Almost four decades have passed since the term femicide was coined in 1976. This new word had a political purpose, in that it intended to produce changes in the social order which tolerated the violent death of women. Since that time, the word has generated a theoretical concept that encompasses the killing of a woman as a specific social phenomenon. Femicide is an effort in sociological imagination that has been successful in transforming conventional perception, public awareness, scientific research and policy making. This article undertakes to review how femicide has evolved in social research. It analyses the most important theories explaining femicide: the feminist, sociological, criminological, human rights and decolonial research approaches and their theoretical significance. It discusses Mexico as a case study, exemplifying how a new English term was then translated into another language and applied in a very specific socio-political context, so that it became instrumental in changing reality and improving the lives of women. Finally, the article proposes a framework where femicide is understood as a social phenomenon that demands an interdisciplinary approach. The authors recommend a systemic, multifaceted model in order to improve both scientific analysis and prevention.

The sociological literature on femicide, compared to intimate partner and other forms of gender violence, is scarce. While feminist sociology has addressed the inaudibility of women, femicide remains invisible. Femicide rates are social facts worthy of sociological attention. Like suicide, femicide has to be defined and analysed according to type. The article postulates possible reasons for the invisibility of the phenomenon, such as the unpleasantness of the subject, scope, its conception as a radical feminist idea, fuzziness, its identification with other concepts like genocide, and methodological difficulties in researching it because of the impossibility of researching dead women first-hand, missing data and the difficulties in comparing data cross-nationally. None of the seven posited hypotheses could account for the dearth of sociological literature on the subject. Suggestions for enhancing the visibility of femicide are made, with a call to unearth the phenomenon and remove its invisibility in sociology.

This study of femicide involving elderly women, or female geronticide, aims to fill a gap in the research literature. The article is divided into three parts: a review of the literature on femicide, geronticide, and specifically female geronticide; a review of the literature utilizing Israel as a case-study and an empirical report on the findings of the first longitudinal study on female geronticide in Israel, which demonstrates that over a period of 10 years (2006–2015) female geronticide was perpetrated solely by intimate male partners. Findings of the study also show post hoc that while femicide is perpetrated in disproportionate numbers by, and towards, members of particular ethnic categories, such as Ethiopian immigrants and foreign migrants, there were no cases of female geronticide in these two groups. The likelihood of an elderly woman being murdered by her intimate partner or family member was higher among the following groups in the following order: immigrants from the former Soviet Union; Israeli-born Jews and; Israeli Arabs. The findings are important for policy-makers in Israel but have applications globally.