Femicide indicators: pilot study of data availability and feasibility assessment

The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) broadly defines femicide as ‘the killing of a woman or girl because of her gender’. EIGE recognises the various forms of femicide committed against women and girls as ‘the most severe manifestation of gender-based violence’. Various terms are used by the European Union (EU) and international institutions to refer to femicide, including ‘gender-related killing of women and girls’, and ‘feminicide’. As the definitions used to describe acts of femicide are either lacking or inconsistent across the EU, methods for researching the prevalence of femicide vary, as does the administrative capacity of Member States to collect this data. The importance of collecting administrative data on violence against women (including femicide) at the national level is reaffirmed in both EU and Council of Europe (CoE) legislative and policy frameworks. The EU’s Proposal for a Directive on combating violence against women and domestic violence includes requirements for Member States to work with EIGE to collect data on femicide. The Victims’ Rights Directive (2012/29/EU) also highlights the importance of statistical data collection as an essential component of effective policy-making. Similarly, the CoE Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (the Istanbul Convention) calls for the production, analysis, and dissemination of disaggregated data on violence against women. To fill the gap in data collection and analysis, several research initiatives have been launched in recent years to define femicide and establish a framework to measure its prevalence. In 2022, the UN Statistical Commission adopted a new global framework, developed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and UN Women, to measure gender-related killing of women and girls. That framework will improve the identification of global risk factors associated with femicide and enhance the accuracy of measuring the prevalence of this form of violence against women.