shades fills you in

In late October 2022, 25-year-old American Shanquella Robinson was found dead on holiday in Cabo. Video eventually came out showing a woman physically fighting Robinson around friends. Mexican authorities said they were investigating her death as a “femicide”

CNN explains femicide is the murder of a woman because she’s a woman. The U.S. doesn’t punish femicide; the crime is just considered a generic homicide. Mexico and other countries do. But most such crimes go unpunished

The Chicago Policy Review says the U.S. really should have femicide laws of its own -- because of the historical oppression of women, and normalized violence towards them. And the U.S. has the highest incidence of femicide in the high-income world

But the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime did a study on gender-related killing, and said that femicide laws don’t always work because “It may be challenging to identify the additional gender-related elements” for the crime

Right, says Insider: When someone does commit femicide, it’s really rare to be convicted for it, since it’s so hard to prove the killing was because of a woman’s gender

But a Serbian judge, an expert in gender-related killings, thinks femicide should be a crime. The root causes of femicide are fundamentally different. It’s the most extreme example of violence against women. And at minimum it helps track data

By the way, this case is only getting this level of attention because Black Twitter helped bring awareness to the case. People were disturbed the case wasn’t getting the coverage it deserved -- Revolt.tv

By February and no arrest, Shanquella’s family, friends, and community mailed 1,000 pink letters to the Mexican authorities to press them to take action