Summary
A U.N. report shows that 140 women and girls were killed daily by intimate partners or family members in 2023, totaling 51,100 victims, an increase of 2,300 from 2022.
The rise reflects improved data collection rather than an increase in violence.
The highest rates were in Africa, with 2.9 victims per 100,000 people.
Despite global prevention efforts, these killings, often the result of ongoing gender-based violence, persist at alarming levels.
The report emphasizes the preventability of such violence through timely and effective interventions.
It’s a shame that this data is being presented this poorly, because this is a really important issue that deserves attention. None of the figures presented in the linked article have the proper context to understand them. Even the UN report itself does not present their findings well.
So, for instance, 140 women per day is of course more than the ideal number of zero, but there are billions of people on this planet. To actually quantify the gender imbalance of this number, we need to compare it to the number of men who are victims in the same way. From the report:
Globally, approximately 51,100 women and girls were killed by their intimate partners or other family members […out of…] 85,000 women and girls killed intentionally during the year […] In other words, an average of 140 women and girls worldwide lost their lives every day at the hands of their partner or a close relative.
The report does not offer corresponding numbers for male (or non-binary) victims. It does, however, say that 11.8% of male victims and 60.2% of female victims are killed by partners or other family members. It also acknowledges that 80% of all homicide victims are men and 20% women, which is beside the point as this is about domestic violence, but it will allow us to do some math to arrive at numbers to compare against.
- 85,000 * 80/20 = 340,000 men killed total
- 340,000 * 11.8% = 40,120 men killed by partners or family
- so we are comparing 40,120 men with 51,100 women
- women are 27.4% more likely than men to be killed by partners or family.
…which should have been the headline. 27% more is massive! Domestic violence is a huge issue, and women are more likely to suffer from it!
There is no need to obfuscate the numbers to be less honest. The honest numbers themselves are shocking enough, and scientifically literate readers won’t dismiss your credibility along with your cause. I look forward to future UN reports communicating these horrifying statistics a bit more clearly.
Thanks for doing the homework on this.
27% more (while significant) is really low compared to the disproportionate focus on violence against women. It shows 44% of domestic violence victims are ignored by the Istambul convention due to sexism, and even that is assuming the number is accurate (see also pixxelkicks reply).
27pct more is huge… I would have expected a much higher number though… both absolute and in percentage.
If we’re talking about statistics then from the original report
An estimated 80 per cent of all homicide victims in 2023 were men while 20 per cent were women,
Shouldn’t we figure out unequal woman murder rate first? What are they doing better than men if they are 4 times less likely to be murdered at all?
Here’s a more general report that delves into your question: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/global-study-on-homicide.html
By far the biggest reason is that ~70% of those homicides are crime or gang related, and almost all of those are men, which neatly accounts for the disparity.
That of course raises the question, why are men so much more likely to get tangled up in gangs or crime? I’m sure that the sociologists have a more nuanced take, but I’ll venture out on a limb and say it’s because men are full of dumbassifying hormones. Being immersed in societal peer pressure probably doesn’t help, depending on what environment they’re in.
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Consider the following:
A lot of reports of domestic violence for male on male violence is reported as non domestic instead, which contributes to a portion of the perceived gap.
The gap is likely smaller than you think. Its even distinctly likely men are in reality the victims more often (like every other category of violence), but it just doesn’t get categorized as domestic because sexism.
Especially since a lot of the victims are often black, which even further biases against them for a domestic incident to get escalated to non domestic (carrying heavier sentences)
It’s well known that black men tend to convicted with far heavier sentences than any other demographic for the same crimes.
Sir, my entire thesis was about how important it is to present clear data to substantiate your claims. Not only are you refuting the findings with zero data or sources, you are injecting a racially charged dimension into the mix.
For all we know your arguments could be entirely correct, but you yourself are undermining them by not attempting constructive discourse.
I just assumed the fact that black men get charged with worse penalties on average was well known enough and common knowledge I wouldnt have to sit and gather papers on it.
https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/64/5/1189/7612940
I mean there’s an entulire Wikipedia page with many sources for it, take your pick.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentencing_disparity
The fact that black men make up a disproportionate amount of perpetrators and victims of violence is also extremely well established, because you know… gangs exist
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-race-ethnicity-and-gender/
In Canada our Indeginious communities have a similiar trend: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3510015601
While simultaneously it’s also pretty well known that gangs trend to being familial in nature. I hope you won’t ask for me to find papers demonstrating how often gang violence tends to be “in family”, I don’t know how easy that will be to find, but it should be pretty common knowledge that gangs typically revolve around family blood ties.
As a result of all three of these facts, it’s extremely easy to see how a considerable chunk of what would be classifiable as male on male domestic violence instead gets classified as non-domestic gang related activity.
Which will make up a non-trivial chunk of that gap you are seeing, very possibly swinging it the opposite direction.
I’d be extremely surprised if men aren’t the actual disproportionate victims of domestic violence once you remove racial/cultural biases out. I expect an enormous amount of domestic violence is categorized as non-domestic.
Literally anyone who has paid attention to the news over the past several years should be starkly aware of how intense these biases play out when it comes to cops knocking on doors of domestic violence events, and how way to often it turns into a “justified homicide”
The original article is about global numbers, not just the USA.
These trends are pretty consistent anywhere you look em up.
Homicide is quite rare overall, people due to all sorts of shit, amd very rarely is it homicide.
It’s usually heart disease, or cancer, or covid.
And outside diseases, it’s usually accidents at home, at work, or on the road.
And outside accidents (and overdoses), it’s usually suicide far more often than homicide. (You could classify that as disease again though, depression can be extremely lethal)
Only after all of that do you start talking about homicide, which is the very tiny fraction of deaths left over.
Go look at the obituaries evey single week in your local city, then compare it to how many homicides there were.
My city of about 1 million population averages only 35 homicides per year.
Meanwhile thousands of people are dying per year to illness, accidents, etc.
You are extremely out of touch if you think homicide is the largest threat to women, lol.
Cars alone beat homicide like 3:1
Even though men and boys account for the vast majority of homicide victims, women and girls continue to be disproportionately affected by lethal violence in the private sphere," the report said.
“An estimated 80% of all homicide victims in 2023 were men while 20% were women, but lethal violence within the family takes a much higher toll on women than men, with almost 60% of all women who were intentionally killed in 2023 being victims of intimate partner/family member homicide,” it said.
So men and boys are dying way more due to violence overall, but as usual people will do whatever it takes to make it look like women are most affected.
Men are dying an order of magnitude more. As long as media keeps ignoring that and trying to twist the numbers to make it look like women have to worse, then you’ll never actually make real progress.
You have to acknowledge violence as a whole and not pick and choose what violence “counts” for your cause.
You either are against violence or not, so stop minimizing 80% and making it out to be a non issue, and trying to frame the minority of the violence to be the majority.
It’s about highlighting domestic abuse that leads to murder ya dingus
Okay, I understand the sentiment behind this comment (and I didn’t downvote you), because men’s issues are often underrepresented or even ignored (see: rape) in key areas, but consider this (to clarify, this is fake data meant to mirror this article): two UN agencies come out and say that this year, 50,000 gay men have died from AIDS, 2,000 more than last year. AIDS deaths are on the rise. The report notes that even though non-gay men tend to be more affected by chronic illness overall, gay men are disproportionately affected by AIDS.
Or maybe there’s a report about how people in South America disproportionately die to a specific kind of insect-transmitted disease, and the UN creates a report on it. They note the vast majority of insect-borne illness deaths are from malaria in Africa, but that this specific disease most affects people in South America.
Would you be here standing up on a podium decrying that the announcement focuses on gay people? Or that it focuses on South America? The point of this finding is that there’s an area where someone is disproportionately affected, and unlike just “homicide”, a lot more can be done in the short-term to prevent domestic violence.
As another comment noted, this is whataboutism. I don’t think it’s being done in bad faith, but it’s still whataboutism.
When the “disproportion” is only 60% vs 40%, that’s a fairly small gap, only a 10% shift.
Enough to be within the realm that it’s more likely to just be a reporting problem to swing the other way.
Meanwhile in reality gay men have at times been disproportionately affected by aids on the scale of hundreds to thousands of times worse than other demographics.
So yeah, no, a 10% shift off bias is not actually terribly huge.
Especially when in the same paragraph they acknowledge a 30% shift bias for men in general, and didn’t remark on that at all.
To call “50% more likely” a huge issue in one sentence and then skim over "300% more likely as not being noteworthy is fucked up
But no one bats an eye at this because that violence is normalized.
Reducing all kinds of violence to the same Violence™ does nothing to address the myriad ways that different kinds of violence happen. All these different kinds of violence makes each kind of violence more manageable that trying to stop Violence™. Focusing on different kinds of violence let’s us allocate resources and attention and research toward dealing with it.
A domestic assault is a much different kind of violence to 2 drunk guys fighting it out to a mobster telling his underlings to “take someone out.” All of these things need/have different things to handle them. Shelters for domestic abuse creates somewhere safe to go, bouncers will break up a fight and kick the brawlers out, for organized crime there RICO legislation.
Stopping All Violence™ is too big of a task for any one person or organization to handle.
I don’t like violence either, so much of it leads to unnecessary loss of life and limb and innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire. But lumping all together into Violence™ brings us no closer to resolving conflicts before the start or helping people when things do go wrongf
The problem is when articles literally phrase it as if the minority portion of the violence is the majority.
When you do that, you now are minimizing a lot of shit and you’ve failed.
The problem is when articles literally phrase it as if the minority portion of the violence is the majority.
This is just a lie; the article does no such thing and even expressly emphasizes the exact opposite.
