Background: Gender-based violence against women and its lethal outcome, femicide, represent important issues around the world. Although governments have passed specific laws, official data on gender-related violence and femicide are often absent and/or incomplete, difficult to access, rarely updated, contested and underestimated due to stigma, victim blaming or issues of legal interpretation. Femicide is an intentional killing in which a woman is murdered by an individual for misogyny and gender-related reasons. The most common type is in fact intimate femicide, which occurs when the murdered woman and the aggressor have an intimate, family, cohabitation or similar relationship.
Case series: We analyzed 15 cases of femicide for which crime scene investigation and autopsy were carried out. For each case, a psychological autopsy was carried out and the means used to determine the individual's death were analysed. The circumstances in which the murder occurred were also examined.
Discussion: Overkilling was evidenced in all cases analyzed. Over-killing in forensic medicine is known as a specific type of homicide in which the number of injuries inflicted far exceeds the number of injuries required to kill the victim. Therefore, the medico-legal management of the cases examined is complicated due to the multiple lesions present on the corpse on the victims which make difficult: 1) the reconstruction of the dynamics of the crime 2) the number of blows inflicted 3) the analysis of the fatal blow 4) the imputability of the offender.
Keywords: femicide; gender-based violence; homicide; overkill.