In the current news wave, there are lots of articles abouty “Femizide”. For those not familiar with the term, this specifically refers to women who die as a result of domestic violence.
As a bit of background, [in 2021, 20 women and 3 men died due to domestic violence](https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/kriminalitaet-strafrecht/polizei/haeusliche-gewalt.assetdetail.21324205.html). *Attempted* murders were 32 and 14 respectively. As you move down the scale to serious injury, mild injury, and so forth, the stats level out at about 2-to-1, that means for every 2 women attacked, 1 man was attacked.
So, here my question for your discussion: Is this emphasis on women justified?
* One argument against: According to the statistics, the ratio of domestic violence is around 2-to-1. It seems likely that the numbers are even more level than that, because men are discouraged from reporting. Emphasizing “femizide” perpetuates this problem. Perhaps we should focus on domestic violence in general.
* One argument for: There were 42 murders in the entire country in 2021, so those 20 women make up almost half of all murders. That’s a lot. There really is a specific problem regarding women, specifically, in the most violent encounters.
What do you think?
8 comments
I don’t see any reason to try to protect only some people from domestic violence.
If needed, effective actions should be taken to protect every person and any groups that are disproportionately affected by the problem will be the most benefited, of course.
I love your loaded, manipulative questioning.
Femizide = the killing of women based on their sex
23 people were killed, 20 women, 3 men. 13% of the victims were men.
Then you add men and women were equally victims of incidents of domestic violence, and ask whether we should focus on femizide…
Just wow.
I don’t think that pushing for yet another word that’s gender specific will bring anything useful.
We should focus on recognising abuse and violence, through the whole society.
It’s equaly bad if man screams at you / insults you / gaslights you / hits you or a woman does it, and no one should be on the receiving end of it, especially in a relationship / common household.
When we’re looking at physical injuries then indeed it might be statistically significant amount of injured women, if for nothing else, because they were weaker ones in the fight.
However, amount of psychical damage should not be downplayed, and in my experience, women can cause quite a lot of damage to men, without raising a hand or even a voice.
I’d stick to terms of domestic abuse and violence and work on informing all people that they don’t have to suffer/endure in toxic relationships.
one of the stupiest things I’ve herad since a while. What do you want us to do, kill more men?
If you need to write this in English, at least spell „femicide“ correctly.
Femicide was coined as a counterpart to homicide, which according to its latin roots refers to men in the first place, even though it’s used as a generic word for murdered people of any gender.
In German, Mord doesn‘t refer to any specific gender in the victim. So it feels different when we say Frauenmord. What it comes down to, though, is that some women are killed every year just because they are women and wanted to make decisions for themselves, and that’s a problem, no matter how much you try to dilute the numbers in your post.
yes we should focus on that and try to find ways to bring this number down to zero!
yes we should also focus on other kinds of (domestic) violence and bring those numbers down, too!
One is not more or less important than the other, but we have to start somewhere. And there is a significant higher number of fatal incidents in domestic violence where the victim is female, so lets work on bringing that number down. period.
Even your arguments against the focus don’t make sense. A 2 to 1 ratio is still double and your assumption that men are discouraged from reporting isn’t backed up. While it might absolutely be true you can’t just let other factors influence the stats where it fits and not do that on other occasions.
I highly recommend the book: ‘AktenEinsicht’ by Christina Klemm. It gives a very factual but often depressing look into how endangered women are treated by police and the justice system.
Funny how no articles talk about the suicide rate in switzerland.
12´´´´ 410 men died in switzerland due suicide .
450 women died in switzerland due suicide.
Should we focus on bringing the male rate down since its much higher?