‘Uphill battle’: Criminal Code must include definition for femicide, advocates say

As police in Ontario increasingly investigate killings of women and girls as femicides, advocates say a firm definition of the term must be embedded in the Criminal Code.

It’s a change they hope could be on the table soon after Prime Minister Mark Carney proposed cracking down on intimate partner violence in this year’s federal election campaign.

Ottawa police, who have been using the term since August 2024, said last week they were investigating the death of a 54-year-old woman as a femicide. They arrested a 57-year-old man and charged him with second-degree murder.

Last month, Kingston Police logged its first use of the label in a news release.

Police said they determined the death of a 25-year-old woman to be a femicide because it occurred “in the context of intimate partner violence,” and they arrested a 26-year-old man for first-degree murder. They confirmed it was their first time describing a homicide in this way.

Police use the word so rarely that the Kingston example was a “very significant” move, said Myrna Dawson, founder and director of the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability.

“That’s not something that’s really in their vocabulary right now. It’s not something that is in many people’s vocabulary as much as it should be,” she said.

Dawson, who is also a sociology professor at the University of Guelph, said the lack of Criminal Code definition is part of the reason why.

The observatory defines femicide as the killing of women and girls because of their gender.

The group also uses a framework from the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime that lists 10 specific indicators that a crime could be considered femicide.

They include a woman or girl being killed by her intimate partner or family member, a victim having had a history of being harassed and sexual violence playing a role in the crime. In some cases, more than one factor can be at play.

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“They’re killed in distinct ways from men and boys, and they’re killed in many ways because of men and boys being entitled to relationships with them and expecting that women don’t get to decide when they don’t want a relationship any longer,” Dawson said.

Using the UN framework, her group has counted 1,014 femicides across Canada since it began tracking the killing of women and girls in 2018.

That included 187 femicides last year. A current or former intimate partner was accused in nearly half of those cases, the observatory found. Family members were accused in another 28 per cent of cases. Only six per cent of alleged perpetrators were strangers to the victims.

Though Kingston police have now called one case a femicide, the group’s data suggests at least four killings since 2018 could meet the definition.

Other groups are attempting the same work. The Ontario Association of Interval Houses, which tracks cases in the province, has identified five femicides in Kingston since late 2019.

Its executive director, Marlene Ham, said that without a universally recognized definition for femicide, different groups will end up with different numbers.

Adding a definition of femicide to the Criminal Code would allow better data on violence against women to be captured by police and national agencies such as Statistics Canada, both advocates said.

Kingston Police spokesperson Const. Anthony Colangeli declined to answer questions about what motivated the force to use the term femicide and whether it plans to use similar terminology in the future.

An Ottawa police spokesperson said the force started using the word femicide to “highlight the realities of gender-based violence faced by women in our community.”

“By using appropriate language to refer to these murders, we are continuing conversations about this subject that is often considered ‘private.’ We are raising awareness about an epidemic that is occurring and labelling these deaths appropriately,” the spokesperson said in an email.

In the absence of an agreed-upon definition, Ottawa police have come up with a list of 14 forms of violence that fall into the category of femicide, including intimate partner violence killings, the torture and misogynistic slaying of women, the killing of Indigenous women and girls, killing related to sexual violence and the “non-intimate killings of women and girls.”

The force confirmed it does not use femicide to describe women killed in murder-suicides — something Dawson said should change as it is “a very common scenario in femicide cases.”

Other police forces, such as the Toronto Police Service, don’t use the term femicide because it currently has no bearing on which charges police lay in homicides. The force does, however, lay terrorism charges in homicides where misogyny is a motivating factor.

Dawson says police are “fighting an uphill battle” when it comes to using femicide terminology more consistently.

“Police really need leaders to take the initiative, and by that I mean the federal government who decides what is a criminal offence and what should be labelled and legislated officially,” she said.

Carney promised in the campaign to make killings motivated by hate — including femicide — a “constructive first-degree offence,” which means a first-degree murder charge would be laid even if the slaying was not planned and deliberate.

Chantalle Aubertin, a spokesperson for Justice Minister Sean Fraser, said in a statement the government is “determined to bring forward legislation to advance this commitment as soon as possible.”

Should the federal government enshrine a definition of femicide, Statistics Canada could record better data, Dawson said.

The agency already tracks homicides reported by police each year, and the genders of the accused perpetrators and victims. While a 2023 report on gender-related homicides of women and girls broke down some indicators of femicide, it only addressed some of the UN’s indicators.

“The more we know about these killings and the more we can contextualize them within that understanding of femicide, the more awareness that we can ultimately build and continue to have these discussions about prevention,” Ham said, noting a history of threats, violence and coercive control is present in many cases.

It’s important to keep the conversation about violence toward women going, Dawson added, with an emphasis on how these killings differ from those targeting boys and men.

“That’s what we’re trying to emphasize because if we don’t recognize that, then our prevention efforts also don’t recognize that, and we don’t recognize the urgency of this.”