The Fatal Cost of Being Female
Maya Omkar
August 2025
Author’s Inspiration
I first became grossly aware of South Asian femicide when I picked up Rupi Kaur’s “the sun and her flowers.” Published in 2017, “the sun and her flowers” was Kaur’s second collection of poetry, desired for its minimalistic illustrations and simplistic but preeminent language. Needless to say, I enjoyed flipping through her array of relatable and beautifully descriptive poems; however, there was only one page that moved me deeply to the point where I think about it today. It was a page controversial for not even being a poem: her timeline of South Asian female infanticide.
As the name suggests, femicide is the intentional murdering of girls or women. Sexism to the point of murder is rooted in centuries of cultural norms, religious beliefs, patriarchal societal structures, and in specified cases, wartime.
For decades, women have been subjected to several forms of violence and murder whether it be honor-killings, dowry-related, societal downpour, or even just pure domestic violence.[1] Historically, the most common reason for femicide is due to social stigma, often resulting in infanticide. As South Asia’s origins were rooted in deep-seated patriarchal structures, the thought of birthing a girl has been, and sometimes still is, negatively provoking. Today, in several South-Eastern Asian countries, including the likes of China, parents are prohibited from learning the sex of the fetus. From the 1990s to 2017, 10.7 million female infants were documented as missing in India alone.[2] The sex ratio for male versus female has always been off balance in the South-Eastern region, notoriously always favoring males. Today, several organizations in South Asia such as The Pushpa Project and the Invisible Girl Project have branched together to raise awareness and prevent female infanticide from materializing. However, this doesn’t mean cases don’t occur. On September 1st of 2024, a 28-year-old Khyala woman strangled her 6-day-old daughter to death. During the investigation, they found the newborn in a bag lying on the terrace of the house across from hers. The woman told the police she had already faced extreme social stigma for birthing three daughters previously and wanted to repel the suppositions that she was cursed.[5]
Honor killings usually occur when a woman is subjected as “impure,” usually through the breaking of purity norms. A woman’s actions that are deemed dishonorable to her family may result in a homicide, usually committed by a close male relative. The justification for this mindset can only be explained through the common systematic devaluing of women which can be found across many cultures historically. Honor killings are most prevalent in countries where family reputation, societal norms, and community cohesion is significantly important to daily living. In contrast to domestic violence, honor killing is a decision typically made carefully and under the right set of standards where the costs and benefits are weighed. One might assume punishment acts as a deterrent, but the prospect of jail time isn’t an impending concern when it comes to honor killing. Acts of impurity include: refusing an arranged marriage, courting a man other than her husband, divorcing and remarrying, or having an extramarital entanglement.[4] In some cases, the murder is even publicly announced in a boast of glee. In Syria, a woman remembered, “I had just reached the police station…when I saw my classmate Aziz joyfully descending a hill…and chanting ‘I’ve killed her and saved my family’s honour! I’ve killed my sister and have come to hand myself over for justice.’ The three of them strolled slowly into the police station, chatting amicably.”[3] Globally, it’s believed that around 5,000 to 20,000 female lives are taken from honor killing in a year alone.
Although the cited cases of femicide and female infanticide occurred in South-East Asia and the Middle East, domestic violence against women is a global issue—it’s everywhere. Regardless of location, gender-based discrimination persists in every society. In much larger and recent cases, when a country is subjected to wartime, gender violence heightens tremendously. The Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been engulfed by a savage war since the mid 1990s. Enriched militant groups have employed sexual violence towards women as a tactic of war, and hasn’t stopped. General Secretaries of the International Trade Union Conference (ITUC) Burrow and Warda wrote, “Violence against women is the worst manifestation of women’s powerlessness and subordinate position at home, at work and in society.”[6] A UN report announced over 55,000 cases of sexual violence documented in the second quarter of 2024.[7] Sexual violence is systematically being used as a method of war in places such as Congo and Sudan.[6]
Femicide isn’t just a cruel grievance against the individual woman or girl; it’s a feature of a deeply-set sexist society that has failed to protect half its population. No law or paper will ever change the normality of femicide—it demands a change in cultural perseverance and a global commitment to valuing men and women equally. The ongoing difficulties women battle each day serves only as a reminder of the pressing problems we have to face.
References
[1] CORRADI, C. (2021, November 22). Femicide, its causes and recent trends: What do we know? European Parliament. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2021/653655/EXPO_BRI(2021)653655_EN.pdf
[2] Cultural and Social Bias Leading to Prenatal Sex Selection: India Perspective. (2022, June 13). PubMed Central. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9234277/
[3] Churchill Robert Paul. 2018. Women in the Crossfire: Understanding and Ending Honor Killing. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
[4] Aksoy, O., & Szekely, A. (2025, April 11). Making Sense of Honor Killings. SageJournals. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00031224251324504#bibr11-00031224251324504
[5] Jalali, U. (2024, September 1). Female infanticide: Mother of three girls, Khyala woman kills fourth daughter. The New Indian Express.
[6] ITUC. (n.d.). Violence Against Women in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
[7] United Nations. (2024, September 30). DRC: MSF publishes alarming figures on sexual violence admissions. https://www.un.org/sexualviolenceinconflict
