Feminicide: Identification Through Skeletal Remains

This chapter begins by analyzing the concepts of feminicide and femicide and under what circumstances it is established that a victim has been the object of a feminicide. It also explains to the reader the different states of preservation in which the remains of a victim can be found, raising the challenges, scopes, and limitations of this discipline at the time of carrying out the analysis due to the different circumstances in which they are found, as is the case of those burned, charred, and those that are mutilated with the clear objective of making their identification difficult. All these intentional treatments undoubtedly cause a loss of information that the physical–forensic anthropologist must face in the laboratory. The role of the physical anthropologist within Forensic Sciences is also addressed, exposing the techniques used by this scientific discipline and what are the biological markers that allow determining the sex and estimating the biological age of the remains, also highlighting its essential contribution to the forensic identification through the recording of certain individualizing features of the victim.