Femicide vs feminicide

While using the term femicide I realised that the is another term, probably a synonym, feminicide.

From the following Wikipedia extract, the two terms appear to be synonyms:

• Femicide or feminicide is a sex-based hate crime term, broadly defined as the killing of women but definitions vary depending on the cultural context.

while in the site "Femicidal Tendencies" they suggest that the two term have different connotations:

• The question of whether to use the term femicide or feminicide during feminist discourse is a cause of great debate in the feminist community. At first glance the words seem strikingly similar, but they cannot and should not be used interchangeably.

Ngram shows that feminicide is less common and more recent in usage (late nineties) than femicide (mid seventies).

As for online dictionaries the ODO is one of the few to cite the term feminicide suggesting it is a synonym of femicide.

Questions:

• Are the two terms interchangeable or does "feminicide" actually carry a different connotation?

• Is there any difference in usage between AmE and BrE for the two term?

Solution 1:

I've come across "femicide" with the "hate crime" meaning, but never "feminicide". If it was commonplace I probably would have seen it despite only reading a little on related subjects.

Here in Britain, "homicide" isn't used as much as in the US, thus "murder" is the standard gender-neutral term. We only need a term for killing someone of a particular group when their membership of the group is important to the fact of the killing (in ordinary use). So "murder" suffices in cases where the gender of the victim is irrelevant or unknown, while "femicide" is appropriate for cases where the gender is important, and "feminicide" unnecessary.

Your second source may use a very specific definition local to a particular field, but I would expect this to be given at the first use in every work assumed at readers outside that field. Otherwise it looks like someone has slipped in an extra syllable - a not uncommon difference between US and UK spellings.

Solution 2:

I would consider "feminicide" more likely to be the correct form, because the Latin word for "woman" is "femina," not "fem." "Femicide" may be in use, but in my opinion, the dropping of a significant syllable from the root word cannot be justified.

Solution 3:

As a British English speaker* I would use neither, as I've never encountered either. My Collins dictionary (unlike my browser’s spelling dictionary) has heard of 'femicide', but just defines it as the killing of women. This makes sense by analogy to related structures, although as homicide refers to both men and women, the introduction of this word isn't very helpful as there is no word for the specific killing of men.

Similar words are composed of 'cide' (murder) and the person murdered (e.g. fratricide, matricide, patricide, infanticide, suicide, genocide — brother, mother, father, child, self, race), so coining words for hate crimes where the motive is incorporated into the word confuses. Indeed 'hate crime' would seem to be the expression in use today. So why not either use that or say “a murder motivated by hatred towards...”.

*Identification of origin only to establish what usage I encounter.