How to improve data on killings of women and girls?

In 2020, approximately 47,000 women and girls were killed worldwide by their intimate partners or other family members. This means that, on average, a woman or girl is killed by someone in her own family every 11 minutes. The killing of women and girls at the hands of intimate partners or other family members – people whom they would normally be expected to trust – represents one of the most extreme manifestations of genderbased violence.

According to available evidence, intimate partner/family-related homicide accounts for the largest proportion of gender-related killings or “femicides”. The elimination of violence against women is a key commitment of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, yet there is insufficient data available to inform prevention policies and to monitor progress.

Based on global estimates for 2020, UNODC dedicates issue 3 of Data Matters series to the analysis of intentional homicide of women committed by their partners or other family members, emphasizing the urgency of generating better data to prevent this type of violence.

An important step towards more and better data on violent deaths of women and girls was taken last week in the framework of the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC) with the approval of the statistical framework for measuring the gender-related killings of women and girls, jointly developed by UNODC and UN Women with the support of the UNODC-INEGI Center of Excellence for Statistical Information on Government, Crime, Victimization and Justice and the UN Women-INEGI Global Centre of Excellence on Gender Statistics.

The framework gives for the first time a common set of statistical definitions and methodology that allow every country, regardless of its criminal code, to count in a globally comparable way all women victim of gender-motivated killings. The framework was developed through an open global consultation that saw the participation of 67 national institutions of 54 countries from all five continents.

The framework builds on the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS) and identifies the data that should be collected on victims, perpetrators and circumstances of the gender related killings of women and girls (femicide/feminicide). The Commission requested UNODC to prepare a global report on countries’ experience in implementing this framework by 2025.