Calls by women's rights activists for stronger laws to deter femicide following the murder of a woman in Sliema face pushback from a men's rights lobby group, which wants the broader term 'gendercide' codified in law. 

The groups were reacting to a report on The Sunday Times of Malta, and later other media, that the police have ‘solid evidence’ that the man who allegedly murdered Polish student Paulina Dembska in Sliema on January 2 had earlier tried to assault two as-yet unidentified men.

'Femicide'

Women's rights groups have described the murder as a 'femicide' - the intentional killing of a person because she is a woman - and said the term should be codified in Maltese law. 

But in a press conference days after the murder, the police had made clear that they do not believe the murder was gender-related.  

The Malta Women’s Lobby, formerly the Malta Confederation of Women’s Organisations, said on Monday that it was disappointed that the police and society were continuing to try to negate the obvious in the case of Paulina Dembska.

“The fact that the accused attacked two men before he allegedly went on to kill and rape the victim orally, anally and vaginally does not detract from the fact that he did so because she was a woman,” the lobby group said.

“Whilst femicide is often associated with intimate partner violence, it extends beyond the household. Femicide is about men’s power and control over women. It is but the final step in a continuum of violence against women and girls, in a context where this sort of violence has been normalised and impunity too often prevails,” the women’s lobby said.

“When insisting that it was not a case of femicide the police are closing their eyes to the systemic gendered patterns that lead to femicide. It is men who jeer and grope women, men who follow and harass them, men who assault them and instil fear, men who rape them, and it is men who generally kill women.  It is not the other way round, and the numbers are clear, although we are not implying that all men do so.

Murder victim Paulina Dembska, who was killed in Sliema on January 2.

“Claiming that in this case, two men were attacked before the victim was violently killed, does not change the gendered context in which this killing materialised. Trying to negate this in the case of Paulina Dembska is tantamount to annihilating women’s reality of their everyday experience.”

The lobby said the Gender-Based Violence and Domestic Violence Act needs to be updated and the law should also be changed to ensure that femicide is recognised as an aggravating factor to homicide.

Its views reflected those of the Women's Rights Foundation, which on Sunday said that the police's "resistance to take gender into account" in such cases was further evidence that the police "have no idea what gender is at all”.

Indications that the man accused of murdering Dembska, Abner Aquilina, had a "complicated sexual identity" and was "sexually conflicted" were further evidence that gender and gender identity played in his mind, it said. 

'Gendercide'

While women's rights lobbies want 'femicide' to be made a crime, a lobby group focused on men's issues has argued that the law must be broader in scope.

Men’s group Flimkien Missirijiet Inqumu (FMI) said that rather than a 'femicide' law, it would make more sense to consider introducing the concept of 'gendercide' - the killing of a person because of their gender, irrespective of what that is. 

Femicide, the group said, would "punish more harshly" only violent people who injure or kill women because they are women, and never those who injure or kill men because they are men. 

“This is a concept which is morally repulsive, incompatible with the rule of law in Malta where the law by definition never allows its interpretation to discriminate by gender, and which completely overlooks male victims of gender abuse and violence," they said. 

FMI said scores of domestic violence cases go unreported each year by men, out of fear of not being believed, out of fear of aggravating the abuser, and out of fear that the institutions of law and order would harass and punish them in the case of conflicting versions, simply on account of their gender.

“Society has to stop acting and speaking as if male victims of violence do not exist,” it said.

Global research indicates that the victims of domestic violence are overwhelmingly female. Domestically, the vast majority of such police reports are also filed by women.  

Homicide already carries the maximum jail sentence permissible under Maltese law, and neither 'femicide' nor 'gendercide' would lead to increased punishment. 

Justice Minister Edward Zammit Lewis made that point when dismissing calls for femicide to be codified into law. The Nationalist Party has argued that making femicide a defined criminal offence would nonetheless improve research and gender awareness within law enforcement.