Naming femicide
What the global pattern of intimate partner killing tells us in plain numbers.
In my work on rural democracy and gender-based violence, one word has consistently shifted the room when I speak it: femicide. It names what the language of “domestic violence death,” “murder of a woman by her partner,” or simply “homicide” obscures. Femicide identifies the killing of women as patterned, sex-based, and structurally distinct from other forms of homicide—with its own demographic profile, its own warning signs, its own institutional failure pattern, and its own political function.
Because femicide is predictable, it is preventable.
The hate-crime question
Hate crime classifications attach where bias against a protected characteristic motivates a criminal act. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 covers race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. Congress added sex to federal hate crime law in 2009 as well. Courts and prosecutors have applied it inconsistently to intimate partner femicide—in part because they treat the bias element as ambiguous when the perpetrator and victim already know each other intimately.
The argument worth examining is this: the bias element is not ambiguous. Femicide is by definition the killing of a woman because she is a woman, in a relationship that runs on gendered power. Naming it femicide and treating it as a hate-motivated act would shift the evidentiary, prosecutorial, and sentencing apparatus to match the structural fact of what the perpetrator did. It would also shift the institutional response upstream—toward the patterns of coercive control, stalking, and lethality escalation the justice system often lets slide.
Classification determines whether the legal system can recognize what perpetrators have been doing to women all along.
The structural inheritance
Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch makes the historical argument that the witch hunts of early modern Europe served as a deliberate institutional reorganization of patriarchal power, with pre-modern superstition functioning as cover—a centuries-long disciplinary project that organized women's bodies, labor, and reproduction, and that depended on community sanction, moral framing, and the killing of women whom inquisitors had categorized as outside the bounds of appropriate womanhood. The historical record is unambiguous. In Scotland alone, between 1563 and 1736, the Crown accused approximately four thousand people—overwhelmingly women—under the Witchcraft Act, and executed an estimated two thousand five hundred.
The contemporary work of Claire Mitchell KC and Zoe Venditozzi—the Witches of Scotland campaign—is the slow legal and historical work of naming what the Crown and the inquisitors did, securing formal state acknowledgment, and pursuing pardon for the women the Crown executed under that statute. Scotland's First Minister issued a formal apology in 2022; the campaign continues to press for legal pardon and public memorialization.
Witch burnings never stopped; patriarchal structures just shifted tactics. The community still participates in consequences for insubordinate women, while the majority of the violence now occurs in the home. The moral framing migrated from heresy and witchcraft to jealousy, dishonor, discipline, the private affairs of intimate relationships, and discrediting survivors based on their trauma responses and actions to protect themselves and their children. The killings communities tolerated migrated from the public square to the kitchen, the bedroom, the rural road, the locked house at the end of the driveway. The pattern of community tolerance—neighbors who heard, family who knew, institutions that documented without acting—carries forward the same disciplinary structure.
What we now call intimate partner femicide is the modern surface of a centuries-old mechanism. The slow work of formal pardon and historical recognition the Witches of Scotland campaign is pressing for in the historical case is the same work of naming and institutional recognition that femicide as a legal category demands in the present. The question is whether the criminal law will recognize the present pattern with the moral clarity it has eventually applied to the past one.
The numbers
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in its joint 2024 report with UN Women, estimated approximately 83,000 intentional killings of women and girls worldwide in 2023. An intimate partner or other family member killed roughly sixty percent—about 51,100—of them. An intimate partner specifically killed approximately 27,892. Strangers killed only a small minority.
Globally, the home is the most dangerous place for women. The data is stable across years and continents. The pattern is structural.
The rural scale
In rural counties, the same pattern operates with thinner formal infrastructure to recognize it. Stalking that an urban police department would have documented goes ignored—often with the victim of the crime being ridiculed in the process. Strangulation as a precursor to lethal violence escapes the notice of a responding deputy without specialized training, in a three-county area with zero forensic nurses to provide necessary medical care. Sheriff's offices return firearms swiftly to abusers, without the legally required notification to survivors. Indeed, there are counties in which no meaningful firearm compliance and accountability exist. The obstacle is not funding, it is the will to act in the interest of prevention—and there are notable rural jurisdictions doing this very well.
The structural critique that applies to the global picture applies in concentrated form to under-resourced jurisdictions. The same naming work that needs to happen in international jurisprudence needs to happen at the county courthouse—and for the same reason.
Femicide is predictable. The research has been clear for three decades. The institutions upstream of every femicide already possess the empirical record they need to interrupt the trajectory. Predictability is the precondition for prevention.
Research in motion
The Court of Justice of Santa Catarina, Brazil (TJSC); the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University; and the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) are currently collaborating on an international study of femicide risk factors. The collaboration sits at the intersection of judicial administration, public health, and academic criminology.
Selected sources
- UNODC & UN Women. (2024). Femicides in 2023: Global estimates of female intimate partner and family-related homicides. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
- Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia.
- Mitchell, C., & Venditozzi, Z. (ongoing). Witches of Scotland campaign and podcast. witchesofscotland.com
- Russell, D. E. H., & Harmes, R. A. (Eds.). (2001). Femicide in global perspective. Teachers College Press.
- Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press.
- Campbell, J. C., et al. (2003). Risk factors for femicide in abusive relationships: Results from a multisite case control study. American Journal of Public Health, 93(7), 1089–1097.
- Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, Pub. L. No. 111-84.
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