Book Review: Feticide in Global Perspective

• Author: Jacquelyn C. Campbell
• DOI: 10.1177/1088767902006002005
• Published date: 01 May 2002
• Date: 01 May 2002
• Subject Matter: Articles

HOMICIDE STUDIES / May 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Book Review
Femicide in Global Perspective, byDiana Russell. New York:
Teachers’ College Press, 2001.
This important book is a compilation of research and scholarship
about homicide of women from a decidedlyfeminist perspective. Diana
Russell (Radford & Russell, 1992) was the first to use the term femicide in
scholarlydiscourse about homicide, and she traces this herstoryin her
introduction. She defines the term with an important theoretical differ-
ence from the dictionaryversion, adding “because theyare women” to
the “killing of women” definition in Webster. Russell ablydefends her
version and its political as well as theoretical difference, although I actu-
allyprefer the Gartner variation in her chapter in this same book. Gart-
ner defines (intimate partner) femicide as “violence that occurs and
takes particular form because its target is a woman” (p. 161). I would
omit the second part of Gartner’s definition (“a woman who has been
intimatelyinvolved with her killer”) and add “lethal” as the first word to
make it applyto a broader spectrum of cases. Thus, femicide can be
defined as “lethal violence that occurs and takes particular form because
its target is a woman.” In this way, a woman is not necessarily killed
because she is a woman but the violence occurs in its particular pattern
because the target is a woman. This seems to retain the political point
that Russell is making and yet avoids an attribution of misogyny to all
killers of women as an assumption rather than based on specific evi-
dence. This definition has the advantage of including most of the cases
where women are killed and also retains its importance in directing
researchers to continue to address the patterns of femicide that differen-
tiate it from cases where men kill men. As Gartner quotes from Dobash,
Dobash, Wilson, and Daly (1992),
Men often kill wives after lengthyperiods of prolonged physical
violence accompanied byother forms of abuse and coercion; the
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