The statistics and truth about femicide comes to light after years of in the darkness. Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash 

Trigger warning: This article contains mentions of violence against women, rape, and intimate partner violence. Reader discretion is advised

by William Rogers

Femicide (or Feminicide) is defined as the killing of a woman or girl because of her gender. These incidents include sexually motivated crimes against women, honor killings, mutilation and intimate partner or family violence. 

In 2024, The United Nations reported that every ten minutes one woman is killed by their partner or family member.  According to the UN’s report, the femicide rates have not gone down and are in no way predicted to do so. 

Femicide is fundamentally different from regular homicide. Homicide is murder that is motivated by simply killing rather than killing one particular gender. A few examples of femicides are the Japanese Junko Furuta Case where a young high school girl was tortured for 44 days and was eventually killed by being set on fire, the Hong Kong Hello Kitty murder where a young woman was tortured and eventually beaten to death and African Eudy Simelane case where a LGBTQ+ activist was raped and murdered in what people call “corrective rape” to try and “fix” her homosexuality. All of these crimes have something in common: They were long, drawn out, and painful. The means of killing is often much more personal and painful than typical homicide. Three out of four femicide victims were stalked by the murderer. This is not counting all the victims who are killed by intimate partners or family. 

Some countries which have strict laws against women don't accurately report how many femicides occur while in other countries, they simply don't separate the murders by type. The justice systems often do not give an accurate report since many murdered women's deaths are not classified as a homicide, and the relationship of perpetrator and victim are not recorded. 

When femicides go into the press there's a tendency for the crime to be labeled as “Domestic Drama”, “Love Killings”, “Family tragedies" and “Crimes of passion” which, according to the National Library of Medicine leads to more understanding and empathy for the killer and blaming the victim for the crime.  Femicides are often reported with a focus on the male perpetrators' motive and reason rather than the female victims' painful life experiences. The media also tends to focus on the faults of the female victims. Calling these crimes anything other than murder frames them as "blaming the victim." This can lead to the view that the female victim could have just avoided it. Femicide is also a crime in which certain people are more affected than others. For example, in Australia and Canada, indigenous women are up to five times more likely to be the targets of femicide. Threats of gender-based violence such as rape and death threats are prevalent in the transgender/transfeminine community. These threatening incidents account for 94% of violence against transgender people (this is not counting the numerous transgender victims whose deaths are incorrectly labeled as non- hate crimes. Femicide is also an easily preventable crime because most victims had reported that the perpetrators were violent with them in the past. Many perpetrators had a history of violence against women. Had the justice system put heavier penalties on perpetrators who had harmed female victims, the sad statistic of women who kill men receive 15 years in prison, yet 90% of men killed by women had previously reported abuse these women. Men who murder women get receive between two-six years in prison for killing a woman. Femicide is an epidemic which takes tens of thousands of lives a year. 

These statistics lead to an overall understanding of the true nature of the justice system as it relates to femicide as well as how changes can be made to ensure the safety of overlooked victims.