Femicide in the United States: a Call for Legal Codification and National Surveillance

By Patricia C. Lewis , Nadine J. Kaslow, Yuk Fai Cheong, Dabney P. Evans and Kathryn M. Yount

Femicide Refers to the intentional gender-related killing of women and girls (1). Despite the high prevalence of female murder victimization in the United States (U.S.) (2, 3), the U.S. lags behind other nations in defining and documenting gender-related female homicides (4). While efforts are underway within the criminal justice and public health sectors to better track violent deaths, deficient surveillance systems limit efforts to estimate the annual incidence of femicide in the U.S. Here, we position femicide as a preventable death that should be treated as a social and public health problem and a distinct form of homicide in the legal code. This approach is especially salient, given the documented increase of non-lethal intimate partner violence (IPV) in major cities (5) and nationally (6) during the COVID-19pandemic, demonstrating the collateral impacts of public-health crises on violence against women (VAW). 

Front. Public Health, 27 February 2024 Sec. Injury Prevention and Control Volume 12 - 2024 |