Knowledge Organization (KO) is published by IMR Press from Volume 52 Issue 1 (2025). Previous articles were published by another publisher under the CC-BY licence, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement.
Knowledge Organization Systems Classifying Crimes of Violence Against Women, Homicide of Women and Feminicide: A Proposal
1 University of Coimbra- FLUC, Largo da Porta Férrea 3004-530 Coimbra, Portugal
2 Federal University of Minas Gerais, Av. Pres. Antônio Carlos, 6627 – Pampulha, Belo Horizonte – MG, Brazil
Abstract
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one in three women worldwide has experienced some form of physical or sexual violence. In Brazil, in 2022, about 30% suffered some form of gender-based violence, with the number of women's homicides (4,034) surpassing that of femicides (1,437). Misclassified crimes? In 2015, Law 13,104 amended article 121 of the Brazilian Penal Code, establishing femicide as a qualifying circumstance for the crime of homicide (when the act occurs against the woman because of her female sex condition). Having Information Science as a basis for promoting the development of methodologies and strategic solutions, conceptual and technical treatments on this phenomenon are necessary. Aiming to contribute guidance for typifying crimes of violence against women in filling out the National Risk Assessment Form (FNAR) and Police Report (BO) through Knowledge Organization Systems, it was based on Araújo and Lima (2018), who suggest semantic enrichment of ontologies through text corpus comparison, and applied METHODOE (Methodology for Domain Ontology Enrichment) by Araújo (2021), consisting of 5 steps. GSSO – Gender, Sex, and Sexual Orientation Ontology, Thesaurus for Gender and Women's Studies, Women Thesaurus, and Thesaurus on Violence against Women and Girls were used as a basis. The result was the OntoVDFcM ontology, to be used in filling out FNAR and BO forms, reducing errors, identifying or preventing crime more assertively, and contributing to more precise statistics, enabling investment of more time and money in protective, preventive, supportive, educational actions, and mainly, in more effective public policies.
Keywords
- knowledge organization systems
- feminicide
- OntoVDFcM ontology
