‘It’s a social disease’: Advocates push for widespread adoption of term ‘femicide’

MONTREAL (CityNews) — Community workers in Quebec are pushing for Canadians to adopt new terminology when it comes to women being murdered by their partners.

Groups like Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability (CFOJA) want people to adopt the term ‘femicide’ in those situations as opposed to using the more general ‘homicide.’

A recent report by CFOJA showed that 160 women were murdered in Canada in 2020. In 90 per cent of those cases, a man was accused.

“When there’s a murder in the context of intimate partner, we should say here’s a murder, here’s a femicide. It’s wrong. Period,” said social worker and clinical supervisor Claudine Thibaudeau.

“Calling it a femicide will make a difference because it assigns blame. And we need to assign responsibility when we talk about these issues. A responsibility for intimate partner violence is always the responsibility of the abuser. It’s not explained by a hard past, or the loss of a job, or even by the pandemic.”

#WATCH: “When there’s a murder in the context of intimate partner, we should say, ‘here’s a murder, here’s a femicide, it’s wrong,’” says Claudine Thibaudeau, social worker at @sosviolence, on why society should #CallItFemicide. @CAN_Femicide’s latest report pushes for this. pic.twitter.com/C52VcDXE4c

— Alyssia (@rubertuccinews) March 31, 2021

In Quebec, seven women were killed in seven weeks just this year. Since the pandemic began, calls into the province’s 24/7 domestic violence hotline skyrocketed to 40,000 — an increase of 17.5 per cent over the previous year.

“We actually got a lot of calls and emails from friends and families who are very worried, some of them asking us and telling us, ‘I’m afraid that my sister is going to be the next statistic,’” said Thibaudeau.

On Tuesday, the sister of a Quebec woman found dead in a remote village in the province’s northern Nunavik region last week says 43-year-old Kataluk Paningayak-Naluiyuk was the latest victim of domestic violence in the province — making her possibly the eighth femicide in as many weeks.

“Since the beginning of February, it’s something like one a week,” said Thibaudeau. “Usually we have 12 a year, which is already terrible. It’s already too much. But one a week, it’s an incredible increase.

“I think the fact that the population is taking a stand will be greatly useful in battling this disease that we have. It’s a social disease.”

The report from the CFOJA highlights that women were more often killed in private locations. The perpetrator was more likely to be an intimate partner or family member in those cases, and it was more likely for them to be beaten, strangled, or suffocated.

“No matter what are the things or the elements that pushes the men to commit such crimes, at the end of the day, the result is the same,” said Nermine Barbouch from the Amal Center for Women. “Unfortunately, we are losing a lot of women and young girls.”