UN Report: Daily Toll of Violence Claims Lives of 137 Women Worldwide

A recent United Nations report highlights a grim occurrence that's happening globally—every ten minutes, a woman is killed by someone she knows intimately. This report raises alarms about the stagnant progress in combating gender-based killings.

In 2024, approximately 50,000 females, both women and girls, lost their lives at the hands of intimate partners or family members. This data was released by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime alongside UN Women, timed with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

The analysis shows a daunting figure of 83,000 females who were murdered in 2024. Out of these, 60% fell victim to people they were related to or had intimate relationships with, including fathers, uncles, mothers, siblings, and partners.

In stark contrast, only 11% of men who were murdered during the same period were killed by individuals they had close ties with. Despite this, men comprised about 80% of all homicide victims in the year 2024.

Breaking down the numbers leads to an unsettling average: 137 women per day, equating to one woman every ten minutes, were murdered, as drawn from statistics across 117 countries.

According to John Brandolino, Acting Executive Director of the UNODC, homes still stand as perilously unsafe spaces for a considerable number of women and girls globally.

Although the 2024 statistics show a slight drop from the previous year, this doesn't truly reflect a reduction in the actual number of incidents. Rather, it points to variations in data collection and availability across different nations.

Every corner of the world reported cases of women killed by close partners or family. Africa had the highest rate with three cases per 100,000 women, followed by the Americas with 1.5, Oceania with 1.4, Asia with 0.7, and Europe with 0.5 cases per 100,000 women, according to the details in the report.

Sarah Hendricks from UN Women’s Policy Division pointed out that femicides rarely occur in isolation. They often come as a result of ongoing violence that may begin with behaviors of control, threats, or harassment—sometimes even conducted online.

The advancement of technology has brought about new forms of violence against females, including unwanted sharing of images, doxxing, and creating deceptive deepfake videos.

Hendricks emphasized the need for strict enforcement of laws that acknowledge the various forms of violence women and girls face throughout their lives, both in physical spaces and digital ones, to ensure accountability well before such acts turn fatal.