A Pandemic of Murder

Globally, a woman is killed by her intimate partner or a family member every 10 minutes.

Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills.

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Red shoes and wooden crosses are scattered across the floor of Mexico City’s main plaza. Each pair represents a victim of femicide.

The stuffed square in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, was filled with women who were listening to Nobel Laureate Jody Williams on a stage at one end. Dotted among the crowd were dangerous looking men with gaunt faces and red eyes — they’d likely been huffing paint or sniffing glue.

I was in that crowd, there as part of a delegation to Latin America with Jody and about a dozen journalists, activists and philanthropists in order to learn about the kinds of violence women face in the region.

Maybe half an hour into the rally, which was a demonstration against violence against women, the military moved in and cleared us out. It was an unpleasant, albeit fitting, end to a symbolically important event: men forcefully silencing women who had shown that they refused to put up with a culture of violence against them. Honduras, then, as now, had the highest rate of femicide — the murder by men of women because they are women — in Latin America. But that is merely one tiny corner of the world in which femicide runs rampant.

Globally, in 2023, 140 women are estimated to have been killed by their intimate male partners or other family members per day, according to UN Women, which released a report on femicide today, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. That breaks down to one woman or girl murdered every 10 minutes.

Still, these intimate partners or family members only count for 60 percent of the perpetrators worldwide. In total, men killed 85,000 women just for existing in 2023, UN Women reports.

“Femicide is a global tragedy of pandemic proportions,” the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Morris Tidball-Binz, said last year.

The problem is not only one of violence; it is one of impunity. A number of countries have passed laws that make femicide a hate crime, but the implementation of these laws is entirely another matter.

Back when I was running WMC Women Under Siege, a journalism project at the Women’s Media Center about sexualized violence in conflict, I published a piece by journalist Maria Hinojosa, who was part of our Latin America delegation. She wrote about femicide, or, in Spanish, femicidio, in Mexico specifically. Still, I think her words apply to every part of the world where violence against women persists.

There are words I have come to better understand besides femicidio. One is “impunity.” It is a horrible concept that is reduced to this: You want to beat up a stranger, your wife or girlfriend, murder her, torture her, kidnap her, slice her up or sell her. You can do it, and chances are nothing will ever happen to you. Sick minds, macho minds, have free rein because the government does little to stop the violence against women. So there is another word, “simulacion,” or in English “simulation”: A government says it is doing one thing when in fact it is doing nothing. Sound familiar?

And finally there is “invisibilizar,” the verb to make something invisible. The women who speak up are dismissed, told they are locas, told that all of their daughters were part of the narcotics business or wanted to run away.

You don’t say that when the numbers show your country, and therefore your government, has a human-rights crisis on its hands, this time one specifically affecting one gender. 

No, you don’t say that when you care about women. You don’t say that when you care about peace. You don’t say that, no matter your gender, when you care about humanity.

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