Femicide or relationship crime: Criticism of the criminological term after crime in Baden

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Flowers are laid at a memorial for a victim of femicide - statistically speaking, a woman is affected every third day

Photo: Caro

An 18-year-old student is said to have killed a classmate of the same age at a high school in Baden-Württemberg.

The police speak of a “relationship crime.”

There is always criticism of this term.

Why is it referred to as a “relationship act”?

The term “relationship offense” comes from criminology, but is not a legal term.

One speaks of a relationship crime when the perpetrator and victim knew each other and the motive for the crime can be traced back to their acquaintance.

This means that a relationship offense requires a history of the offense prior to the current situation, derived from a relevant perpetrator-victim relationship.

The epitome of a relationship crime is the killing of a partner or former partner, a form of femicide.

However, the term is also used for homicides in which the perpetrator and victim have a family or friendly relationship with each other - including in police crime statistics.

Since 2011, such crimes have been recorded there under the term “partner violence”.

The critic

According to critics, the word “relational crime” shifts responsibility from the perpetrator to the relationship, which ultimately serves as the motive for the crime.

Jealousy and rejection on the part of the partner or former partner are often cited as motives for a so-called relationship act.

According to feminist understanding, such crimes are not about feelings - many women's rights activists believe it is wrong to explain the killing of a woman by citing a previous relationship.

This would make the crime trivial.

Violence against women is never a result of a romantic relationship, but rather a product of patriarchal patterns of control and dominance and the demonstration of superiority of men over women.

That's why we should talk about femicide instead of a relationship act.

In recent years, the debate has increasingly raised the question of whether the gender implications of the acts and their sexist background are sufficiently taken into account when dealing with femicides under criminal law.

What is femicide?

The term femicide goes back to the feminist sociologist Diana EH Russell, who introduced it at the “International Tribunal against Violence against Women” in 1976.

She wanted to point out that a large proportion of the killings of women take place in the context of the power structures of sexism and misogyny in patriarchal societies.

Finally, she described femicide as “the killing of female persons by male persons because they are female.”

This means that the female gender plays a decisive role in femicide: The term refers to different forms of sexism in the context of deadly violence against women and girls.

Statistically speaking, a woman is killed by her partner or former partner every third day in Germany;

Every day there is an attempted murder of a woman registered by the police in Germany.

The most common form of femicide is intimate partner violence.

Femicides also include so-called “honor killings”, in which the reputation of the man or family is intended to be restored.

Murders motivated by misogyny, without the perpetrator and victim having a personal relationship with one another, and crimes against women in wartime in order to demonstrate dominance also fall under the term.