Every 10 minutes, a woman or girl dies at the hands of an intimate partner or close relative. That’s six every hour; more than 140 every day, worldwide.
The figures come from a new UN Women and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report which found that 51,000 women and girls were intentionally killed an intimate partner or family member last year.
Those numbers chill Alexis* to the bone because she and her children were very nearly among them.
She didn’t realise her ex was controlling and manipulating her until she felt “completely powerless” in the relationship. Even then, she believed she was the problem.
It wasn’t until he became aggressive towards their children that Alexis decided she needed to leave.
“When I did manage to escape, his behaviour went from ‘I will control you’ to ‘I will destroy you’. I felt like a dead woman walking,” she told 9news.com.au.
Femicides in 2023: Global Estimates of Intimate Partner/Family Member Femicides found that two thirds of the 85,000 femicides that occurred in 2023 were at the hands of a partner or relative.
Africa reported the highest number of victims with 21,700, followed by Asia with 18,500, the Americas with 8,300, and Europe with 2,300. Oceania recorded about 300 victims in 2023.
While the report didn’t include data specific to Australia, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported that one woman was killed every 11 days by an intimate partner on average in 2022–23.
“We know that by one count, 85 women have lost their lives to violence this year,” Safe and Equal CEO Tania Farha told 9News, and that’s just the deaths that have been formally reported.
“The true number is likely far greater, including invisible victims and missing and murdered First Nations women.”
Some of those women had just left a domestic or family violence situation when they were killed, which is one of the most dangerous times for victim-survivors.
”It’s never as simple as just ‘leaving’ … it’s a like a game of cat and mouse. There is this overwhelming fear of what will happen next,” Alexis said.
“He was threatening homicide, he was threatening to take the children off me, he was coming to the school unannounced and their swimming lessons just to intimidate me.”
When she reported her ex’s past abuse and escalating behaviour to police, Alexis felt dismissed, gaslit and “blamed”.
It’s a commonly reported experience among women fleeing violence.
Farha called the UN Women report’s findings devastating but unsurprising and said women like Alexis won’t be safe until change is made.
“If we want to prevent more senseless deaths, we need to prioritise a comprehensive and coordinated approach that incorporates supporting victim survivors, working with perpetrators and preventing family violence before it starts by addressing the attitudes, cultures, systems and structures that enable it,” she said.
“Without this, these tragic statistics will continue to rise – both locally and across the world.”
