Some 51,100 women and girls were murdered in 2023 by their romantic partners or members of their family around the world, an average of 140 feminicides per day, according to the annual UN Women report on this phenomenon published this Monday.
Women and girls victims of femicide, or gender-based killing, accounted for 60% of the 85,000 intentionally murdered in 2023, the paper’s findings show.
The report reveals that, although femicide affects women and girls in all regions, it is Africa which has the highest absolute number, 21,700 murdered in 2023 alone, and which experiences the level of violence the highest, given the size of its female population. In relative terms, Africa experiences 2.9 feminicides per 100,000 women, followed by the Americas (1.6), Oceania (1.5), Asia (0.8) and Europe (0). ,6).
UN Women acknowledges that due to lack of data, it is currently only able to track temporal trends in feminicides in the Americas, where the ratio has remained stable since 2010, and in Europe, where it has decreased by 20 % since the same year. .
In these regions, it identifies intimate partners as the main culprits for the “victimization of women in the private sphere” in 2023: in Europe, 64% of victims of femicide were murdered by their partner, while in America, the percentage is 58%. . This trend is out of sync with the rest of the world, since according to available data, women and girls are more likely to be murdered by a family member (59%) than by their intimate partner (41%).
The report draws on this data to demand that domestic violence prevention measures be expanded beyond those perpetrated by couples and included in family contexts in which women are at greater risk.
Previous complaints
Likewise, he emphasizes that the data available in France, South Africa and Colombia (from different years) confirm that a good portion of women murdered by their partner (between 22% and 37%) had already reported physical violence. , sexual or psychological. these, which suggests that feminicides are “preventable”.
“Restrictive orders imposed on male partners which prohibit any contact between them and the victims of their violence are among the measures that can prevent the murders of women,” he says.
UN Women also draws attention to trends in reporting data on feminicides: more and more countries reported data over the past two decades until reaching a peak of 75 countries in 2020, but since then , they were reduced, and in 2023 they were only half. The UN agency also warns that countries’ responsibility in tackling gender-based killings depends on the quality and availability of their statistics on feminicides. “Significant efforts to reverse the negative trend in terms of data availability would therefore increase the government’s responsibility in combating violence against women,” the document concludes.
