Black women in the United States of America face a femicide crisis that is structural, persistent, and measurable.
Black Femicide
Black femicide is a construct used to describe the deliberate killing of Black women and girls, who face homicide at a disproportionate rate. Rosa Page, an American nurse, coined the term building on the redefinition of femicide by Dr. Diana Russell and founded the Black Femicide U.S. movement.
Researchers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Columbia Mailman School of Public Health conducted an analysis. They discovered that, between 1999 and 2020, Black women were six times more likely to be murdered than their white counterparts.
Moreover, the study emphasizes that Black women are at a greater risk of being killed by firearms than white women.
The risk of femicide increases for Black women in America based on the concentration of structural racism where they reside.
Firearms kill Black women at rates no other weapon approaches. Nearly three out of four Black female femicide victims die by gunshot. That proportion has climbed 47% since 2011. Guns do not cause femicide. But they determine who survives it.
Black women are most often killed by someone they love, trust, or share a home with. Nine out of ten victims knew their killer.
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…
Black women are killed at rates that expose a crisis rigidly upheld by structural racism. This page documents national femicide rates for Black and white women from 1999 to 2023, drawing on peer-reviewed research, FBI data, and the Violence Policy Center’s annual analysis. Terminology: The Purpose Of The Word Femicide Narcissistic Abuse Rehab narcissisticabuserehab.com Black Femicide Statistics Hub · National…
Every ten minutes, somewhere in the world, a woman or girl is killed by an intimate partner or family member.
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The femicide of Ugandan Olympic marathoner Rebecca Cheptegei has sent shockwaves across the global sporting community, pulling back the curtain on the issue of gender-based violence in Africa. Cheptegei, 25, died on September 5, 2024 after being set on fire by her former romantic partner on her way home from church in Eldoret, Kenya. This tragedy has sparked widespread outrage…
Two decades of data reveal that Black women face persistently elevated risk of femicide–up to 20 times higher than white women in some states.