Domestic violence is violence that occurs between people who have a domestic relationship- family members, roommates, romantic/sexual partners, etc. It may or may not rise to the level of murder.
Femicide is killing a woman due to her gender, and there may or may not be a domestic relationship between the killer and the victim.
There’s going to be a lot of overlap and grey areas between the two. Many femicides are domestics, but not all, and not all domestics result in femicide
To provide some examples
1. Sort of your “classic” domestic abuse situation- man beats his wife. Domestic abuse, not a femicide because he’s not killing her.
1.5 He beats her to death. Domestic, and this may ruffle some feathers, but I’m going to say only probably a femicide. I’m sure I’m going to end up saying something like this a lot in this comment and expand on it as I go, but you kind of have to examine the killers thoughts and motivations, and they may not always be totally clear. In probably the vast majority of these kinds of situations you’d probably find there’s sort of an underlying attitude of “I’m the man, she’s the woman, so I can do whatever I want to her” to one degree or another which would make it a pretty cut-and-dry femicide, but I think there’s also cases where he might be just as violent and abusive to other people regardless of gender given the opportunity, which muddies the waters and makes it a little harder to call a femicide, if he was just as likely to kill a man under similar circumstances I don’t know if it necessarily warrants slapping the “femicide” label on it, but it sure as hell looks like one on the surface. I suspect that most places collecting and studying data on this kind of thing would just go ahead and call it a femicide and I’m not going to blame them for that, I don’t think there’s any feasible way to really examine each individual incident with the kind of attention you’d need to properly sort it out, and even if you could, in the end given the sorts of cultural imbalances between men and women that exist, you’d probably end up with the conclusion that the basically all of them do in fact qualify as femicide to some degree and the rest are just kind of a rounding error.
2. Religious extremists kill a woman they see out on the street because (take your pick, she wasn’t dressed “appropriately,” didn’t have a male guardian with her, she dared to have a job or education, etc.) That’s a femicide, but not a domestic because there was no relationship between them.
As an aside, there was a conscious decision on my part in that example to use the gender-neutral “they” in that example. You probably pictured male murderers, I did as well, but on further reflection I think it would be perfectly fair to still call it a femicide even if the perpetrators were women. The victim is still being targeted because she’s a woman who’s not behaving the way they think a woman should.
3. Woman kills her husband. Domestic, murder, not a femicide because the victim was a man.
4. (Here’s where shit really starts getting murky.) Man kills his wife because she was having an affair with another man. Again it’s a domestic, it’s a murder, and its maybe/probably a femicide. It’s a bit harder to nail down the motivation here. There could be a lot of underlying psychological, cultural, interpersonal, etc. baggage here. Did the man kill her just because she was cheating, or does he have, for example, some sort of underlying expectations that because she’s the female partner she’s supposed to be loyal and subservient to him. I don’t know that there’s an easy way to untangle that, and many men may not even really be consciously aware of those sorts of biases they have in the back of their minds. If hypothetically the man way gay/bit/pan/etc. would he have murdered a male partner in the same sort of situation?
5. Wife kills her husband’s mistress. Murder. Kind of a domestic, maybe stretching it a bit because unless he was cheating on her with her sister or something there’s not really a direct domestic relationship between the two women, but there is still an indirect link between them through the husband. Femicide? Again, maybe, for pretty much the same reasons as #4, lots of potential baggage there that would need to be unpacked.
5½. Man kills his cheating wife AND/OR wife’s mistress ~(wife was cheating on him with another woman.)~ Murder✓ Domestic? See above. Femicide? Maybe, again see above, but there’s also potentially an added aspect of “she cheated on me with another woman?” That, in his mind, adds extra insult to just the fact that she was cheating on him, would he have been so quick to jump to Murder if she had cheated on him with a man?
5¾? Woman kills her wife AND/OR her wife’s mistress. Murder- yes. Domestic - see above. Femicide - again see above, probably not a femicide, I think in this one since we’re dealing with a lesbian relationship we’ve kind of reached a point where we’d kind of expect a lot of “traditional” ideas about gender roles and such to be thrown out the window which would sort of take the concept of femicide off the table, but in practice that shit is really deeply ingrained in a lot of people and hard for them to shake entirely. There can still be some lingering notions that “a woman should be faithful to their partner” that they wouldn’t apply equally to men, and so you could make a solid argument for it qualifying as femicide.
6. Man rapes and kills woman jogging alone in the park. Murder? Yes. Domestic? No, no relationship between them. Femicide? Almost certainly yes. I’m sure there could be some edge cases of a rapist lurking in the bushes who would be happy to target the next person who came jogging down the trail regardless of their gender, but far more often they probably specifically were preying on women.
7. Man kills woman in a carjacking. Murder? Yes. Domestic? No. Femicide? Maybe. This could be a situation where they literally just carjacked the first person in a vehicle they come across, so not a femicide, it could have just as easily been a man. Or it could be a case where they specifically targeted a woman because they perceived her as being weaker, easier to victimize, less able to defend herself, etc. which I think would make a compelling argument to call it a femicide.
That’s not meant to be an all-inclusive list by any means of course.
And there’s a lot of complicating factors we could go into that I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like digging into too deep right now and I may hit the character limit if I tried to. Like how trans and nonbinary people fit into the equation, to give a short example a transphobic person kills a trans man who they “see” as a woman, you might say that they had “femicidal intent” or something to that effect, even though the victim was a man, and if they killed a trans woman, their motivations might not have been femicidal, and in their own minds they wouldn’t think they committed femicide, but to the rest of us they committed femicide anyway.
I mean, welcome to the world. Sometimes concepts are complicated and require more than a simple dictionary-style definition to fully understand. Otherwise there’d be no use for classes and textbooks and you could learn everything you need to know from a dictionary.
And I did provide some pretty short definitions right at the beginning, the rest is examples and me sort of musing on the terms for further clarification for those who need/want it.
Elsewhere in the comments I think you used the term “misogynist homicide.” If for some reason that term sits better with you, by all means use it, I’d say they’re synonymous, and all of my explanation applies just as much to that term. Language evolves and new words are coined every day, if we can come up with a neat one-word name for something as opposed to clunky 2+ word phrases I’m generally a fan of that.
Also, I think a critical reading of my comment might show you that I also have some misgivings about how we use the term, because like I repeatedly said, it can be damn hard to properly sort out the killers motivations. I think some people are too fast to slap the label on any instance where a woman is killed, especially by a man, and while it’s probably likely that the label is appropriate in the majority of those cases, I don’t think it’s necessarily a useful term to use unless you can clearly explain the misogynistic motivations behind it.