Femicide Penal Response in the Americas: Indicators and the Misuses of Crime Statistics, evidence from Peru

Abstract

During the last decade, several countries in Latin America have enacted femicide as a gender-specific criminal figure. Legal modifications throughout the region were a corollary of political debates, broad perceptions and sensibilities regarding <>, and the systematic appearance of media stories and official reports warning of an exponential growth. This article focuses upon the problem of femicide, both as a social phenomenon and a juridical figure, through a comparative socio-legal approach that takes Peru’s penal reform as a case study. The aim is to account for the incidence of femicide in demographic terms and demonstrate that this is not a phenomenon of exponential growth, contrary to media stories and punitive discursive practices regarding the need of a penal reform in the country. This is achieved by recognizing an issue of increasing importance: the challenge of building gender-based indicators to measure and prosecute femicide into the criminal justice.