Femicide of these measures have had a positive effect on lowering the femicide rate. Other effective legislation against femicide include legislation that defines civil injunction relief; defines physical abuse as a criminal offense'; allows arrest without a warrant; requires data collection and reporting; and provides funds for women's shelters. Serial femicide is defined as "the sexually sadistic killing of women," also called "sexual terrorism". Feminists emphasize that many cases of serial murder can also be considered to be cases of male-perpetrated crimes against women as a means for men to achieve sexual gratification and dominance over women. They claim that gender-neutral
Femicide motive is not always empirically possible to be determined, and so must be removed from the qualification for femicide in order to gather data. On the other hand, authors Desmond Ellis and Walter Dekesedery take a different approach by viewing the definition for femicide as "the intentional killing of females by males". These feminists require that femicide always be intentional unlike the inclusion of covert femicide in Diana Russell's definition. Most of these definitions imply that the perpetrator of femicide is a man, but South Asian feminists differ in their definition stating that femicide is "the intentional killing of females