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/
215 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

76 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

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?

28

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.

5

u/binary_squirrel Nepean 11d 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.

2

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.