Women mobilizations in France and Femicide

Reclaiming Agency, autonomy and movement building of Women Across the Globe: A Cross Country Dialogue of Feminists Around Covid 19 Pandemic

1. 2017 and the new law

Violence against women has for a long time been considered as being a private sphere issue, and the States have been slow to grasp the question, however eminently political. France is following this path in 2017, by giving itself the means to incriminate for the first time violence committed against women on the basis of their gender outside the marital framework, that is, violence committed in the public sphere.  This step forward has been taken by the Law on Equality and Citizenship of 2017.  This law includes provisions to combat violence against women and to better punish them under criminal law, because the most extreme manifestation of violence against women is murder.

In the 1990s, the term feminicide appeared in the United States to designate this violence, and it has been taken up and incorporated into the law in many Latin American countries.

In the early 1990s, the term became an object of research when Jill Radford and Diane Russell published Femicide: the politics of woman killing. The term is a contraction of female and homicide. Certain tragedies have reinforced its use, such as the massacre in polytechnique school of Montréal Canada; or the recurring disappearance of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Since 2005, the work of the Council of Europe and the European Union in their French translations has used the word, as have the French translations of the work of the United Nations.

In France the word was added to the vocabulary of law and human sciences in 2014 by the General Commission on Terminology and Neology, and defined as "the homicide of a woman, girl or child because of her sex".  It appeared in the 2015 edition of the Petit Robert: "Féminicide: adj. et n.  - 1855 - from the radical of the Latin femina "woman" and -cide. Didact. 1 - Rare: Who kills a woman. N. One, a feminicide. 2 - N. m. Murder of a woman, a girl because of her sex.

• - Petit Robert : introduced in 2015
• - Larousse : introduced in 2020
• - French Academy: not recognized (institution created in 1635 responsible for defining the French language through the elaboration of its dictionary)

The term is now used internationally by the organizations and committees involved in the fight against violence against women

The Law on Equality and Citizenship of January 27, 2017 presents advancements in the fight, as it allows for the aggravation of crimes or offenses committed because of the sex of the victim. However, French criminal law refuses to recognize femicide.

"There are a few provisions that refer, expressly or implicitly, to murders specifically of women. This is the case, for example, when reference is made to an aggravating circumstance when the victim's vulnerability due to "a state of pregnancy" is "apparent or known to the perpetrator"

Other provisions do not name women but have been introduced into the criminal law to protect them.  Thus, an aggravating circumstance is provided for when the murder is committed by "the male spouse or cohabitee of the victim or the partner bound by a civil contract".

In its decision, the Constitutional Council decided that the concept of gender identity was clear and precise enough to comply with the principle of legality of crimes and penalties. The legislation aimed at the gender with which a person identifies himself or herself, whether or not it corresponds to the sex indicated in the civil status registers

Finally, the choice is made to criminalize gender-based violence through the system of aggravating circumstances and not to dedicate a specific crime when the victim is a woman.

In this context, feminists point that this law is an insufficient choice with regard to the specificity of violence against women : criminalizing gender violence through the technique of aggravating circumstances, while maintaining the separation between violence committed in the private and public spheres, would not give full weight to such violence, which, constitutes a continuum of patriarchal domination.

It is obviously necessary to continue to penalize in an aggravated manner violence committed by a spouse, cohabitee or partner. However, it would also seem relevant to consider the possibility of grouping all forms of extreme violence committed against women under a single criminal offence. The criminal law would then have a designating role. It would make it possible to no longer consider murders of women as one-off and exceptional accidents, but rather as "the illustration of a system based on relations of power and domination in which women are considered inferior to men".

The context in France is certainly different than in other countries. It can be recognized that gender violence is less marked there than in other regions of the world. However, the fact that their impact is less does not erase common characteristics that imply thinking about violence in a global way and, to do so, using the adapted words, including, perhaps, law.

The ongoing strikes all over France today have also as an aim to ask for the recognition of femicide in French law.

2. 2019 and 2020

For the record, France issued 2 phases of lockdown, the first one having been in April for a month and a half ; and the second one, that is ongoing, covers all November 2020.

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