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Femicide and Gun Control: The Application of Symbolic Penal Law in The Mexican Criminalization of Femicide

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Abstract

The criminalization of femicide in Mexico has been introduced as a tool to address the violence, discrimination, and oppression against women. The criminalization strategy has a symbolic function: going beyond deterring the crime to be used as tool for education. In that sense, the criminalization of femicide emerges as an educational tool used to introduce new principles and societal values, highlighting the reality of discrimination and subordination against women, thereby transforming an individual conduct into a watershed issue worthy of collective condemnation. At the same time, official data reveals that over the past two decades, the rate of murders of women involving firearms has increased by 375%. This highlights the necessity for a comprehensive criminalization strategy that acknowledges the widespread criminal use of firearms as a significant factor in gender-related killings of women. Therefore, to raise awareness (as the femicide laws intend), every policy emanating from the State, or its affiliate institutions must incorporate a gender perspective. This includes specific programs targeting armed gender-based violence, considering the entire weapons cycle, including gun production, their use, and transfer processes. Moreover, this gender-sensitive approach must also acknowledge that the possession of small arms is linked to violent masculinities and that women, beyond being victims, might also play roles as perpetrators of armed violence. The symbolic purpose of femicide laws should then become a platform for developing further appropriate effective policies and strategies to reduce gender-based violence, with special consideration of gendered armed violence. This article will analyze the possibility for extending the symbolic purpose of femicide law to produce a gendered small arms control strategy in Mexico. Considering the educational alternative that the femicide law provides, the following paper will evaluate the criteria needed to develop a comprehensive and intersectional program for gun control in Mexico.

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Notes

  1. A set of measures through which society ensures that the conduct of every member is congruent with the standards set by the community. Additionally, social control is used to define society’s capacity to respond to situations in which those parameters are breached [93].

  2. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) is a federal law that was enacted in 2005 with the support of the gun industry. The law provides gun manufacturers and sellers with significant immunity from lawsuits related to the misuse of firearms by third parties. Under the PLCAA, gun manufacturers and sellers cannot be held liable for damages resulting from the criminal or unlawful use of their products, except in cases where the seller or manufacturer knowingly violated a state or federal law related to the sale or marketing of firearms. The law also restricts the ability of plaintiffs to bring lawsuits against the gun industry, including those involving negligent design or marketing practices [7].

  3. The Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB) was enacted by President Bill Clinton in 1994 and prohibited “the manufacture, transfer and possession” by civilians of assault weapons. The result was a de facto ban of assault weapons. The result was a de facto ban on 18 military-style assault weapons. But the ban gave Congress the ability to renew it after a decade. U.S. Lawmakers decided not to do so, and the ban expired in 2004.

  4. Different studies consider that the increase in homicide could be attributed to the Mexican Army’s anti-drug interventions, which, by taking down kingpins and fragmenting criminal groups, intensified both internal and external rivalries. In fact, the argument goes as far as to consider that the development of more violent organizations, such as the Zetas, was an outcome of these interventions [94, 95, 98, 99].

  5. Criminal Opportunity Theory suggests that offenders make rational choices and therefore choose targets that yield high reward with little effort and risk. According to this theory, the occurrence of a crime depends on two things: the presence of at least one motivated offender who is ready and willing to engage in a crime, and the conditions of the environment in which this offender finds himself, namely the opportunities to commit a crime. All crimes require opportunity but not every opportunity is followed by crime [22].

  6. The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is an international treaty that regulates the international trade in conventional arms and seeks to prevent and eradicate illicit trade and diversion of conventional arms by establishing international standards governing arms transfers. Mexico ratified this treaty on September 23, 2013 [100].

  7. The National Guard is a hybrid police-military force in charge of public security at the Federal level in Mexico Founded in 2019 it establishes a hybrid structure with a civilian leader, and civilian management, but relegating operational control to military officers, in that sense National Guardsmen operate under civil, not military law.

  8. Most investigations regarding the criminalization of femicide identify the Cotton Field case as the landmark event for the recognition and application of a gender-perspective analysis in the inter-American human rights jurisprudence and as the first case to address gender-related killings of women and girls (femicide) as a standalone crime.

  9. Rafael Velandia Montes defines “penal populism” as a phenomenon within criminal law development where the criminalization of different conducts is frequently carried out following a political agenda, one that exploits the anxiety and social fear that began in the 1970s, following a rise in criminal activity and a progressive abandonment of the re-socializing ideal of penal law [65].

  10. Unofficial translation of “el derecho penal no protege a las mujeres pero, cuando menos, sirve para manifestar la condena social a determinadas conductas y con ello conseguir un cambio de actitudes.” [76, 77]

  11. This strategy has been called “dominance feminism”: a feminist legal theory that that locates gender oppression in the sexualized domination of women and the eroticization of that dominance through pornography and other aspects of popular culture. It has been developed by feminist scholars like Catharine MacKinnon and Kathryn Abrams who have pushed to raise consciousness about male sexualization of and aggression against women [84, 96].

  12. The term “para-juridical” is a direct translation from Spanish para-jurídicos, referring to the non-strictly legal purposes the criminal reform aims to resolve. The term is a combination of the prefix para, “near” or “resembling,” and jurídico, directly describing legal elements. Not to be confused with paralegal (n.), which is used to describe a paraprofessional who assists a lawyer.

  13. The concept of social injury was first used by scholar Edwin Sutherland as an attempt to classify white-collar crime as harmful to the state. His conceptualization entails the renaming of particular forms of a crime (in the present case: the different forms of violence against women) as injuries worthy of general condemnation while also demanding legal redress [97].

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Martínez-Villalba, L. Femicide and Gun Control: The Application of Symbolic Penal Law in The Mexican Criminalization of Femicide. Int J Semiot Law (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10097-w

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