By: Jayson Fry, 2L
Argentine President Javier Milei’s recent proposal to remove femicide as a distinct legal category from the country’s penal code has sparked widespread national and international outrage. This move represents a stark departure from Argentina’s ongoing efforts to address gender-based violence. The country has long struggled with pervasive gender violence, making this proposed legal shift troubling. It is seen by many as a dangerous step backward in the fight for women’s rights and protection.
The government justifies this proposal as part of its broader anti-“wokeness” agenda —a populist, reactionary approach to strip the law of what it considers unnecessary identity-based distinctions. According to President Milei’s administration, classifying femicide separately from general homicide contributes to a politicized and divisive legal framework that they seek to simplify. However, critics argue that this rationale not only reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the unique nature of gender-based violence but also constitutes a dangerous dismissal of the systemic factors that contribute to it.
Femicide is not just another form of homicide—It is the intentional killing of women specifically because of their gender. Recognizing femicide as a separate category is crucial because it reflects the complex intersection of cultural, social, and structural elements that drive violence against women. Treating femicide as general homicide ignores the patterns and motives unique to these crimes. It also risks erasing years of progress made by feminist movements across Latin America, which have fought tirelessly for stronger legal protections for women.
Argentina’s 2012 decision to codify femicide as a distinct legal category was celebrated as a significant step in recognizing and addressing the epidemic of violence against women. Undoing this progress sends a chilling message to victims and survivors of gender violence. Advocates fear that if femicide is no longer recognized as a distinct crime, it will become much more difficult to track these killings and hold perpetrators accountable. Moreover, removing femicide from the legal framework risks normalizing the very violence it seeks to combat, reducing the visibility of these crimes in public discourse and statistics.
In a country where a woman is killed every 32 hours, this legal rollback threatens to silence victims, while erasing the cultural recognition of femicide and minimizing the broader societal conversation about the patriarchal structures that enable these crimes. Rather than moving backward, Argentina’s legal system should be strengthening protections for women and ensuring that gender-based violence is treated with the seriousness it deserves.
