Introduction

In December 2015 the South African Supreme Court of Appeal set aside a conviction and sentence for culpable homicide, substituting a verdict of murder. Commenting after the decision, the victim’s mother said this:

June Steenkamp was paying tribute to her daughter Reeva, the victim in one of the most-publicized 21st-century intimate partner femicide cases to date. Getting away with it – that’s how victims’ families invariably describe any verdict less than murder. The justice system ‘worked’ for June Steenkamp because in her eyes a verdict of murder respected her daughter’s life and, by extension, the lives of all South African women. Respect in the first instance but also justice for Reeva: the family had finally got ‘justice for her’. Justice is what the families always want. Anything less than a murder conviction is, in their eyes, an injustice.

It’s not just the families. For nearly four decades, feminist researchers and anti-violence activists across all Anglophone jurisdictions have condemned a legal status quo in which wife-killers avail themselves of defences, indicatively provocation by sexual infidelity, thereby avoiding a murder conviction and receiving instead verdicts for the lesser, ‘second degree’ crime of manslaughter and frequently risibly short sentences. Such dispositions in intimate partner femicide cases, feminists claim, fail victims – in a word, they are unjust. Minister for Women and Equalities Harriet Harman spoke for many when, leading the early 21st-century movement to reign in defences to murder in England and Wales, she declared: