Better Tracking Women’s Deaths: Every Case Is a Life
In Latin America, improving statistics on femicide is key to understanding and preventing violence against women
Latin America has some of the highest homicide rates in the world. Within this violence lies a phenomenon that is particularly difficult to measure: the gender-based murder of women and girls, commonly known as femicide. Although many countries have criminalized these offenses in their legislation, statistical measurement of the phenomenon remains fragmented and uneven.
One reason is that these cases constitute a specific subset of intentional homicides. Identifying them within general homicide statistics requires detailed information about the context of the crime, the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator, and the circumstances surrounding the incident. This information is often scattered across different institutions within the justice system: police departments, prosecutors’ offices, courts, forensic medical services, and correctional systems.
To address this challenge, several countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are working on the development of a methodological document to outline the statistical process for measuring femicide (Figure 1).
Figure 1. MEMF statistical process.
The initiative is supported by the UNODC–INEGI Center of Excellence for Statistical Information on Government, Public Safety, Victimization, and Justice, in collaboration with UN Women, and aims to support the implementation of the statistical framework for measuring gender-based killings of women and girls.
The methodological approach proposes integrating multiple administrative sources to reconstruct the trajectory of cases within the criminal justice system. By combining police, prosecutorial, judicial, prison, and forensic medical records, countries can more accurately characterize both the victims and the context in which femicides occur.
This type of integration makes it possible to produce indicators across the various stages of the justice system (Table 1), including:
victims of gender-based murders of women and girls
persons suspected of these crimes
persons prosecuted and convicted
persons incarcerated for these crimes
and the rate of gender-based murders of women and girls.
Table 1. Metadata for indicators
Beyond the production of indicators, the value of this approach lies in its ability to guide public policy. Integrated data analysis can reveal patterns that help prevent violence. If, for example, it is observed that many victims are young women of school age, authorities can strengthen prevention campaigns in schools and communities. If, on the other hand, a significant proportion of the perpetrators are young people facing long prison sentences, correctional systems can develop training and reintegration programs to reduce recidivism.
Another advantage is the ability to generate a single, consistent figure on femicide, derived from the integration of institutional records. Having a harmonized metric allows police, prosecutors’ offices, courts, forensic medical services, and women’s ministries to work with a common statistical reference for the phenomenon, reducing inconsistencies and strengthening coordination among institutions.
The integration of these sources also facilitates the development of early warning systems capable of identifying risk patterns and guiding timely responses. Furthermore, the statistics produced can serve as a reference for the authorities responsible for investigating these crimes, by providing systematic evidence on the characteristics of the cases and their progression through the justice system.
The initiative also aims to adapt the Generic Statistical Process Model (GSBPM) to the context of measuring femicide, aligning it with the international statistical framework. The goal is to facilitate the integrated production of these statistics, documenting each stage of the process—from data collection to the production of indicators—and improving comparability across countries.
Better measuring femicide is not just a statistical challenge. Having integrated, consistent, and timely information is a fundamental prerequisite for understanding violence against women and designing more effective policies for prevention, investigation, and justice.