u/Both_Relationship_62

Screenshot 1 shows the countries whose legislation includes special penalties for the murder of women (“femicide”) as of 2023. Source: World Bank.

Among these countries are Venezuela, Peru, Honduras, Turkey, Georgia, Gabon, and Morocco.

Morocco criminalizes homosexuality and prohibits preaching any religion other than Islam, and at the same time, it has a legally established special punishment for killing women.

It seems like some people view "femicide" laws as something progressive, but there is actually nothing progressive about them. These are plain traditional gender roles where the female sex is the object of protection, while men are those who deal with all kinds of danger and often die in the process.

The World Bank also provides more detailed examples of specific provisions in the "femicide" legislation of three countries — Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru (screenshots 4-5 show the example from Mexico).

I asked ChatGPT to go through each of these criteria and assess whether they could also apply to male victims. It answered that all of them are applicable to men, except for "Discrimination against women", which, however, can have a male analogue, and "Victim was pregnant", which is biologically specific to women.

The general idea expressed in phrasings like "for a reason related to gender", "because she is a woman", and "because of her gender" can apply to men just as well — if not even more so. Most violence against men happens because of their gender / because they are men. Violence against men (at least physical) is far more socially accepted than violence against women, and in many cases, a man would not be targeted if he were a woman (or, if the attack did occur, the violence would likely be less severe).

Screenshots 6-9 show homicide victim data by sex for all countries marked in blue on the map in Screenshot 1 (plus Italy, where a "femicide" law was adopted several months ago, minus Gabon, for which there’s no data available). Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

As we can see, in all these countries, without exception, the majority of homicide victims are men. In some of them, men are killed more than 10 times as often as women.

According to UN statistics, on average globally, men become victims of homicide nearly 4 times more often than women.

In 2024, for example, the recorded global homicide figures were: 83,098 women (2.05 per 100K) and 336,829 men (8.21 per 100K) — a ratio of approximately 1 to 4. The ratio in previous years was roughly the same.

Men constitute the majority of homicide victims in every region and subregion of the world, though with varying ratios. The largest gap between female and male victims is in the Americas (around 1 to 7), the smallest is in Oceania (around 1 to 2). Among subregions, the largest gap is in Latin America (nearly 1 to 9), and the smallest is in South Asia (around 1 to 1.5).

So we see an interesting picture: "femicide" legislation is most prevalent in the region with the world's largest gap between male and female homicide victims — Latin America, where men are killed nearly 9 times more often than women.

I wonder whether it’s a coincidence or a pattern.

Maybe the reasoning behind such laws was something like: "Well, our region is very dangerous, there's so much violence, all these gangs, so women need special protection in this dangerous environment".

But anyway, the "boys will be boys" attitude is quite obvious. Like, men kill each other all the time, something typical and not worth special concern. The priority must be to make sure that women are not harmed.

I think this is a serious mistake. Male-on-male violence, as the most socially accepted form of violence, is, in a certain sense, the foundation of violence in general. Aggressive traits and toxic beliefs are often shaped in male-on-male competition and conflict. Violence between men often serves as the environment that cultivates and normalizes aggression as such. This is something that ultimately affects women too. Pushing male-on-male violence into the background, treating it as something secondary, is a mistake, because it is not secondary — it is, to a large extent, foundational.

It is also unjust, because violence between men is a problem in its own right. The fact that young men in Latin America join gangs and end up dying in shootings is a tragedy. They do it not because their lives are going well.

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I used AI to speed up the translation of the original text written in my native language into English, but I carefully checked and double-checked the translation and made all necessary corrections to make sure it accurately corresponds to the original. The text is written by a human (me), but the translation into English is by AI (with my careful editing and corrections).