u/Hakashi32

I don't even know how to start without just screaming. People just died. Buried under their own homes. And there are actual human beings out there right now using that as an opportunity. Going into dead people's houses to rob them. ROBBING THE DEAD. Stealing donations that were sent to help survivors. Blocking people from even getting close to where their families are buried. Charging $450 to hand over a body. A BODY. Like it's a transaction. And on top of all that, there are children being taken from their families in the middle of this chaos. While everyone's grieving and trying to survive, someone out there decided that was the moment to snatch a kid.

I genuinely don't understand how a person looks at all this and decides to make it worse. How do you rob a corpse. How do you extort a mother trying to bury her kid. How do you kidnap a child in the middle of a disaster. Do these people not have parents? Siblings? Anyone they love? Do they really think it could never be them?

I'm not even looking for advice or answers here, I just needed to scream into the void because this is making me sick.

I believe femicide as a standalone criminal category is legally inconsistent and unnecessary, because hate crime legislation already covers every case femicide was designed to address — and does it more symmetrically. CMV.

**Quick definitions first:**

- **Femicide:** the killing of a woman by a man motivated by hatred or contempt toward her because she is a woman

- **Misandry:** hatred or contempt toward men as a group (the mirror of misogyny)

- **Hate crime:** any criminal act motivated by prejudice against race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnicity, etc.

**The logical gap in femicide as a legal category:**

Femicide as currently defined in most penal codes requires the perpetrator to be male. That means the following cases fall outside its scope by definition:

- A woman kills another woman motivated by misogyny → not femicide

- A woman kills a man out of hatred toward his gender (misandry) → not femicide, not even a named crime in most jurisdictions

- A man kills another man motivated by misogyny → also not femicide

The only case with its own named criminal category is man kills woman. Every other gender-motivated killing gets thrown into generic homicide with maybe an aggravating factor if the prosecutor bothers.

**The solution isn't creating "misandricide":**

The symmetrical answer isn't to keep creating gender-specific terms until we have one for every combination. That just fragments criminal law further.

The answer is already sitting in the legal system: **hate crime homicide**.

Hate crime legislation targets the *motivation*, not the gender of the perpetrator or victim. It already covers race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity. Properly applying it to gender covers every case:

- Man kills woman out of misogyny ✓

- Woman kills man out of misandry ✓

- Woman kills woman out of misogyny ✓

- Any gender-motivated killing, any direction ✓

Same framework. Same logic. Same sentencing aggravation. No need to define anyone's sex in the statute.

**The analogy that I think is hard to refute:**

Racism-motivated murder isn't prosecuted under a statute that says "white person kills Black person." It's prosecuted as a hate crime with racial motivation as an aggravator — applicable in any direction. Nobody argues that this framework "dilutes" the fight against racism.

Why should gender work differently?

**What I think is actually driving the resistance:**

Femicide as a term has enormous symbolic and political weight. It names a real, historically documented pattern of systematic violence against women. I'm not disputing the reality of that pattern.

But symbolic power and legal precision are different things. A law can acknowledge a social pattern through its application and sentencing guidelines without baking the sex of the perpetrator into the definition of the crime itself.

**What would change my view:**

- A legal argument for why gender-neutral hate crime statutes are *structurally insufficient* to prosecute misogyny-motivated killings, not just politically harder to use

- Evidence that hate crime frameworks produce meaningfully worse outcomes for victims of gender-motivated violence compared to femicide statutes

- A principled legal reason why gender should be treated differently from race in this context

**TL;DR:** Femicide has real logical inconsistencies that hate crime homicide already solves symmetrically. The resistance to consolidating under hate crime law seems political rather than legal. I want the legal counter-argument.