The Ottawa Police Service said Monday it is investigating the alleged murder of a local woman as a case of “femicide” — the first time the city’s police department has used the term.
A police statement identified the victim as 47-year-old Jennifer Zabarylo of Ottawa.
Michael Zabarylo, 55, has been charged with second-degree murder and appeared in court Monday, police said.
No further information was provided on the circumstances of Jennifer Zabarylo’s death, as the case is now before the courts.
The case is being considered a “femicide” — a term generally defined as the killing of a woman or girl based on their gender — as it “occurred in the context of intimate partner violence,” police said.
The exact nature of the relationship was not disclosed.
An OPS spokesperson told Global News the case marks the first time the force has used the term “femicide” to describe a homicide investigation.
The spokesperson said the term’s use stems from ongoing input from violence against women workers and advocates who regularly collaborate with police on their approach.
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In 2022, while announcing the renaming of its partner assault unit to the intimate partner violence unit, then-interim police chief Steve Bell said the force would begin incorporating “the use of terms like femicide” in how it speaks about violence against women.
“We have learned that language matters, particularly when it comes to education and support,” Bell said in a statement.
Femicide is a relatively new term to describe gender-based killings that is not legally defined in Canada’s Criminal Code. Advocates for reducing gender-based and intimate partner violence have called on the government to pursue the Criminal Code definition.
Femicide laws have been enacted in Latin American countries like Brazil, Argentina and Peru in recent years. Mexico, which has one of the highest rates of female homicides in the world, began documenting femicides in 2012 and has pursued measures to reduce the killings.
There is little data on gender as a motivating factor in homicides in Canada, though the number of homicide cases with female victims has been on the rise.
Statistics Canada’s latest annual report on police-reported crime, released last month, shows that the number of female homicide victims last year was nearly identical compared with 2022 — 205 women killed — despite a 14 per cent drop in total homicide victims over the same period.
Homicides where women were the victims are up 31 per cent from 2019, compared with a 12 per cent increase for all other genders.
The federal government and Statistics Canada are currently undertaking a three-year data collection project, the Femicide Information System, “to better understand gender-related homicides and improve decision- and policy-making in this area,” a spokesperson for Women and Gender Equality Canada told Global News in a statement.
The project, which is set to conclude in 2025, is aimed at “developing a comprehensive national picture of the state of gender-related homicides in Canada.”
A 2023 Statistics Canada report on gender-related killings was only able to use data on solved homicides of women or girls by a male accused of intimate partner violence, where sexual violence was part of the killing, or where an identified sex worker was killed.
Using those parameters, the agency found that while gender-related killings had generally declined since 2001, there was a 14 per cent increase between 2020 and 2021, “marking the highest rate recorded since 2017.”
The United Nations has called gender-based violence and femicide a problem that requires global action, warning in a report last year that while overall homicides are falling worldwide, the number of female homicides is not.
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