As Latin America imprisons perpetrators for life, Gender CS's approach reduces femicide to dependency issues
Technical Working Group on GBV including Femicide Chairperson Dr Nancy Baraza and Vice-Chair Dr Sam Thenya receive a report from National Crime Research Centre CEO Dr Mutuma Ruteere (right) during the stakeholders’ engagement held at KICC on April 9, 2025.
What you need to know:
- Femicide is rooted in power, not dependency—Kenya needs legal recognition and strong protective policies.
- Without clear laws and accountability, femicide continues to silence women and undermine gender equality in Kenya.
Hannah Wendot Cheptumo, the Cabinet Secretary for Gender, gave a rather dismissive interpretation of femicide during her vetting by the Parliamentary Committee on Appointments.
She stated, “Femicide is brought about by dependency. If girls were able to have economic power, they would not depend on either gender. If a woman is educated, chances are that they will avoid some of these challenges in society.”
But does dependency justify the killing of a woman? Femicide is a violation of the most basic human rights, namely the right to life, liberty, and personal security as outlined in a 2021 study conducted for the European Parliament's Subcommittee on Human Rights. Beyond being a human rights violation, femicide is an obstacle to social and economic development.
According to the European Institute for Gender Equality, femicide is the most extreme manifestation of gender-based violence. It is deeply rooted in, and a manifestation of, systemic power imbalances that promote unequal status between men and women.
The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability outlines three broad categories of femicide. Intimate femicide, also known as intimate partner femicide, refers to the killing of women by current or former partners, primarily men, and in some circumstances women where a relationship involves lesbians.
Familial femicide involves the killing of women and girls by family members or other relatives, primarily men, though in some cases women perpetrators are included. These murders may intersect with intimate femicide when multiple victims are involved, as seen in cases of familicide or filicide.
Non-intimate femicide describes the killing of women by individuals with whom they had no intimate relationship. This category includes various subtypes such as stranger femicide, the murder of women involved in sex work, sexual femicide, femicide related to human trafficking, and those committed in conflict settings.
In Latin America, femicide has been translated into Spanish as feminicide and it is used for characterisation of the cases and in laws. In this region, 18 countries have passed laws criminalising femicide, feminicide, or gender-based killings of women.
In Argentina, for instance, the Criminal Code was amended in 2012 to define femicide as an aggravated form of homicide. The law prohibits consideration of mitigating circumstances in sentencing where a perpetrator has a known history of violence.
Femicide is defined here as the murder of a woman by a man in the context of gender violence. The law recognises motivations such as pleasure, greed, or hatred based on race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation as grounds for aggravated homicide.
It imposes life imprisonment for individuals who kill descendants, spouses, or persons with whom they have had an intimate relationship even if they were not cohabiting at the time of the crime. This legislation followed years of advocacy in a region where, in 2022 alone, at least 4,050 women were killed in acts of femicide, according to the Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean. That is the equivalent of an entire village wiped out.
There have been convictions under the law. In 2023, for example, an Argentinian court convicted two men for the 2016 rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl. The main offender received a life sentence for sexual abuse, supplying narcotics, and femicide. The second man, found to be an accessory, was sentenced to eight years in jail.
However, despite the existence of such laws, political threats roll them back. In January 2024, Argentina’s Justice Minister Mariano Cúneo Libarona declared that the government would “eliminate the figure of femicide from the Argentine penal code,” arguing that feminism was a “distortion of the concept of equality”. This reveals the constant struggle to protect women from extreme violence.
In Kenya, no specific law addresses femicide. Yet the killing of women with albinism and other gender-motivated killings are widely recognised as extreme forms of gendered brutality. Proposals submitted to Kenya’s taskforce on gender-based violence, including femicide, calls to recognise it in law. Experts have documented cases where elderly women, particularly widows, are murdered so that male relatives can take over land and property.
Others are killed under accusations of witchcraft or blamed for their husbands' deaths. The 2021 study for the European Parliament lists several factors that facilitate femicide, including substance abuse, violation of protection orders, and untreated mental health conditions. Other contributing factors include unemployment-related stress, obsessive jealousy, childhood exposure to domestic violence, and prior partner abuse.
Aggressive masculinity
Cultural norms that glorify aggressive masculinity, lack of redress for gender inequality, and coercive control in intimate relationships all contribute to femicide. Of particular concern is the use of femicide as a weapon of war. Conflict settings create fragile environments in which men exploit these underlying factors to exert dominance and kill women deliberately, weaponising their bodies and lives to destroy communities.
Therefore, Hannah's interpretation of femicide is so simplistic and misguided that anyone holding the office of Cabinet Secretary for Gender, charged with lobbying for laws to prevent femicide, should not, and cannot, afford to think that way.