Galvanized by the recent, violent murder of a woman by a man she hardly knew in broad daylight in a populated, public space, women’s rights activists in Argentina have revived the slogan that began in Mexico in response to the mass killings of young women in Ciudad Juárez. Ni una mujer menos, ni una muerta más (not one less woman, not one more female death) was the cry when the murders reached their apex with the discovery of eight dead women and girls in 1996 in Juárez, where the yearly death toll due to femicide reached 304 in 2010 and continues unabated and largely unreported. Those words were spoken by Susana Chávez Castillo, a local poetry prodigy who met the same fate when she took a simple walk in her neighbourhood to visit some friends.[1] Her mutilated body was found on 6 January 2011. In Argentina, they are saying, Ni una menos, not one less female, because every woman and girl’s life matters.

The term femicide is apparently formed from the two words “female” and “homicide,” and is generally defined as the intentional killing of women and girls because they are female, or better yet and more inclusively, female-identified. It is what is happening in Juárez, what happened in Caballito, what happens when baby girls are left to die. And it happens in the home, hidden from view. According to the World Health Organization’s information sheet entitled “Femicide: Understanding and Addressing Violence Against Women,” “Most cases of femicide are committed by partners or ex-partners, and involve ongoing abuse in the home, threats or intimidation, sexual violence or situations where women have less power or fewer resources than their partner.”[5]

But often and sadly, this latter definition is taken to imply a shared responsibility on the part of women, leading mistakenly to endless discussion, programmes, training and proscriptions, as if it were in their power to avoid abuse and femicide. But in Juárez and Caballito, one cannot in any way implicate the women who were killed; there was nothing they could have done. As Diurno writes, “Femicide is nothing more than patriarchy’s greatest expression, the dominion of male over female, and the response is brutal for females who want to escape this destiny.”[6]

In the words of prolific author Ilka Oliva Corrado, “Saying not one less means no more defenseless princesses and violent little he-men. It means taking down trafficking and prostitution networks. No more precarious labour, equal pay for equal work. Sexual education to decide. Contraception to not abort. Legal abortion to not die. No more assaults and violence against women, justice for the victims.” [7]