FemicidesWhat the Numbers Say

Eight out of ten homicide victims worldwide are men. But barely more than one in ten murdered men was killed by an intimate partner or family member; for women, it is six out of ten. They die at the hands of a husband, a companion, an ex, and also, the authors specify, a father, an uncle, a mother, or a brother.

Where perpetrators can be told apart, partners come ahead of family. In Europe, partners committed nearly two-thirds of these murders; in the Americas, more than two-thirds. Elsewhere, data does not allow this breakdown.

Africa records the highest number of victims, both in raw counts and in proportion: about three women and girls killed by someone close to them per 100,000, six times the European rate. It is also where estimates are most fragile: for lack of data, a large share of African and Asian figures is modeled, yielding a global range of 44,400 to 55,500 victims.

Trends over time can be read for only two continents. Since 2010, the rate has slowly declined in Europe and remained virtually unchanged in the Americas. The authors see in this the mark of practices and norms that change slowly. The slight dip compared with 2023 does not reflect a genuine decline: it is mainly down to which countries submitted data.

Each of these women has a file. Since 2006, the Victim Support Delegation of the Ministry of the Interior has reviewed violent deaths within couples one by one, with investigators, and each year it publishes what it knows. The counts that follow are from 2025; percentages come from its 2024 key figures, the most recent detailed edition. They point to two ages of life.

Young women in their twenties and older women are overrepresented among victims. More than four in ten victims were 60 years old or older, one in four at least 70. For more than two out of three among the latter, the investigation cited illness—their own or their partner's—as the motive.

Most often, the motive reflects control. Half of recorded motives reflect a drive for domination: an argument, a refused separation, jealousy. Three out of four perpetrators had not consumed alcohol at the time of the acts. And nine out of ten murders occurred at the home of the couple, the victim, or the perpetrator.

That leaves the act itself. In two cases out of three, the perpetrator kills with a weapon (in 2024, across 138 deaths, women and men): when one is used, it is an edged weapon in more than half of cases, a firearm in more than a third. Next come asphyxiation by strangulation or suffocation (14%), followed by beatings (9%). Men who kill with a weapon reach slightly more often for a rifle or handgun (48%) than a blade (45%). And of the 34 perpetrators who fired a gun, 25 held a weapon they had not declared.

The murder does not stop with its intended target. In 2024, seven children were killed in this violence, twelve witnessed the murder, and 94 were orphaned; in 2025, 106 children were orphaned. Including these children, four other collateral victims, and perpetrators who subsequently committed suicide, intimate partner violence caused 190 deaths in 2024. Three numbers thus describe the same year, and they nest inside one another: 107 women killed by their spouse or ex, 138 violent deaths within couples when men are included, 190 deaths in total when adding murdered children, four collateral victims, and the 41 perpetrators who committed suicide.

Men killed do not tell the same story. In 2024, nearly two out of three female perpetrators of intimate partner homicide had themselves suffered violence from their partner. Over time, the tally lengthens: 2,539 women died at the hands of a spouse or ex between 2006 and 2024, and 377 children in their parents' violence.

In 2019, the General Inspectorate of Justice reviewed 88 intimate partner homicide cases tried in assize courts. Nearly two-thirds of victims had already experienced violence from their partner. A portion had never been reported, though friends and family knew; the rest had been reported to the police, and those reports were "too often logged as mere incident reports." The murders were committed primarily at the time of the couple's separation or its announcement.

In 2025, slightly more than a third of murdered women had already suffered violence from their spouse or ex-spouse; 61% of them had reported it to the police or gendarmerie, and most had filed formal complaints. Only a single one was equipped with a grave danger emergency phone.

Meanwhile, the Grenelle des violences conjugales, a national consultation on domestic violence, had opened at Matignon in September 2019, with advocacy groups and victims' families. It led to two laws, in December 2019 and July 2020: the first created the electronic anti-approach bracelet and broadened access to grave danger emergency phones, available nationwide since 2014. The two tools followed divergent paths: the number of active emergency phones has risen by two-thirds since 2022, to more than 5,300; the number of bracelets has fallen by a third since 2023, to 658.

The National Observatory offers two reasons. The bracelet does not work when victim and perpetrator live, work, or shop in the same places. And some perpetrators use it to keep harassing, by setting off alerts, day and night.

That leaves the figures: from 146 women killed in 2019 to 96 in 2023, then 111 in 2025. None of the published evaluations we consulted attributes these fluctuations to the Grenelle or to any one measure. The United Nations simply points out that, in many cases, femicide is the end point of continuous violence, and that timely intervention could have prevented it.

The word "femicide" does not appear in the French Penal Code. The murder of a woman by her spouse, cohabitant, or civil partner is classified as aggravated murder, punishable by life imprisonment; the same penalty applies to an ex-partner if the crime relates to the past relationship, and to any murder committed on account of the victim's sex. Several Latin American countries have established it as a standalone crime, such as Chile in 2010.

On October 13, 2026, the National Assembly adopted, with no votes against, a "comprehensive" bill on sexual and gender-based violence. It assigns an independent authority the task of publishing, each month, the count of femicides. The Senate has yet to review it.

In the meantime, others keep count. Since 2016, the collective "Féminicides par compagnons ou ex" spends up to eight hours a day combing regional and national press, tracking investigations through to trial. It recorded "at a minimum" 98 femicides for 2025, whereas the ministry counts 111: press monitoring captures only cases covered by news media. Inter Orga Féminicides, which brings together #NousToutes and other advocacy groups, uses the UN definition: the killing of a woman on account of her gender, within or outside a couple. The Victim Support Delegation also consults these advocacy groups' counts when compiling its own.

A woman killed by her son, by her father, or by a stranger because she is a woman does not appear in the French figure, which stops at the couple. The global figure reaches further, into family members, because most states record the relationship between victim and perpetrator. Beyond that, gender-related killings of women are measured only in a few pilot countries, and the UN acknowledges they cannot yet be estimated globally. The total of 50,000 victims is therefore a minimum.

Women driven to death do not appear either. In 2024, police and gendarmerie registered 906 women who had committed suicide or attempted to do so following harassment by a partner or ex-partner, and the law does not allow the two to be told apart; added to this were 270 attempted femicides. The Observatory also points out that this count leaves aside women who died of the after-effects of the violence they suffered: cardiovascular disease, depression, addiction, or cancer.

The number of women who died in a context of male violence is therefore higher than what is published. And the death toll says nothing of those who survived.