Theoretical Perspectives, Empirical Findings, and Policy Implications of Research on Femicide Before, During, and After the COVID-19 Pandemic: Beyond a Special Issue Introduction

• Published date: 01 May 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10439862241245820
• Author: Lorena Molnar,Marcelo F. Aebi
• Date: 01 May 2024

https://doi.org/10.1177/10439862241245820

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

2024, Vol. 40(2) 236 –246

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/10439862241245820

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Editorial

Theoretical Perspectives,

Empirical Findings, and Policy

Implications of Research on

Femicide Before, During,

and After the COVID-19

Pandemic: Beyond a Special

Issue Introduction

Nullius in Verba

In May 2020, one of the coeditors of this special issue and cowriter of this introduction

was teaching an online class to students of a master’s program organized by several

Catalan universities. We were at the height of the pandemic, and he shared his worries

about the potential harmful effects of the lockdowns on violence against women.

According to opportunity and strain theories, which seemed the most relevant in that

context in terms of their potential for explanation and prediction, he mentioned that an

increase in this kind of violence was foreseeable. He stated the limits of official crime

indicators, such as police statistics, in measuring violent behaviors and concluded that

the only offense that could be reliably measured was homicide—because the records

of people killed are relatively reliable—provided the country made a distinction

according to the gender of the victim and, ideally, the characteristics of the offender.

In that way, one could try to identify the cases where the victims were women, and

particularly those that could be considered as femicides, even if the definition of the

latter varies from country to country. Then, loyal to the motto of the Royal Society

(Royal Society, 2024) that gives title to this section and that he made his own years

ago, he shared his screen and began searching for data on “femicidios” in Spanish-

speaking countries, given that the class was taught in Spanish. To his surprise, the

available data for March and April 2020 from several countries with femicide obser-

vatories showed no increase in femicide. This unexpected finding gave him one of the

most memorable moments in his research career. Not only were human lives being

spared, but for once, the outcome contradicted well-established criminological theo-

ries. Predictably, he proposed studying these trends further.

The result is an article titled “Against All Odds, Femicide Did Not Increase During

the First Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Six Spanish-Speaking

Countries,” published in issue 37/4 of this same Journal of Contemporary Criminal

Justice (Aebi et al., 2021). That paper, which tries to contribute to the “southerniza-

tion” of criminology by focusing on Latin American countries that are often neglected

in international criminological literature, is the cornerstone of this special issue. It tests

1245820CCJXXX10.1177/10439862241245820Journal of Contemporary Criminal JusticeMolnar and Aebi

editorial2024