Processing Femicide in the Global South: Victim Vulnerability and Criminal Justice Outcomes in Argentina

Despite growing attention to femicide—the killing of women because of their gender—little is known about how victim vulnerability shapes criminal justice outcomes. Studying this question is challenging because most countries do not classify femicide as a distinct criminal offense, limiting systematic data collection. We address this limitation using case-level data from Argentina’s National Registry of Femicides of the Justice System, which contains information on femicide incidents, victims, offenders, and judicial outcomes for cases from 2017 to 2020 outside the Province of Buenos Aires. We conceptualize victim vulnerability using four recorded markers: disability, migrant status, employment as a sex worker, and indigenous identification. Drawing on scholarship on homicide, sexual assault, and intimate partner violence, we estimate logistic regression models with fixed effects to examine whether victim vulnerability is associated with case outcomes. We find that cases involving vulnerable victims have lower odds of conviction and, to a lesser extent, higher odds of dismissal or shelving. These findings are consistent with theoretical perspectives suggesting that social marginalization may shape criminal justice decision-making, although the underlying mechanisms cannot be directly assessed with the available data. Our findings show that broader social inequalities shape criminal justice responses in cases of gender-based violence.