La tipificación del feminicidio como delito en Colombia y en Brasil : vacío legal o negligencia gubernamental

Abstract

The escalation of violence against women in countries like Colombia and Brazil has forced the legal system of the two countries to criminalize the crime of gender homicide as femicide. Its objective is to raise awareness and reduce the number of femicides committed each year, and to achieve this, laws and regulations have been deployed that characterize criminal types that sanction the forms of violence against gender or women enshrined in the Belem Do Para Convention; the same one that facilitated that in 2015 the Rosa Elvira Cely Law and the María Da Penha Law were introduced into the system of each country. The article makes a comparison of the two laws using criminal types as such, and some jurisprudential decisions relevant to the subject. Start by giving a definition about feminicide and gender violence. Then it analyzes in detail the legal performance of each nation against each of the forms of violence according to the way they are typified in Colombian and Brazilian criminal legislation. It is emphasized that the criminalization (or typing) of feminicide is not significant to reduce the rate of feminicide; on the other hand, it does produce low levels of the rule of law that explain the trends in femicides.