Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl case 12 is on “the intentional murder of women because of their gender” or femicide. My team broached this sad topic last week, and one promising approach to decreasing femicide discussed in the case is mitigating possible root causes. For example, “the South African government’s approach to femicide has emphasized financial independence, built on the assumption that resolving economic hardship can help assuage the conditions that lead to femicides,” presumably under the assumption that women completely dependent upon men might be more vulnerable to inescapable violent relationships.
For a small-scale, grassroots example of a strategy to decreasing domestic violence generally, an organization where I live in East Tennessee hosts an annual “Me and My Guy” daddy daughter dance as a way to encourage men to treat women with dignity and respect, and for young women to internalize the belief that they deserve respectful treatment. That way they’ll be more likely to demand it from otherwise abusive partners, or leave/avoid abusive relationships altogether. This modest annual event is something my daughter and I have done for several years, always look forward to and enjoy. I recommend it to all the local dads I know with daughters, and last year we were joined by my nephew and great-niece. And I think beyond bringing particular young ladies and their father figures closer together, the event has to be raising standards among participating girls’ friend groups, and well as attitudes among dads’ coworkers, friends, and families.
Another strategy countries are using to decrease femicide is enhanced legal punishments. My IEB team may change their mind, but their initial take was that such laws would be unlikely to enhance deterrence unless there’s a substantial gap between punishments for killing women versus killing anyone. At least in the U.S., a murder conviction can already bring life imprisonment or even execution in some states, so some sort of additional pain would need to be included for femicide-specific murder convictions to proactively shape the behavior of would-be perpetrators. However, maybe anti-femicide laws could reinforce the wrongness of targeting women—just as hate crimes laws reinforce the wrongness of targeting victims due to the religion, ethnicity, etc.—and over time shape cultural values such that fewer hate crimes or femicides would occur? In this way, perhaps anti-femicide laws are both a direct deterrent and a cultural-shift strategy? Perhaps. And maybe this is the real goal of such laws since many (if not most) would-be murderers aren’t making rational risk calculations, but acting out of rage or irrationally generally. A few other ideas our team broached on the enhanced punishments angle:
- It’s unclear when femicide-specific punishment enhancements would/should trigger—anytime a woman is murdered, or anytime a woman is murdered solely/mainly/in part because she’s a woman?
- It’s unclear how these laws would deal with cases where the perpetrator is herself a woman (same punishment?)
- It’s unclear how these laws would deal with cases where the victim or perpetrator is nonbinary, which the case acknowledges in the closing sentence
What do you think? Do other questions, possible solutions or analogies IEB teams should be considering come to mind? If so, please leave a comment. Not a happy topic, but definitely worth discussing, and perhaps a problem the Ethics Bowl community can help address. In the meantime, kudos to the Monroe County Health Council—looking forward to the next dance in December.