I spent the first eight years of my life in Narayanganj, a bustling city in Bangladesh, a small but densely populated country bordered by India and Myanmar. Even as a child, I understood there were different expectations for girls. We learned to walk quickly, speak softly, and stay alert.
After we immigrated to the United States, what I learned is that being a woman is something one is always made aware of. Unease follows you. It takes different shapes, speaks a different language, but it’s there. The threat doesn’t disappear with a new address. What feels personal, in truth, is global, and deadly.
Women are being murdered around the world every day simply because of their gender, and the silence around it is deafening. In a nation that boasts progress, innovation, and justice, nearly three women are killed every single day by an intimate partner in the United States. This is not a coincidence. It is a silent epidemic, hiding in plain sight.
Think about how much has changed in the last two decades. We have self-driving cars, the internet has reshaped our world, and cryptocurrencies have emerged. The passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 marked a major shift in how society views violence against women, no longer could domestic violence be dismissed as a private matter. Yet despite these advances, the rate of femicide, the gender-based killing of women, has barely budged. While technology races forward, the threat to women’s lives remains frozen in time
According to UN Women, femicide is the most brutal form of violence against women, an intentional killing motivated by gender. Unlike general homicide, femicide recognizes the gendered root cause: women targeted for who they are, not just how they live.
To grasp the magnitude in the U.S., consider these staggering facts:
- Over 55% of all female homicide victims in America are killed by current or former intimate partners.
- In 2020 alone, more than 2,000 women were murdered by men
- Since 1996, over 45,000 women have been murdered by men in single victim/single offender incidents.
- Among all female homicide victims over the past 25 years, 92% knew their killers.
These aren’t just numbers. They are mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends whose lives were cut short by violence rooted in gender and power. And yet, femicide remains overlooked by our laws, our media, and our society.
More Than a Statistic: The Lives Behind the Numbers
Beyond the statistics are real women whose lives were abruptly and unjustly ended.
Ana Walshe was a 39-year-old mother of three from Massachusetts. In 2023, she was reported missing, and her husband was later charged with murder after evidence showed he made chilling Google searches like “how to dispose of a 115-pound woman” and “how long before a body starts to smell.” Ana had reportedly told friends she felt unsafe and was considering leaving the marriage, a common femicide precursor. Her case is a tragic example of intimate partner femicide, and premeditated control rooted in male entitlement.
A world-record-holding Kenyan Olympic runner, Agnes Tirop was stabbed to death by her husband in their home in 2021. She was only 25. Her murder sent shockwaves through the global athletic community and highlighted how even globally accomplished women are not protected from domestic violence and gender-based murder. Her death became a rallying cry for reform in Kenya around violence against women.
A 23-year-old mother in Milwaukee, Emily Rogers was found murdered and buried in a container in 2022. She had recently ended her relationship, and her ex-boyfriend was later arrested and charged. Friends said she feared for her safety but felt powerless to escape. Her death underscores how leaving a relationship is the most dangerous time for many women, especially when legal systems and social supports fail to intervene.
These individual tragedies are part of a much larger pattern, one that remains dangerously obscured by how our country chooses to define and track violence.
A Crisis Hidden in the Data: Why Femicide Remains Invisible in the U.S.
In the United States, there is no official crime category for femicide. Law enforcement agencies and the FBI track homicides, domestic violence, and intimate partner violence, but do not distinguish killings that are rooted in gender-based hatred or control. Without this recognition, femicide is erased in policy discussions, misclassified in databases, and misunderstood by the public.
While gender- based violence affects women across all backgrounds, the risk is disproportionately higher for women of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, indigenous women, and immigrants, whose cases are often overlooked, underreported, or misclassified. According to the Violence Policy Center, Black women are murdered at nearly three times the rate of white women in the U.S. This racial disparity is worsened by systemic neglect, media underreporting, and failures in law enforcement response. Research from the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology shows that missing Black women receive significantly less media coverage than white women, despite being disproportionately affected. This pattern is often referred to as “Missing White Woman Syndrome,” highlighting how media and public attention tend to prioritize white victims while overlooking women of color. According to research from the National Institute of Justice and the Urban Indian Health Institute, over 80% of Indigenous women have experienced violence, and in certain counties, they face murder rates up to ten times higher than the national average. The National Crime Information Center logged 5,712 cases of missing Indigenous women in 2016 alone, but only 116 were logged in the Department of Justice’s missing persons database. This gap shows how femicide is not just invisible, it is intentionally uncounted. Immigrant women are less likely to report abuse or threats, fearing deportation, language barriers, or lack of legal support. This silence leaves them especially vulnerable to gender-based violence and femicide.
A Global Emergency: Femicide Knows No Borders
Femicide is not just a U.S. issue, it is a global epidemic. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), every 10 minutes, a woman or girl is killed by an intimate partner or family member. Globally, 85,000 women and girls were killed intentionally in 2023, and these lives are taken not in war zones or by strangers, but often in their own homes, by people they know. Despite its wealth and legal systems, the United States ranks 34th globally in the rate of women killed by intimate partners, according to WHO and UN Women.
In Bangladesh, the crisis is especially dire. In 2023, the rights group Ain o Salish Kendra reported that at least 235 women were killed by their husbands or in-laws in domestic violence cases, and that’s likely an undercount given how many incidents go unreported. Social stigma, lack of legal protection, and economic dependence continue to silence survivors and shield perpetrators. In 2024 High Court Division of the Supreme Court has directed authorities to adhere to guidelines that discourage (but do not prohibit) disclosing a fetus’s sex for non-medical reasons. This is primarily to prevent gender-biased sex selection and protect unborn babies and pregnant women. This only proves how even before being born, the lives of women and girls are under threat. These forms of gendered violence aren’t limited to domestic abuse, they extend into honor killings, where women are murdered by family members for perceived dishonor. According to the UN Population Fund, an estimated 5,000 honor killings occur each year worldwide, mostly in South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, though the actual number is likely higher due to chronic underreporting. In Mexico, the femicide crisis has escalated into a national emergency. In 2022 alone, more than 1,000 women were officially recorded as victims of femicide, and many more were killed without being classified under the legal term. Activists have accused the government of inaction, even as protests erupt across the country with chants of “Ni una menos” Not one less.
Policy Failures and the Price of Inaction
Too often, women are murdered after reporting abuse. They tell their friends and families, file police reports, and beg for help, but are still killed by the very people they tried to escape. This isn’t an unfortunate coincidence. It is a systemic failure. It is the culmination of a long pattern of control, coercion, and violence. In over half of all intimate partner homicides, the victim had already reached out for help. Yet too often, those cries are dismissed. The systems meant to protect us too often side with abusers, judges restore gun rights, police minimize threats, shelters are underfunded, and restraining orders go unenforced. Despite the Lautenberg Amendment barring firearm access for domestic violence misdemeanants, it long excluded dating partners, creating the deadly “boyfriend loophole.” This loophole, which federal lawmakers failed to close for years under pressure from the NRA, has enabled abusers to keep access to guns. The presence of a firearm in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of death by 500%. We should be angry. In fact, we should be furious. Women die every day because warning signs are ignored, and cycles of violence are often treated like private matters. Until we recognize femicide as the crisis it is, nothing will change.
Afroza Keya, Government Relations Intern
Resources:
National Domestic Violence Hotline:
Phone: 800.799.SAFE (7233)
Website: https://www.thehotline.org/
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