In October, a 25-year-old student a Winston- Salem State University in North Carolina, Shanquella Robinson died in a luxury rental property in the Mexican state of Baja California which is being investigated as femicide. The term ‘Femicide” will be unfamiliar to many of us. despite being a global issue, femicide or a gender-motivated crime has not been defined by US legislation.
One of Robinson’s friends is a suspect in the case, and Mexican prosecutors request his extradition. According to Daniel de la Rosa, the attorney general for Baja California Sur, in connection to Robinson’s case, a femicide arrest warrant has been issued.
The authorities have reported that no one has been charged in the case and haven’t released the names of Robinson’s friends.
Several experts argue that just because there is no law explicitly defining femicide as a distinct crime from homicide in the US does not indicate that homicides against women are not occurring there.
According to Dabney P. Evans, director of Emory University’s Centre for Humanitarian Emergencies, who studied violence against women, “ Femicides happen all the time in the US, and many famous murder cases that we all have in our consciousness are femicide, but we don’t put that label on them.”
So now, the investigation regarding Robinson’s death has concluded femicide. Whether it is male or female, gender-based violence is a global issue and that is why certain scholars are saying that US law could help women by adding it into legislation.
Now let us look at what femicide is:
The most extreme form of gender-based violence is termed ‘femicide.’ which is also defined as the intentional murder of women because they are women.
There are two categories of femicide. One is intimate femicide and the other is non-intimate. The killing of a woman by her current or ex-partners is considered intimate femicide. whereas, non-intimate femicide is the killing of women by people with whom they had no intimate relationship.
According to federal law in Mexico, people can get up to 60 years in prison if they are convicted of femicide.
Robinson and another man appear to be physically fighting in a room in a video that has been going viral online recently. Her father, Bernard, said that in the video her daughter is being pushed to the ground and struck on the head. It is not sure whether the video has been shot just before Robinson’s death or whether the injury caused because of the fighting led to her death.
Several instances that could perhaps be classified as femicides, according to experts, include the excessive homicides of Black women and the deadly shooting of women in Atlanta-area spas in 2021.
According to the record of homicide data by the Violence Policy Centre, 2,059 women were killed by men in the US in 2020 and 89% of the victims knew their killers.
The system of law that addresses gender-based violence and monitors domestic violence exists in the US, but it is not perfect as it seems.
Also Read:- Arrest Warrant Issued For Shanquella Robinson’s Friend!
The federal hate crime legislation includes violent or property crimes that are least partially motivated by hatred against a person’s racial, religious, sexual, or ethical background.
Federal law renewed the Violence Against Women Act earlier this year. The laws are designed to help survivors of femicide’s well-documented antecedents, including domestic abuse, sexual assault, and stalking.
According to a UN report released this week, over 56% of the 81,100 women and girls who were killed intentionally worldwide last year were either by intimate partners or family members.
The report claims that it is challenging to convey the true extent of gender-based violence since around 4 out of every 10 homicides reported to authorities lack “contextual information to allow them to be recognized and counted as gender-related killings”
Femicide or gender-based violence is not an issue to be discussed in the US but to be discussed globally. If we took the record of gender-based violence in each country of the world, there would be an indefinite number of women who died like Shaquella Robinson was killed.
