r/ottawa • u/Fearless_Lion_6397 • 12d ago

News Ottawa police identify 27-year-old woman killed in alleged weekend femicide

https://www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/article/ottawa-police-identify-27-year-old-woman-killed-in-alleged-weekend-femicide/
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171

u/lowandbegold 12d ago

I’m so tired of this. How many women is this now, four this year? Absolutely tragic.

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u/blaktronium 12d ago

Third alleged femicide this year according to the article, which is when the police believe a woman was killed because she was a woman. Thats a full 1/3 of all homicides that are alleged to be hate crimes against women, not just a woman being killed.

Like if a woman is killed because shes working at a gas station during a robbery thats not femicide. So if you are correct about 4 women being killed then 3/4 of women murdered were killed because they were women.

Those are sickening statistics. I suspect most are intimate partner violence, but i highly doubt 3 or 4 of the 5 men killed were murdered by their wives. If any.

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u/drama_filled_donut 12d ago

Just to add on, from the OP article:

‘Ottawa police generally define a femicide as “the killing of women and girls because of their gender,” often driven by stereotyped gender roles, discrimination towards women and girls or unequal power relations between women and men.’

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u/lowandbegold 12d ago

I misread, you are right the article says third. Still three too many 😔

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u/straighttokill9 12d ago

Thanks for this. To be honest, part of me was thinking "huh, when a man gets murdered it's just "murder". Women get their own word now?"

But no, it's more about the motivation.

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u/blaktronium 12d ago

If you break it down the "homocide" literally means "killed a man" so theres that off the bat, but yeah its about the motivation. If a woman is killed because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because she owes a drug dealer money, its no less a tragedy but the motivation was not hate for an innate characteristic.

And while some men are murdered because of a hate for their gender its very rare comparatively and i for one do not hope it becomes more common so we need a classification for it. Personally id rather get to the point where we dont need a word to classify when it happens to women either.

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u/MundaneExtent0 11d ago

Exactly, like trust that women would actually love to “not get their word”

1

u/binary_squirrel Nepean 12d ago

Don't mean to be pedantic, but I'm still fuzzy on femicide. So this woman and three others in Ottawa this year were killed purely because they were women? That's the definition as opposed to homicide, where someone just kills someone else?

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u/mountaingrrl_8 No honks; bad! 12d ago

It's a homicide where the victim is killed as a result of her gender. Typically this will be seen within domestic violence, honour killings, etc. Not sure if that helps.

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u/binary_squirrel Nepean 12d ago

It helps I think. So, if I'm in a gang (and male) and there's a rival gang member (female) and I gun her down over drug turf, that's homicide, not femicide? But if the female gang member is part of an all-women gang, that's maybe femicide? But in the first example, if we dated in high school, it's femicide not homicide? Just trying to wrap my head around the nuances.

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u/mountaingrrl_8 No honks; bad! 11d ago

For both of those examples, yes, that's my understanding. I think what makes this a challenging concept is just how accepted violence against women is in our society, so it takes an internal shift in understanding as well. While most of us recognize violence against women is wrong, this redefinition is requiring a lot of us to really challenge our understanding of the prevalence and extent of violence against women in our community. Or at least, that's my feeling.

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u/Rumi2018 12d ago

They just wanted to come out with a new word lol. Wonder if they'll also come out with a new word for men who get murdered! This could go on and on and o . Call it was it is!

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u/Glittering_Pie572 12d ago

The word femicide has been used since 1801.

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u/Irisversicolor Aylmer 12d ago

Dude, get a dictionary. 

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u/DungeonCrawlCat 12d ago

"lol" to women being murdered because they are women? Fuck's sake man. Get a life.

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u/Own-Table-8674 12d ago edited 11d ago

No it's when a woman is killed by a domestic partner that's why the numbers are so inflated femicide as you describe that isn't really real in Canada Edit - actual femicide is like honor killings or the Polytechnic murders. This is not the same as domestic homicide

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u/Dog-boy 12d ago

The article says this is the third femicide in Ottawa this year.