Legal experts and activists are urging and calling for the formulation of specific laws to address ‘femicide’ or the killing of women and girls due to their gender as currently there is a lack of such provisions in the criminal justice system.

A University Malaya criminologist stated that while not all murders of women and girls fall under femicide, the crime is currently not recognised by police since the nation has no legal provisions to charge individuals specifically for it.

The Women’s Aid Organization (WAO) highlighted that while Malaysia lacks official data on femicide, WAO media noted a troubling and disturbing trend where 17 cases of women or girls were killed from January to August this year.

While femicide cannot be held or concluded in these cases, of these cases, 60 percent involved intimate partners, with 46.7 percent of them being married and 13.3 percent of them being unmarried.

WAO stated that young women and girls are especially vulnerable due to societal norms that assign them to be of lower status and power within families while cultural beliefs reinforcing male dominance increase the risks they face.

Since Malaysia has no direct laws recognising femicide as a distinct crime driven by gender based motives, such cases are usually prosecuted under general homicide laws, failing to address the unique gendered patterns behind some of these killings.

-THE MALAYSIA VOICE