An average of 140 women and girls worldwide lost their lives everyday in 2023 at the hands of their partner or a close relative, a United Nations report on gender violence has found.
Globally, this figure adds up to a staggering 51,100 women and girls killed by someone in their family last year.
This 2023 figure also means that 60 per cent of the almost 85,000 women and girls killed intentionally were murdered because of gender-related motives.
“The home is the most dangerous place for women and girls,” the 36-page report states.
Published on Monday by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the report said despite efforts to prevent the killing of women and girls by countries, their killings “remain at alarmingly high levels”.
The report also specifies these killings as “femicide”, saying this “represents the most extreme manifestation of gender-based violence against women and girls”.
“Very often such killings are not isolated incidents but rather the culmination of pre-existing forms of gender-based violence that affect all regions and countries worldwide.”
The report notes as well that gender-related motives for murder “are rooted in societal norms and stereotypes that consider women to be subordinate to men, as well as in discrimination towards women and girls, inequality and unequal power relations between women and men in society.”
Regional data
While no region is immune to this gender-based violence, Africa features as the region with the highest number of female victims, with an estimated 21,700 women and girls killed by an intimate partner or a family member in 2023. This amount of femicide is also the highest in relation to Africa’s population size– 2.9 victims per 100,000 in 2023.
The Americas and Oceania also recorded high rates of intimate partner/family member femicide in 2023, at 1.6 and 1.5 per 100,000 respectively, while the rates were significantly lower in Asia and Europe, at 0.8 and 0.6 per 100,000 respectively.
In terms of regional variations when accounting for all male and female victims, the largest share of female victims of intimate partner/family member homicide in 2023 was recorded in Oceania at 80 per cent.
“Even though men and boys account for the vast majority of homicide victims, women and girls continue to be disproportionately affected by lethal violence in the private sphere,” says the report.
In Oceania, available data suggests that the majority of female victims of intimate partner/family member femicide were killed by family members (59 per cent), while intimate partners accounted for 41 per cent of the murders.
“Given the differences in victim-perpetrator dynamics among these two types of femicide, targeted prevention policies are needed to tackle these specific forms of gender-based violence within the domestic sphere,” says the report, noting that “considerably less is known about the patterns and risk factors associated with the intentional killings of women and girls by other family members”.
Prevention is possible
As for what can be done to stop gender violence, the report suggests that many killings of women are preventable with sufficient monitoring systems.
“Available data also confirm that a significant share of women killed by their intimate partners had previously reported some form of physical, sexual or psychological violence by their partner. This suggests that many killings of women are preventable. When monitoring systems are in place, a range of measures to prevent femicides is possible.”
Since 2020, the number of countries reporting or publishing data on the killing of women by intimate partners or other family members has decreased by 50 per cent, indicating a worrying trend that attention to femicide may be decreasing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In response to this, the report also calls for the need to collect better data on femicide, in order to understand the issue’s magnitude and develop more effective strategies to end gender violence.