Black Femicide Trends 2020–2025: The Impact of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered the sharpest single-year escalation in Black femicide rates in two decades. Though rates declined slightly from their 2021 peak, they remain 25% higher than pre-pandemic levels–and the federal funding rollbacks of 2025 have removed the infrastructure most likely to reverse that trajectory.

The years between 2020 and 2023 represent the most acute phase of the Black femicide crisis since systematic tracking began. What the data shows is not a spike that corrected itself — it is a structural escalation that plateaued at a level 25% above where it started, with no policy intervention sufficient to drive it back down. For Black women, the pandemic did not create new vulnerability. It exposed and accelerated the vulnerability that was already there.

Table of Contents

• What is Black Femicide?
• 2019-2021: Two Years That Changed Everything
• The Pandemic Surge: A Crisis Within A Crisis
• Where Things Stand Today
• Further Reading
• Resources

What is Black Femicide?

Black femicide is a form of intersectional femicide. In other words, it is the final lethal expression of coercive control motivated by anti-Black misogyny, otherwise known as misogynoir.

Coined by scholar and activist Moya Bailey, the term misogynoir is a portmanteau of misogyny and noir (the French word for black)¹. It describes the singular prejudice directed specifically at Black women, where racism and sexism converge into a distinct form of oppression.^{2 3}

It is important to recognize that misogynoir is not exclusive to non-Black individuals; rather it is a pervasive systemic force that can be internalized and enacted by anyone, including members within the Black community.^{4 5}

2019-2021: Two Years That Changed Everything

Between 2019 and 2021, the femicide rate among Black women surged from 6.0 to 9.0 per 100,000–a 50% increase in just two years.^{6 7} In 2020 alone, at least 5 Black women and girls were killed every single day in the United States, a 33% increase from the year before.^{8 9}

The +50% surge from 2019 to 2021 is the headline. However, the figure that carries the most weight for researchers and policymakers is the one that follows it: in 2023, after two years of partial decline, the rate stood at 7.8 per 100,000–still nearly three times the rate for white women, and still a quarter higher than before the pandemic began.

However, the crisis did not peak and resolve. It peaked, partially retreated, and then held. The trend line below shows that trajectory in full, with the 2018–2019 baseline marked so the distance between where we started and where we remain is unmistakable.

The Pandemic Surge: A Crisis Within A Crisis

A rate does not climb 50% in two years by accident. Behind every data point on that chart is a convergence of structural conditions that made Black women uniquely exposed to lethal violence during the pandemic years–conditions that predated the coronavirus pandemic but were dramatically accelerated by it. ¹⁰

The six factors below are not a complete accounting of causes.¹¹ However, they are the ones for which there is the strongest documented evidence, drawn from peer-reviewed research, federal data, and the testimony of advocates working directly with victim-survivors.^{12 13}

Where Things Stand Today

By 2022 and 2023, rates had begun to fall from the 2021 peak–a development researchers attributed in part to the reopening of courts, domestic violence shelters, and community support networks as pandemic restrictions lifted. The partial recovery was significant, but incomplete.

However, its continuation is now in serious doubt. The Trump administration’s 2025 rollback of Violence Against Women Act funding, the gutting of the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention, and the language restrictions placed on organizations serving Black survivors have dismantled much of the infrastructure that drove that partial improvement. A crisis that was beginning to respond to intervention has had the intervention removed. What comes next in the data will reflect that.

Further Reading

• The Alarming Rate of Black Femicide
• National Femicide Rates in the United States
• Black Femicide: Perpetrator Relationship Data
• Black Femicide: State-by-State Disparities
• The Role of Firearms in the Black Femicide Crisis
• Global Femicide Crisis: A Woman Is Killed Every 10 Minutes
• The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index
• The Global Femicide Legislation Index

Resources

1. Bailey, Moya. (2022). Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press. ISBN-10: ‎147987874X ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Noble, D., Palmer, L.A. (2022). Misogynoir: Anti-Blackness, Patriarchy, and Refusing the Wrongness of Black Women. In: Tate, S.A., Gutiérrez Rodríguez, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Race and Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83947-5_12 ↩︎
4. Adhikari B, Amaratunga C, Mukumbang FC, Mishra SR. Why should we be concerned by internalised racism in global health? BMJ Global Health. 2025;10:e016740. ↩︎
5. Daley, P. (2025) Misogynoir: Unpacking Black Men’s Anti-blackness and Femicide against Black Women. Pambazuka. ↩︎
6. Federal Bureau of Investigation. (n.d.). Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. U.S. Department of Justice.  ↩︎
7. National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.  ↩︎
8. Violence Policy Center. (2025). When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 2023 Homicide Data. ↩︎
9. Waller, B.Y., Joseph, V.A., & Keyes, K.M. (2024). Racial inequities in homicide rates and homicide methods among Black and White women aged 25–44 years in the USA, 1999–2020: A Cross-Sectional Time Series Study. The Lancet. ↩︎
10. Everytown for Gun Safety. (n.d.). Guns and domestic violence.  ↩︎
11. Nguyen, A. and Drane, K. (2025). Gun violence in Black communities. Giffords Law Center To Prevent Gun Violence. ↩︎
12. Federal Bureau of Investigation. (n.d.). National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). U.S. Department of Justice. ↩︎
13. Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2025). Homicide victimization in the United States, 2023. U.S. Department of Justice. ↩︎