femicide

Femicide is the practice of murdering females. It is endemic in the Middle East, and practised by both Christian and Muslim Arabs, it is also practised in Latin America and India with female infanticide being a notable problem in China.

In the Middle East, the practice is often for reasons of 'honour.' If a woman or girl talks with a man, and is not properly chaperoned, she can be killed. If a woman has premarital sex, even if she is raped, she can be killed. In many cases if a woman is killed, she is actually quite lucky. Many women are forced into arranged marriages, sometimes even with their rapists. If a woman refuses an arranged marriage, she will be killed or mutilated. These are legal practises in the Arab world.

In India, the practice of dowry is still rather extensive. In recent years, it has become a business in and of itself. A man will marry and his family be paid a dowry, within the next few years he will kill his wife and remarry, continuing the process. These deaths are often by immolation, and rarely investigated.

In Latin America, the excuse often used for the practice of femicide is that it is too difficult to get a divorce. Once again the crimes are rarely investigated.

I would have to say that Social Wolf's explanation is closer to the defintion of gynocide, at least as it is currently being used. Both words have only begun to be used in the last decade or two and neither of them are in any dictionaries. Femicide is a term that was coined by feminists and generally used to lend political significance to the murder of a woman, such as the murder of one's wife, girlfriend, sister, mother, neighbour, etc. and often used in conjunction with the word 'intimate' to emphasize that the woman knew her killer; it is derived from the Latin word femina meaning 'woman' and the Latin caedere meaning to 'to slay', in contrast to homicide with the Latin word homo meaning 'man'.