Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for October 2020, Myrna Dawson (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Guelph, Canada). Her article for Current Sociology, Identifying femicide locally and globally: Understanding the utility and accessibility of sex/gender-related motives and indicators, co-authored with Michelle Carrigan, is Free Access this month.

Myrna Dawson

Your article for Current Sociology “Identifying femicide locally and globally: Understanding the utility and accessibility of sex/gender-related motives and indicators” co-authored with Michelle Carrigan, was recently published online. What do you see as the key findings of this article?

M. Dawson: The first key finding is that it is important to use the term femicide or feminicide (the latter is more common in some world regions) to distinguish sex/gender-related killings of women and girls from other homicides – which is why we use #CallItFemicide in our social media education and awareness work. Femicides are distinct in their characteristics as shown by our data from the Canadian context. This has been increasingly recognized in the Global South, particularly Latin America in the past decade or so, but not in the Global North, including Canada. However, there are few empirical studies to demonstrate this clearly because of a dearth of reliable data.

Related to this latter point, the second finding is that there were significant challenges in documenting the characteristics of these killings and those involved, leading to significant data gaps, particularly around sex/gender-related motives and indicators. Given the database is unique for its original and ongoing focus on femicide and the triangulation of information from multiple official and/or public data sources, the broader implications of these gaps are even more concerning. In short, data that can enhance the development of informed prevention initiatives targeting femicide, and violence against women and girls more generally, are not being routinely collected by states, governments, or their representatives.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

M. Dawson: One implication is that we need to call these killings what they are – femicide or feminicide – to emphasize the sex/gender-based elements involved. This term draws attention to what we underscore in this study – that is, women and girls are often killed in different ways and for different reasons than men and boys, although both killed primarily by men. We cannot address a social problem if we do not recognize it for what it is and name it, but we also need to identify what those sex/gender-based elements are and determine how to measure them consistently.

A second implication is that the data gaps – what we and others call data biases – are putting the lives of women and girls at risk. As such, we call for states and governments to reconceptualize data collection to emphasize prevention rather than administrative needs. The goal is to produce reliable and consistent data that can help us to better understand the sex/gender-based motives and indicators and to support the development of more nuanced prevention initiatives. These data collection efforts must begin at the point of police investigations and prosecutions which will subsequently feed into aggregate-level data available at the national and global levels. Better data are crucial for monitoring trends and patterns to identify emerging research, policy and practice priorities, but better data require strong and sustainable collaborations across research, communities, and government.

Do you have any links to other pieces of research or a suggested reading list which build on or add to the article?

M. Dawson: There is so much to highlight.

A classic that remains relevant today in this field is Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (1992), the edited collection mentioned above, which provides crucial foundational knowledge.

Beginning with Homicide Studies (1998) in which I published my first article on intimate femicide, there have been four special issues focused specifically on femicide, including as well Current Sociology (2016), Qualitative Sociology Review (2017), and Journal of Comparative Social Work (2018).

One of the most comprehensive efforts to document how femicide/feminicide may be identified, which we draw heavily from in our article, is The Latin American Model Protocol for the Investigation of GenderRelated Killings of Women (Femicide/Feminicide) (2014).

The international 12volume series Femicide, initially published by the Academic Council of the United Nations System, and now by the United Nations Studies Association (UNSA) Vienna, provides a muchneeded look at various topics related to femicide from a variety of country and world region perspectives.

Oxford Bibliographies has a special focused guide to current academic scholarship on femicide.

Ongoing research conducted through the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability also continues to educate and increase awareness about what is meant by sex/gender-related motives and indicators using illustrative case studies from Canada published in the annual #CallItFemicide reports which can be downloaded from www.femicideincanada.ca.

Could you tell us more about your trajectory? How did you come to the field of sociology?

M. Dawson: I grew up on a small island in Eastern Canada where I made my first attempt at university. Eager to see the rest of the country and the world, however, I dropped out after the first semester and enrolled in a college journalism program after which I spent six years as an editor/reporter for newspapers in Eastern and Central Canada. Much of my reporting focused on issues related to crime and justice so my interest in violence and society was sparked during this time. Of course, it was not until much later that I began to appreciate the value of theory and research in understanding human behaviour or how complex the processes can be when attempting to understand society’s responses to violence. I returned to university in the early 1990s, completing my BA (Sociology/Law & Society) at York University and my PhD (Sociology) at the University of Toronto. During this period, I was exposed to the rich feminist literature and research on male violence against women and girls which ultimately determined my research trajectory.

How did you come to your field of study?

M. Dawson: During the last year of my BA, I read what was for me the most influential book of my undergraduate degree, Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (1992), an edited collection by Jill Radford and the late Diana Russell. At the same time, I became aware of a report on intimate femicide in Ontario, Canada, that had recently been released, based on a study spearheaded by a group of eight women working in shelters for abused women. On the cusp of entering graduate school, I volunteered to work on this project, which was entering its second stage of data collection and, through this research, I was also able to begin my examination of the role of intimacy in determining access to justice for femicide victims. My ongoing research on femicide continues to document these killings, using these data to research and write on various questions and topics related to femicide. I recently rolled out this project nationally, supporting the work of the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability which I established in 2017.