End of impunity?

In the wake of unabating lethal violence against women, many countries around the world are mas the killing of women a specific crime

In 1782, a judge in England gave husbands the right to use violence on their wives as long as any implement used was not thicker than their thumb. This standard of measurement led to the coining of the term "rule of thumb" Society has thankfully made enough progress to find such archaic ideas abhorrent.

However, tens of thousands of women continue to be killed every year around the world just for being women.

United Nations data shows that, on average, five women or girls are killed every hour by someone in their own family. Some countries are now passing laws to specifically criminalise femicide - an extreme manifestation of gender-based violence.

The first documented use of the term "femicide" was in an 1801 book by Irish writer John Corry called A Satirical View of London at the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century where it was used to refer to the killing of a woman. The term was brought back in the 1970s by Diana EH Russell, a specialist in violence against women, who worked to highlight the magnitude of male violence and discrimination against women.

While no agreed definition of the phenomenon exists, femicide is broadly defined as the killing of a woman or girl because of her gender. This might be as a result of intimate partner violence or killing in the name of "honour", for example.