Critical analysis of studies on femicide and psychology: reflections on the visibility of women’s deaths due to gender issues

Abstract

This study based on the socio-historical psychology perspective aimed to analyze how psychology has investigated femicide. In total, 12 texts from the CAPES Portal were selected by searching the words “Feminicide and Psychology” from 2015 to 2023. This study discussed how the production in the area is incipient and how only two studies used the gender perspective as an analysis category. Most methodologies were based on document analysis and secondary data without linkage of databases, reinforcing how difficult it is to give visibility to the topic using the data sources in different public policies. The authors discuss the risk of naturalizing feminicide and failing to contemplate the complexity of the phenomenon and its intersectionality if psychology studies maintain their intrapsychic and psychopathological levels of analysis. The socio-historical psychology or the historical-dialectical materialist method guided no analyzed studies.