came into the study of violence against women by way of the Ms. Magazine article “Femicide: Speaking the Unspeakable” by Caputi and Russell (; see also Caputi & Russell, ). Their article is a critical response to press representations of the  Montreal Massacre . Its description of the attack is short and to the point: During a half-hour rampage, [Marc] Lepine killed  young women, wounded  other women and  men, then turned his gun on himself. A three-page suicide note blamed all of his failures on women, whom he felt had rejected and scorned him. Also found on his body was a hit-list of  prominent Canadian women. (Caputi and Russell, , p. ) At the time, press accounts attributed the incident to madness and characterized Lepine as a deeply disturbed individual. Caputi and Russell objected to the representation, arguing that systematic killings on the scale of the Montreal Massacre were never just the result of madness. The Montreal Massacre and subsequent public mass murders are rooted in misogynist attitudes, just as pogroms and lynchings resulted from antiSemitism and racism, according to Caputi and Russell (). Like other such violations, femicide should be considered a hate crime, with enhanced punishment for its commission. If Caputi and Russell were concerned by the skewed focus of press accounts of mass murder, then in Chapter , “Does Gender Make a Difference ?,” Clifford, Jensen, and Petee are uneasy about overgeneralizing on the basis of dramatic incidents. Not all killers who seek out public sites such as schools or malls necessarily target women, according to these authors . What bases do they have for concern? First, female victimization is overrepresented in nationally televised news accounts of public mass murders. As a result, the public is exposed to a disproportionate number of incidents with female victims, and some people may erroneously associate the two. Second, real-life women are killed in public mass murder ·  · part ii incidents at higher rates than they are killed in normal homicides. The authors interpret the difference in light of routine activities theory: Women are more likely than men to be found in some public locations (e.g., malls) and just as likely as men to be found in others (e.g., schools). Hence, women are going to be among the victims of public mass murderers . It is a question of women being in harms way, according to Clifford , Jensen, and Petee. In its original formulation, femicide—the intentional killing of women by men—represented one end of a sexual terrorism continuum that ranged from deliberate fatalities through physical and psychological abuse, the latter including sexual harassment, forced sterilization, female mutilation , and cosmetic surgery. When the consequence of these and related practices was the death of a woman, Caputi and Russell defined such incidents as femicides (Caputi & Russell, , p.). Hence, for these two feminists, a finding of elevated female fatalities in public mass murder incidents over regular homicides would be grounds for using the terms femicide and hate crime (Caputi & Russell, ; see also Danner & Carmody, ). Hate crime solutions to problems such as femicide, however, depend on deliberate acts or those that meet the legal requirements for intentional homicide (see Douglas, ; Martin, ). Following Ellis and Dekeseredy (), the current emphasis in defining U.S. femicide is on motive and status; that is, on the male perpetrator’s specific intention to kill a woman. As such, femicide tends to be applied to intimate violence fatalities in the United States (see Frye, Hosein, & Waltermaurer, ; Koziol-McLain et al., ). Outside the United States, particulary in areas of the world where femicide is culturally condoned or politically motivated (Russell & Harmes, ), media representations tend to emphasize consequences over perpetrator intentions. We saw in the chapters in Section I, Gendering Constructions: Women and Violence, that media representations in the United States downplay real-life female victimization and that, when press accounts recognize it, female victims are presented from a masculine point of view. Women are located in the domestic sphere, where sex segregation is an illusion reinforced by media violence. Women are idealized or stigmatized depending on whether they are characterized as Madonnas or whores. Female victims are further stigmatized depending on other identities such as race, ·  · debating the issues ethnicity, immigration status, or social class. Chapters , , and  build on these constructions...