Magister Artium (Psychology) - MA(Psych) / This study is about intimate femicide: The murder of a woman by a male intimate partner, namely her husband, boyfriend (dating or cohabiting), ex-husband (divorced or separated), ex-boyfriend or a rejected would-be lover. Intimate femicide has been identified as a dire social problem in South Africa. Although intimate femicide has been researched from a range of perspectives, there is a paucity of research on the discourses that women draw on to understand this crime in the context of South Africa. The primary aim of this study was to explore how women survivors of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) understand intimate femicide. This aim crystallised into the following objectives: 1) to explore how women survivors of IPV construct and understand the term intimate femicide, 2) to ascertain how women survivors of IPV understand the issue of risk of intimate femicide within an abusive relationship and 3) to investigate the discourses that women survivors of IPV draw on to understand intimate femicide. This thesis is couched in a feminist poststructuralist epistemology. Data was gathered through a qualitative approach, using in-depth semi-structured interviews. A Foucauldian discourse analysis was conducted on seven interviews with heterosexual women who had been in violent romantic relationships. In addition, ethical principles of anonymity and confidentiality were strictly adhered to. The findings of this study illuminate the immense difficulties that women experience in attempting to understand their level of risk while in an abusive relationship and the complexities experienced in attempting to understand intimate femicide. The discourse analysis revealed that fairy tale romance narratives present women with the idea that there is always hope for their relationships regardless of abusive circumstances, while dark romance discourses position romantic relationships as naturally abusive and present abuse as an invalid reason to leave a relationship. These justifications, beliefs, and understandings of the abuse hamper women’s ability to understand intimate femicide. This has significant implications for scholarship in general and feminist scholarship in particular. These findings emphasise the need for additional engagement in women’s understandings of intimate femicide - a group that has largely been consigned to the periphery. Moreover, given the excessive rates of intimate femicide in South Africa, it is critical that more research is conducted in order to increase awareness of intimate femicide amongst women in violent relationships.

From January 2016 until August 2021, at least 436 women or girls have been deliberately murdered in Spain by men. Non-intimate femicide (and, particularly, murder committed by complete strangers to the victim, to which this study refers as “stranger femicide”) has historically been, and still is, the most covered type of femicide in the media. This is also the case in the Spanish press, and more specifically, El País, the most read media outlet in the country. This thesis examines how El País framed Diana Quer’s case, the most high-profile, intensively covered femicide case in Spain in the past 5 years. It will also examine which ethical problems the reporting presented. From a feminist perspective and through a mixed-method approach of content analysis and frame analysis, this study examines 86 articles corresponding to the two informative peaks of Diana Quer’s case coverage. The periods go from August to October 2016, the first two months of her disappearance, and from December 2017 to January 2018, the 15 days following her killer’s arrest and crime confession. The findings reveal that the coverage in El País constructed a victimization iconography with DQ’s case that engendered cautionary tales and failed to address femicide as a social issue. The reporting also presented a series of critical ethical problems calling for a reformation of femicide reporting guidelines.