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Justice for Valeria Márquez
Valeria Márquez was killed in one of the most horrifically public ways possible. On Tuesday evening, the 23-year-old Mexican social media influencer, who had built up a large following with videos about beauty and makeup, was recording a TikTok livestream in the beauty salon where she worked in Jalisco, a state in west-central Mexico. A man entered the establishment and, with her video still running, shot her dead.
Many details of the case are still unclear. However, Márquez’s death is being investigated as a femicide, according to a statement by the Jalisco state prosecutor.
Femicide is defined as the intentional killing of a woman or girl with gender-related motivations. (The term for killing males because of their sex, something that has occurred during war and genocide, is androcide.)
While femicide is a universal and age-old issue, it is poorly understood. It is also sometimes wilfully misunderstood by some men’s rights activists, who like to argue that it is a nonexistent problem because men make up the majority of victims (and perpetrators) of homicide. So it’s worth spelling out the parameters of femicide. If a woman is killed in a robbery gone wrong, that’s (probably) not femicide. If she is killed by an ex-boyfriend who views women as the property of men rather than autonomous human beings, that’s femicide. “Honour”-related killings are also obviously femicide.
We are missing a lot of data on femicide. “Too many victims of femicide still go uncounted: for roughly four in 10 intentional murders of women and girls, there is not enough information to identify them as gender-related killings because of national variation in criminal justice recording and investigation practices,” UN Women wrote in a report last year.
Naming the problem – understanding why femicide is different from homicide – is important, because it helps us solve it. If more institutions took misogyny and domestic violence seriously, we’d see fewer dead women. A report by the World Health Organization notes, for example, that “stronger gun laws related to men previously cited for or convicted of intimate partner abuse are of particular importance in reducing rates of femicide”.
Justice for Márquez doesn’t just involve finding her killer and ensuring they are punished. If this was femicide, it means being very clear about the misogyny that led to her death. It means holding all the lawmakers and institutions that perpetuate this misogyny to account. Justice means understanding that her death wasn’t some sort of tragic one-off, but part of a far larger problem.
“If I die, I want a loud death,” the Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna wrote on social media shortly before she was killed by an Israeli airstrike this year. “I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time … ”
That quote has haunted me ever since I read it. So many women who die premature and violent deaths die quiet deaths. They become statistics. Márquez must not just become another femicide statistic. Let her death, which has shone a spotlight on femicide, be loud. Let it have an impact that will remain through time.
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The week in pawtriarchy
Chimpanzees are a hygienic bunch, a new study has found: they wipe their bums and even clean up after sex. Like orangutans, they also apply chewed plant material – which may have medicinal properties – to their wounds. In short, they are probably more knowledgeable about medical matters than the US health secretary.
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
