We recently had family friends to stay as houseguests, and since the television news was on during dinner one night, I suppose I should not have been surprised when my 10-year-old friend – while helping me dish up dessert – asked, ‘Danielle, what’s genocide?’

It was a sharp swerve away from what I’d just been thinking about, which was: will there enough ice cream to go with the apple crumble?

As I reached for a truthful, reliable definition of genocide to give to my young friend, the word slipped about in my mind. Was it to effect the destruction of an entire (racial, ethnic) group of people, or was it to attempt the same, with clear intent? Did destruction necessarily entail killing? What, precisely, qualifies as ‘genocide’?

I produced a definition that would serve my young friend’s immediate purposes and resolved to look into the matter further. Later that night, I went down a rabbit hole.

The Oxford English Dictionary says genocide is ‘the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of people from a particular group identified as having a shared ethnicity, nationality, etc., with the intention of partially or wholly destroying that group’. The Macquarie Dictionary, meanwhile, says it’s ‘extermination of a national or racial group as a planned move’ (and that same dictionary defines exterminate as: ‘to get rid of by destroying; destroy totally; extirpate’).

These definitions are not the same. Killing OR persecution meets the Oxford’s threshold for genocide, and the killing or persecution only needs affect people FROM a particular group. The Macquarie’s threshold seems higher, requiring actual extermination of a particular group.

Nevertheless, both definitions incorporate the concept of intention – in the Oxford, genocidal actions are ‘deliberate and systematic’; in the Macquarie, they are a ‘planned move’. This makes applying the term particularly tricky, because while actions are usually evident, intentions can be concealed or denied.

The word ‘genocide’ was created by the Polish Jewish lawyer and activist Raphael Lemkin (from the Greek ‘genos’ for race or tribe, and the Latin ‘cide’ for killing). He brought his neologism to the world stage eighty years ago, in 1944, in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe which contained a chapter called “Genocide—A New Term and New Conception for Destruction of Nations.”

The story goes that, a few months after finding refuge in the USA in 1941, Lemkin heard British Prime Minister Winston Churchill give a radio address in which he said: ‘Whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands…of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.’

So Lemkin gave that crime a name, and offered this definition:

‘Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.’ 

Four years after Lemkin’s book was published, the newly created United Nations created the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Australia was among the many nations which signed up immediately, in December 1948.

The Convention, now acceded to or ratified by 153 states worldwide, defines genocide as any of five acts ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’

This definition is different again; the words ‘in part’ seem especially significant and consequential.

Go further down the rabbit hole, and you can start investigating the distinctions between ‘genocide’, ‘war crimes’, ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’: all of which, of course, can overlap and intersect.

When the horror-filled consequences of these crimes seem near enough to indistinguishable, it can be hard to insist that definitions matter, but I think they do – not only for their consequence in international law, but also so that we retain the capacity to describe with precision what’s happening.

It’s completely reasonable for people to have different opinions about whether or not particular acts constitute genocide, but debate will be futile if participants cannot say, precisely, what each of them means by the term.

On the last night of our friends’ stay with us, my young friend asked me another question: ‘Am I old enough to watch the Lord of the Rings movies?’

O, my heart. Those big brown eyes of his; his perfect and unmarked young skin; his terrifying trust that the adults in his life will have the answers.

I thought of the scene, in The Two Towers, that is always a struggle for me to watch: when the uruk hai are laying siege to the supposed stronghold of Helm’s Deep, with the full intention of exterminating the race of men. The women and children have fled into the bowels of the fortress, where they’re now trapped.

I told my young friend that The Lord of the Rings movies would still be there for him when he was older.

‘I hear Inside Out II has come out on Disney Plus,’ I suggested.

And so, Inside Out II it was. But while I was watching this charming animation about the pains and perils of adolescence, I was remembering King Theoden’s words as his people face their ruthless slaughter at Helm’s Deep.

‘So much death,’ he says. ‘What can men do against such reckless hate?’

What, indeed?