The Global Femicide Legislation Index was created to document the small but significant shift in jurisprudence: the emergence of legal frameworks designed to confront a crisis that has long been hidden in plain sight.1 Every ten minutes, a woman or girl is killed by someone in her own home—an intimate partner or a family member. These killings occur with a grim, rhythmic consistency.2 In 2024 alone, an estimated 50,000 lives were lost in the private sphere; over the course of a decade, that number swells to half a million.3 Furthermore, research shows that the rate of femicide for Black women in the United States is six times higher than that of white women.4 These figures have remained stubbornly static, a testament to a status quo that will continue until femicide is recognized as a specific legal category.
What is Femicide?
The term femicide did not enter the lexicon by accident; it was forged as a tool of political- and legal provocation. Feminist scholar Diana Russell popularized the term in the 1970s, in an effort to reduce the risk of erasure by the term homicide.5 For Russell, the gender-neutrality of the law was a veil that obscured a specific, systemic pathology: the “hate killing of women perpetrated by males.”6
In her testimony before the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women in 1976, Russell mapped out a dark, historical lineage. She argued that from the witch hunts of the early modern period to the contemporary honor killings in so-called traditional societies, femicide has been a constant, if unnamed, thread in human history.7 8 To Russell and her contemporary Jill Radford, who described the phenomenon as “the misogynistic killing of women by men,” naming the crime was the first step toward dismantling the culture that permitted it.9 Both scholars contended that using a gendered term was essential to expose the sexual politics of gender-based murders.10
Thus, when a woman is killed because she is a woman, or because she has defied the patriarchal expectations of a current or former romantic partner or family member, it is femicide. As legal scholar Caroline Davidson has noted, this “gendered killing” represents a special category of violence that requires a distinct category of justice as femicide is frequently the lethal finale of the continuum of intimate- and familial violence known as coercive control.11 12
To learn more about what femicide looks like in extreme cases of abuse, read Mortal Discard: Five Fatal Patterns in Coercive Control.
Why Femicide Legislation is Necessary
It is a somber truth that no single law can, by its mere existence, end an epidemic of violence. Yet, to grant femicide its own legal status is to perform an essential act of statecraft. It provides the foundational architecture for what must follow: a sequenced, multi-sector response that moves beyond the courtroom and into the structures of daily life. By codifying the crime, we do more than just punish; we create a lens through which the state is finally forced to measure, and thus confront, its systemic nature.
List of Countries That Have Femicide Laws
Searchable Global Femicide Legislation Index
Click here to view our searchable Global Femicide Legislation Index.
Frequently Asked Questions: A Brief Guide to the Femicide Crisis
Femicide is the misogynistic killing of women and girls by men. It is often the finale on the continuum of coercive control.
The law is not merely a tool for punishment; it is a tool for diagnosis. By classifying certain killings as femicides, we acknowledge their specific, systemic roots in gender-based violence. This allows for more accurate data collection and, more importantly, the implementation of specialized prevention protocols—such as high-risk domestic violence intervention—that a general “homicide” charge might ignore.
On the contrary, it suggests that their lives have been historically undervalued by legal systems that treated “crimes of passion” or domestic violence as private matters. Femicide laws aim to correct a historical deficit in justice, ensuring that motive is treated with the same weight as the act itself.
Legislation is the structural spine of a broader response. Without a legal definition, there is no mandate for specialized police training, no specific funding for at-risk women, and no way to track whether state interventions are actually working. The law doesn’t end the violence, but it creates the accountability necessary to do so.
The private sphere refers to deaths that occur within the home or at the hands of those known to the victim—family members, spouses, or current/former intimate partners. While we often fear the stranger in the shadows, the data reveals that for women and girls, the most significant threat remains behind closed doors at home.
References
- Wakefield, Manya. (2024, Nov. 29). Global Femicide Crisis: A Woman Is Killed Every 10 Minutes. Narcissistic Abuse Rehab. ↩︎
- UNODC and UN Women, Femicides in 2023: Global Estimates of Intimate Partner/Family Member Femicicdes. United Nations publication 2025. ↩︎
- UNODC and UN Women, Femicides in 2024: Global Estimates of Intimate Partner/Family Member Femicides. United Nations Publication, 2025. ↩︎
- Bernadine Y. Waller, Victoria A. Joseph, and Katherine M. Keyes (2024, February 8). 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. Retrieved on May 3, 2024. ↩︎
- Russell, Diana E.H. (2011, Dec.) The Original and Imprortance of the Term Femicide. dianarussell.com ↩︎
- Russell, Diana E.H., and Radford, Jill. (1992, Jan. 1). Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing. Twayne Publishers. New York. ↩︎
- Russell and Radford. 1992. ↩︎
- Russell, Diana E.H., Van de Ven, Nicole. (1976) Crimes Against Women: Proceeding of the International Tribunal. Les Femmes. ↩︎
- Russell and Radford. 1992. ↩︎
- Russell and Radford. 1992. ↩︎
- Russell and Radford. 1992. ↩︎
- Davidson. 2022. Page 326. ↩︎
Photo by Katrin Bolovtsova.
Manya Wakefield is a narcissistic abuse recovery coach, coercive trauma specialist, and the developer of the Coercive Trauma Recovery Method™ and TENEL™ (Traumatic Exposure to Narcissism in Early Life) — proprietary recovery frameworks built from seven years of direct professional work with survivors of coercive control, narcissistic abuse, and Adult Children of Narcissists. Both frameworks have been reviewed by Dr. Michael Kinsey, PhD, clinical psychologist, New School for Social Research. She is the founder of Narcissistic Abuse Rehab, a global social impact platform launched in 2019 to support survivors through evidence-based recovery frameworks. Manya is the author of Are You In An Emotionally Abusive Relationship (2019), a resource used in domestic violence recovery groups worldwide. Her original research contributions include the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index (2020) — the first systematic index of its kind on the web — and the Global Femicide Legislation Index (2026), comprehensive legal references used by advocates, legal professionals, and policymakers internationally, cited in peer-reviewed publications including the Southern Illinois University Law Journal, Palgrave Macmillan, and the University of Agder. Her expertise has been featured in Newsweek, Elle, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost, Parade, and YourTango. She hosts the Narcissistic Abuse Rehab Podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music. All content on this site reflects Manya's direct professional experience working with survivors of narcissistic abuse and coercive control, her published research, and her ongoing advocacy work.
