Femicide

Femicide is the intentional killing of a woman or girl because she is female. It is not a synonym for female homicide — all femicides are female homicides, but not all female homicides are femicides. What defines femicide is motive: the gendered dimension of the killing, rooted in discrimination, unequal power relations, patriarchal entitlement, or the refusal to accept a woman’s autonomy, separation, or independence.

The term was introduced into public discourse in 1976 when South African-born feminist scholar Diana E.H. Russell testified at the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women in Brussels. Russell encountered the word through an unpublished anthology by American writer Carol Orlock, who had coined it to describe the killing of women and girls by men. Russell adopted it as “an alternative to the gender-neutral homicide” — precisely because gender-neutrality in law had long functioned as a veil over a specific, systemic pathology. To Russell and her collaborator Jill Radford, naming the crime was the first act of dismantling the culture that permitted it.

The global scale of femicide is documented annually by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and UN Women. Their 2025 report — Femicides in 2024 — found that approximately 50,000 women and girls were killed by an intimate partner or family member in 2024 alone, representing approximately 60% of all intentional femicides globally. That is an average of 137 women and girls killed every day by someone in their own family. Africa recorded the highest rates relative to female population. Across every region, femicide remains chronically underreported and frequently misclassified in official homicide statistics — an invisibility that the UNODC-UN Women statistical framework, endorsed by the UN Statistical Commission in 2022, is designed to address.

Femicide is frequently the lethal endpoint of coercive control — the culmination of a sustained pattern of intimate partner abuse, surveillance, isolation, and psychological subjugation. Research consistently identifies separation and divorce as the highest-risk periods: the point at which a woman attempts to exercise autonomy over her own life is the point at which the risk of being killed by her partner is statistically greatest.

Narcissistic Abuse Rehab published the Global Femicide Legislation Index in 2026 — the first systematic index of femicide-specific legislation worldwide — tracking the emergence of legal frameworks across Latin America, Europe, and beyond that recognize femicide as a distinct criminal category. The index draws on the scholarship of legal theorists including Diana Russell, Jill Radford, and Caroline Davidson, whose 2022 Harvard Journal of Law and Gender article Femicide as Gender Persecution argues that femicide can rise to the level of international crime as a crime against humanity.