ABSTRACT
Sixteen Latin American countries have criminalised femicide, after the Inter-American Court of Human Rights judgment of the case Gonzalez and others vs. Mexico (also known as the Cotton Field case). This decision recognised the women’s deaths in that case were motivated by gender discrimination and the Mexican state had been ineffective in preventing and punishing these crimes. In Brazil, the crime of femicide was introduced in 2015, following the 2006 Maria da Penha Law, which sought to address violence against women. These laws are designed to bring a ‘gender lens’ to dealing with crimes against women and to prevent ‘honor killing’ defences in cases of intimate partner homicide, avoid impunity for crimes of violence against women, as well as highlighting the importance of policies to enhance gender equality. This chapter will compare statistics on femicide in Brazil and other countries, offer an overview this law reform movement in Latin America, explain the rationale for the new legislation, describe how it has been implemented, and the arguments for and against making femicide a specific crime. It argues that renaming and labelling gendered killings of women as femicide is an important strategy to recognise, understand and categorise such phenomena.
