“There Was No Other Option”: Femicide Perpetrators' Sensemaking on Gender and Violence in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Fahs, Ellie; Marco, Martín Hernán Di; Evans, Dabney P.

doi:10.1089/vio.2021.0093

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 24 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Goussinsky and Yassour-Borochowitz (2012) have argued that femicides usually imply a sense of deep despair, which would trigger perpetrators to disregard consequences. In this regard, Fahs et al (2023) showed that intimate femicide implies an action to express and remediate emotional pain, and Mathews et al (2015) stressed that the homicides are connected to an immense emotional turmoil triggered by the idea of losing a partner. The same authors have also argued that the feeling of vulnerability and fear compelled them to polarise their partner as either good or bad.…”

Section: Emotions and Intimate Partner Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…More recently, there has been an emerging interest in the life histories, narratives, and sense-making of individuals who commit intimate femicide (Di Marco and Evans, 2020;Dobash and Dobash, 2015;Fahs et al, 2023;Mathews et al, 2011Mathews et al, , 2015Regis-Moura et al, 2022). Research has revealed that comprehending the worldviews of the perpetrators is key to preventing it, as such views may reveal the norms involved in aggression (Jewkes et al, 2015;Presser, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Fear, helplessness, pain, anger: The narrated emotions of intimate femicide perpetrators in Latin America

Di Marco,

Sandberg

2024

International Sociology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While studies of femicide perpetrators have focused on background factors, such as criminal history and mental health conditions, little attention has been paid to their individual experiences. Perpetrators emotions and sense-making have often been overlooked and even dismissed. With a micro-sociological approach to violence, we identify the narrated emotions involved in the perpetration of intimate femicide. The data gathered are based on 33 open-ended interviews with convicted male perpetrators from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, and Venezuela. We identify four main emotions reflecting participants’ experiences of femicide: Fear, expressed through stories of women as threats to self, family, and community; helplessness, expressed through stories of men being trapped, judged, and persecuted; and pain, connected to stories of jealousy and belittlement. These lead to anger, expressed through stories of bodily reactions and losing control. The findings indicate that intimate femicide perpetrators resort to lethal violence to regulate self-worth and remediate actions they feel were disruptive. Our research demonstrates the importance of embodied and narrated emotions to understand femicides. We argue that viewing femicide as a product of a shared pervasive emotional economy highlights the role of emotions in maintaining a gendered social order.

show abstract

Section: Emotions and Intimate Partner Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear, helplessness, pain, anger: The narrated emotions of intimate femicide perpetrators in Latin America

Di Marco,

Sandberg

2024

International Sociology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Perceptions of Social Capital Before and After the Perpetration of Femicide, Homicide, and Other Serious Crimes: Evidence from Argentina

FarrHenderson,

Di Marco,

Evans

2024

J Interpers Violence

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Over the past two decades, femicide—the gender-based killing of women or girls—has become an issue of international concern. Yet relatively little data on perpetrators exist. Current research primarily focuses on individual risk factors with less attention on community and societal factors. We use a social capital approach to examine femicide by analyzing the extent to which crime perpetrators experience and perceive social punishment (exclusion) from their social networks. Using a quota sampling strategy, we administered a cross-sectional questionnaire to perpetrators of femicide ( N = 71), male–male homicide ( N = 73), and other serious crimes ( N = 64) across four prisons in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Other crime perpetrators served as a control to the two lethal crime groups. Perceived social capital scores were assigned based on responses to two scales adapted from the World Bank’s “Integrated Questionnaire for the Measurement of Social Capital.” Before committing murder, femicide and homicide perpetrators’ scores were not statistically different. Yet after the crime, femicide perpetrators retained significantly greater scores than homicide perpetrators. The perceived social capital scores of other crime perpetrators did not change after the commission of their crimes. As a secondary objective, we examined the individual and social contexts of femicide perpetrators. Most (85%) of the femicide perpetrators could name at least one other person in their social network whom they knew to be physically violent during disagreements with their partner, while 11% stated that “everyone” they knew used violence during disagreements. Although the penalty for committing femicide and homicide is ostensibly equivalent—a life sentence of 50 years—we found that the informal social punishment femicide perpetrators perceived is less severe than that experienced by homicide perpetrators. These data indicate a lack of social punishment for femicide, compared to other crimes, showing social legitimization of the crime. These findings support the development of community-level interventions to prevent femicide.

show abstract

“There Was No Other Option”: Femicide Perpetrators' Sensemaking on Gender and Violence in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Cited by 2 publications

References 24 publications

Fear, helplessness, pain, anger: The narrated emotions of intimate femicide perpetrators in Latin America

Fear, helplessness, pain, anger: The narrated emotions of intimate femicide perpetrators in Latin America

Perceptions of Social Capital Before and After the Perpetration of Femicide, Homicide, and Other Serious Crimes: Evidence from Argentina

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About