Africa continues to record the highest rates of femicide committed by intimate partners and family, having accounted for about 21,700 victims in 2023, according to a report released by the United Nations.
The document on femicides in 2023 concludes that women and girls around the world continue to be affected by this extreme form of gender-based violence, with no region of the world excluded.
“With an estimated 21,700 victims of intimate partner/family femicide in 2023, Africa is the region with the highest number of victims in aggregate terms,” the report reads. Asia recorded 18,500 victims, the Americas 8,300, Europe 2,300 and Oceania 300.
Africa is also the scene of the highest number of femicide victims per intimate/family partner in relation to its population size (with 2.9 victims per 100,000 last year).
The Americas and Oceania also reported high femicide rates per intimate/family partner in 2023, with 1.6 and 1.5 per 100,000, respectively. On the other hand, significantly lower rates were recorded in Asia and Europe, with 0.8 and 0.6 per 100,000, respectively.
The authors of the report point out that, in addition to the murder of women and girls by intimate partners or other family members, there are other forms of femicide.
They indicate that recently some countries have started to quantify other forms of femicide through the use of the statistical framework used to measure gender-based homicides.
France is given as an example, where during the period 2019-2022, 79% of all female homicides were committed by intimate partners or other family members, while other forms of femicide accounted for more than 5% of all female homicides.
Also, exploratory research in South Africa indicates that femicides outside the domestic sphere accounted for 9% of total female homicides in 2020-2021.
Data available for three countries – France (2019-2022), South Africa (2020-2021) and Colombia (2014-2017) – confirm that a significant proportion of women killed by their intimate partners (between 22% and 37%) had previously reported some form of physical violence, sexual or psychological by your partner.
“This suggests that many murders of women can be avoided,” the authors of the document conclude, advocating as measures that may prevent the murder of women the restraining orders against male partners, that prohibit further contacts between them and the victims of their violence, among other actions.
Globally, it is estimated that about 1.3 women per 100,000 female inhabitants were killed by an intimate partner or other family member in 2023.
Source: O País
