Why Femicide is a Dubious Concept

“Whatever you know is just words,” said Sanatkumara, “names of finite phenomena. It is the Infinite that is the source of abiding joy because it is not subject to change. Therefore, seek to know the Infinite.” — The Chandogya Upanishad.

What is in a word?

One way in which individuals get caught up in meaningless debates is when they fail to recognize the difference between words and concepts. As the quote above suggests, whatever we know is just words, but there’s more to words than the words themselves. Despite taking a mystical route, the Upanishads correctly observe that beyond words, we find the infinite, and the infinite does not change. For purposes of this article, let’s replace the word infinite with concept since, as we shall see, both entail the same thing. First, think about Abraham Lincoln’s quote below:

“If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” “Five,” his audience would invariably answer. “No,” he would politely respond,” the correct answer is four. Calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.”

Both Lincoln and the Upanishads are making a distinction between words and concepts. The word dog has a specific truth meaning, and so do words like tail and legs. Even though it’s possible to call legs tails and dogs cats, it’s actually impossible to change the underlying concepts. Assuming you didn’t know the word dog, and you came across a dog, would you be able to describe the animal to other people until they understood what you were talking about? What if you did not know what a cat is and you came across one? Would you still be able to describe what you saw? The answer is yes because you’d only need to describe the specific features that are characteristic of dogs and cats. People would form mental pictures of what you are talking about and then make the connection. These are concepts, and concepts are what we invent words such as dogs and cats to describe. Concepts are not necessarily mental since, other than our apriori knowledge of them; they are not figments of the imagination since they represent real phenomena. An infant knows the difference between a dog and its mother, a dog can tell apart a cat from another dog, and cows know goats are not cows.

The concept isn’t just the sense data; what you see, hear, or feel; it also entails what we know through acquaintance or description. It’s only after coming across a large number of dogs and cats that we realize that there’s an underlying concept to dogness that never changes, transcending the peculiar differences in every dog we know. A dog without a leg is still a dog because dogness isn’t defined by legs, even though you could still invent a word for three-legged dogs. What the Upanishads call the infinite is what Kant called the Universal. The universal is what we typically consider to be truth. Statements are true if the concepts underpinning the words are universal.

Therefore, when asked to judge the validity or truth of a statement or word, you can start by examining the universality of the underlying concepts. Lincoln does this well when he asks about the number of legs that a dog has if we decide to call the tail a leg. The statement dogs have five legs is not true even after switching the words because the concepts defining tails and legs stayed the same. “Ruto is the president of Kenya today” is a true statement because we all know who Ruto is, what the word president means, what Kenya is, and what the word today means. You can use this framework to judge the validity of statements like “transgender men are men.” Ideally, the word man can be used to mean many different things, including “humanity.” However, the concept it denotes is maleness. Even though one can choose to call anything they wish man, that doesn’t mean the male concept can be applied to everything out there. Therefore, we can acknowledge that “transgender men are men” fictionally means something, but “transgender men are male” isn’t remotely valid.

What is femicide?

The differences between words and concepts underlie the difference between fiction and reality. We can wish for anything to exist by giving it a name. However, it does not become real just because we give it a name. Take an example of a word like femicide, which the UN Office on Drugs and Crime defines as the “gender-related killing of women and girls.” This definition arises from four characteristics:

1. The killing of a woman by another person (objective criterion).
2. The intent of the perpetrator to kill or seriously injure the victim (subjective criterion).
3. The unlawfulness of the killing (legal criterion).
4. The gender-related motivation of the killing.

UNODC agrees that the fourth characteristic is what distinguishes femicide from a typical gender-neutral homicide. Therefore, if there’s anything to unpack, then the fourth statement is the one to focus on. Since we’ve already gone through the whole premise of words and concepts, let’s ponder what the fourth statement means.

Assuming I told Owino to go out and record all gender-related killings of women and girls in the world, what would he record? Would he go around recording every instance of a dead woman who was killed? Would he visit prisons to interview all killers, trying to find out what their motivations were before they killed women? What exactly would Owino understand as the meaning of the phrase “gender-related motivation.” Would he interpret it to mean gender caused the motivation, or would he interpret it to mean that gender was secondary to other primary motivations? For example, assuming she found a woman killed by the husband for cheating, is gender, in this case, a primary motivating factor for the killing or secondary?

The UNODC helps settle this problem for Owino by postulating that “gender-related factors [include] the ideology of men’s entitlement and privilege over women, social norms regarding masculinity, and the need to assert male control or power, enforce gender roles, or prevent, discourage or punish what is considered to be unacceptable female behavior.” Does this help, or the waters have been muddied further? Remember, we are still looking for the concept, and you don’t get the concept by piling additional mysterious words into it.

For comparison, homicide is defined as the intentional and unlawful killing of one person by another. It’s quite simple because we know what the word ‘law’ means, and we know what the words ‘person,’ ‘intent,’ and ‘killing’ mean. Since murder is illegal in all countries, Owino only needs to sieve through all killings in the world and determine their legality. However, with femicide, the definition seems to suggest there are a million things that characterize it, making its categorization a herculean task. It’s probably for this reason that websites like Wikipedia discard all the pomp and define femicide as the killing of women because of their gender. This is interesting because it implies gender is the primary motivation of the killing, even though the UN maintains gender can be a secondary and even tertiary motivation of a killing.

Suppose gender is a secondary or tertiary motivation (meaning a man in the same position would have suffered the same fate). How is that category important in the definition of the femicide concept? We know this concept is absurd because social norms, gender roles, masculinity, and patriarchy are never the primary reasons for any killing. It would be like saying capitalism is the motivation for every work-related death in the world.

This can be understood intuitively by considering this analogy. If a man is killed by a woman for cheating and another woman elsewhere is killed by a man for cheating, what we need here is a word that defines killings that arise from cheating, and not a word categorizing the killing based on gender. Similarly, if a husband kills his wife for coming home late and in a different neighborhood, a wife kills her husband for coming home late, what we need here is a word describing killings for coming home late and not categorizing them by gender. In as much as social norms that sanction late coming lurk in the background, these norms do not directly cause any murders. Calling killings for coming home late “social-norm-related” or “gender-related” is like calling a dog’s leg a tail; it doesn’t change the reality underpinning the nature of the killing. Following this line of thought, we can conclude that the UN’s definition that tries to include broad social issues as secondary and tertiary factors as the defining motivations for female deaths is wrong or logically flawed.

Another damning flaw in the definition of femicide can be stated as follows: precedents are not motivations.1 All humans in the world can either be male or female, and the mere fact that all killings will occur to males or females does not tell us anything about the motivation of the killing. Otherwise, someone would come out and say Luhyas, Luos, or Kikuyus are being systematically murdered just because a few dead bodies collected at City Mortuary happened to be Luo, Luhya, or Kikuyu. These tribes tell us nothing about the motivations of the killers because the tribes themselves occur naturally to the individuals and are, therefore, characteristic of the murdered person and not the motivation for the murder. Similarly, gender is something everyone has, and all dead bodies will always have a gender. Gender, therefore, does not tell us why the person was murdered, and worse, it does not tell us the motivations of the murderer. The phrase “gender-related motivation” is similar to others, such as “height-related motivation,” when a tall person is killed, or “tribe-related motivation,” when someone of a specific tribe is killed. For this reason, the Wikipedia definition, despite its simplicity, is logically flawed and conceptually empty.

To sum up, words are nothing without concepts. As the Upanishads observe, concepts are infinite, and words are superficial. Inventing new words and changing the meaning of others usually does not alter the fundamental realities underpinning them. We should, therefore, be careful how we use words to ensure we actually communicate their truths rather than using words to conjure fictional realities and impose these non-existent worlds on others. The word femicide ascribes causality to second, third, and fourth-order factors, which aren’t the primary motivating factors for the death of women. In the process, it covers up actual causality since gender in itself is a precedent for all deaths and rarely a primary motivating factor for murder. The concept underpinning the word femicide is, therefore, missing, making the entire word non-informative of any real-world phenomena.

1. The word precedent in this case means every human who dies must have had a gender or a sex before their death. The gender was precedent, but it wasn’t causative. If X precedes Y, that doesn’t mean X causes Y. If people have gender before they are killed, that does not mean it’s gender that caused or motivated their death. If that had been the case, it would put us in a very difficult scenario where preventing femicides meant doing away with human gender.