Femicide: Is it a cause for concern in Malaysia?
SHAH ALAM - The cases of women being homicide victims have been reported especially following the Covid-19 pandemic when the world was on lockdown, with many cases escalating from domestic abuse that ends up in murders committed by their partners or exes.
The World Health Organisation said the term femicide was generally understood to be the intentional murder of women and girls simply because of their gender, but broader definitions have now come to include any killings involving females.
Unlike male homicide, many femicide cases were committed by partners or the victims' exes, which often escalated from repeated domestic abuse and eventually led to murder.
There are several forms of femicide, and the first one was intimate femicide committed by the victim's partner or exes.
The cases usually start with threats and intimidation, might involve sexual violence, and has a higher chance of occurring when the women have less power or fewer resources than their partner.
Other categories of femicide include non-intimate femicide (where the victim does not have any relations to their attacker), honour killings (where the victim's murder is to "protect the dignity and honour" of the attacker and their family), and dowry-related femicide.
To find out if femicide is a cause for concern in Malaysia, Sinar Daily spoke to Women's Aid Organisation (WAO) Research and Advocacy officer Anis Farid on the matter.
While the motives behind femicide were often framed as complex, the truth is that it was not, she said.
"Femicide happens when someone feels the death of a woman is a justified resolution and reaction to a problem.
"It is important to highlight that time and time again, femicide is framed as a crime arising out of strong emotions such as jealousy, anger, love, and betrayal, but this frame of reference actually normalises the murder of women as an appropriate and justified response," she said, adding that repeated patterns of violence such as in the case of abusive relationships or stalking cases resulted in femicide.
When the frame of reference was normalised, it taught the society that when men were overpowered by what they felt, they were allowed to kill women and girls as they pleased, and this was a type of narrative that needed to be disassociated with the society.
"Perpetrators commit femicide because they feel they have a right to end a woman's life if what she does goes against what he feels is the right way to behave for a woman," Anis said.
As part of WAO's campaign to push for anti-stalking legislation, the organisation carried out a media analysis of instances where women wound up being killed at the hands of a perpetrator that had previously stalked them.
They found that when the media reported these stories, there was a high chance that the story was reported as murder and the stalking aspect was glossed over.
"The reality is that oftentimes, when women are murdered, they are murdered by someone they knew, like a previous intimate partner," she said.
This narrative often obscured the way the woman knew she was in danger prior to the incident, as exemplified in the New Straits Times (NST) report of how a 31-year-old woman had filed several police reports over her ex-boyfriend who had been stalking her prior to her murder.
"We know that instances of domestic violence can escalate to death, however, there is a huge gap in publicly available data in Malaysia on the number of cases which have ended in death.
"Based on what we know of generally increasing trends of domestic violence following the pandemic lockdowns, it is also highly likely that femicide might have increased but is not being properly tracked or documented," Anis added.
Anis said the Home Ministry had released statistics on murder cases which involved married couples, with a total of 27 cases occurring from 2019 to 2021.
However, she cautioned against believing this data at face value. This number might be underestimated as the country did not have data transparency and there might be unreported cases that ended in death that were not properly reported to the police.
"For example, police reported that no reported stalking cases have ended in death, despite the fact that there are stories which contradict this, such as the aforementioned 31-year old mother.
"Police also separately reported that there were 18 cases of abuse which resulted in death from 2016 to October 2021, which is a different and lower number than the 27 cases involving husbands and wives (reported by Home Ministry)," she shared.
Despite such cases being brushed under the rug at times, a Google search of cases involving husbands who murdered their wives in Malaysia yielded over six million results, a brief glimpse of what might turn out to be a real problem in Malaysia.
The biggest question now was whether the country would take femicide seriously.
Murder, Anis said, was the final expression of power someone could have over another person.
Living in a patriarchal society, inherent power imbalances between men and women created the conditions that allow for femicide.
As a community, we could prevent femicide by understanding violence in all its nuances, cycles, and patterns, and by creating awareness of who survivors can reach out to for help.
"The police have the data and must put in more effort to link cases of violence against women to cases where it ends in their deaths so that the public may understand the scale of the problem.
"Additionally, we need better tracking and monitoring procedures in place, which we currently lack. If a woman has reported multiple times that some form of violence was perpetrated against her by the same individual, there needs to be a system in place which would automatically recognise and categorise her as being in danger," Anis said.
