By Deutsche Welle
Nov 25, 2024, 3:01 PM EST
Some 51,100 women and girls were murdered in 2023 by their romantic partners or family members around the world.That is, an average of 140 femicides a day, according to the annual UN Women report on this phenomenon published this Monday.
Women and girls victims of feminicide, or gender-based murder, represented 60% of the 85,000 intentionally murdered in 2023, the document’s conclusions indicate.
The report reveals that, although feminicide affects women and girls in all regions, It is Africa that concentrates the highest absolute number21,700 murdered in 2023 alone, and has the highest level of violence taking into account the size of its female population.
In relative terms, Africa suffers 2.9 femicides per 100,000 women, followed by the Americas (1.6), Oceania (1.5), Asia (0.8) and Europe (0.6).
UN Women recognizes that due to a lack of data, it is currently only able to track temporal trends in femicides in the Americas, where the ratio has remained stable since 2010, and in Europe, where it has decreased by 20% since that same year.
Intimate partners were mainly responsible
In these regions, it points to intimate partners as mainly responsible for the “victimization of women in the private sphere” in 2023: In Europe, 64% of femicide victims were murdered by their partnerwhile in the Americas the percentage is 58%.
This trend is discordant 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 points to these data to demand that violence prevention measures be expanded domestic violence beyond that perpetrated by couples and to include family contexts in which women are at greater risk.
Likewise, it highlights that the data available from France, South Africa and Colombia (from different years) confirm that a good part of the women murdered by their partners (between 22% and 37%) had previously reported physical, sexual or psychological violence. these, which suggests that femicides are “avoidable.”
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