Marking the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the 2025 femicide brief from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and UN Women confirms that femicide continues to take the lives of tens of thousands of women and girls worldwide, with no sign of real progress.
83,000 women and girls were killed intentionally last year. 60 per cent – or 50,000 women and girls – were killed at the hands of intimate partners or family members. This means one woman or girl is killed by a partner or family member almost every 10 minutes. In contrast, just 11 per cent of male homicides were perpetrated by intimate partners or family members during the same year.
“The home remains a dangerous and sometimes lethal place for too many women and girls around the world. The 2025 femicide brief provides a stark reminder of the need for better prevention strategies and criminal justice responses to femicide, ones that account for the conditions that propagate this extreme form of violence,”
“Femicides don’t happen in isolation. They often sit on a continuum of violence that can start with controlling behaviour, threats, and harassment, including online. he United Nation’s16 Days campaign this year underscores that digital violence often doesn’t stay online. It can escalate offline and, in the worst cases, contribute to lethal harm, including femicide. Every woman and girl has the right to be safe in every part of her life, and that requires systems that intervene early. To prevent these killings, we need the implementation of laws that recognize how violence manifests across women and girls’ lives, both online and offline, and hold perpetrators to account well before it turns deadly.”
Press release https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/press/releases/2025/November/137-women-and-girls-killed-every-day-by-intimate-partners-or-family-members-in-2024.html
Report FEMICIDES IN 2024 https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/briefs/Femicide_Brief_2025.pdf