By Iratxe Iglesias Otero, WAVE Intern 2025
What We Do Not See
Across Europe, violence against women is often discussed in numbers. We ask how many women report, how many are killed, and how many seek help. These numbers matter, but they show only part of the picture. Much of the violence women face is hidden inside homes or silenced by institutions that fail to track it. The reality is bigger, more complex and often invisible.
A recent BBC article illustrates this uncomfortable truth clearly.[1] In the United Kingdom, more women are killed by their sons than by strangers. This fact unsettles the common belief that danger lurks somewhere outside, in dark alleys or public spaces. It reminds us that for women, the place they should be safest is where they are most at risk.
Globally, violence from men remains one of the leading causes of women’s early deaths[2].
In 2023:
- Nearly 85,000 women and girls were intentionally killed.
- Sixty per cent (51,000) were killed by a partner or family member.[3]
- That means roughly 140 women and girls were killed every day by someone inside their home.
These deaths are often treated as isolated tragedies, yet they reveal a pattern that is both structural and persistent. Society continues to fail in recognising, measuring and confronting the full scale of violence against women.
Part of the reason we cannot fully grasp the magnitude of femicide is that official data still fail to capture it. This does not mean there is no information. It means state-led systems continue to document only part of what women endure. Across Europe, civil society organisations and feminist observatories have stepped in to fill these gaps, counting the cases that governments overlook or categorise under broad labels. The European Observatory of Femicide[4], along with national observatories in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Malta, now produces some of the most detailed records available, often including categories that states do not track at all.
Their work shows not an absence of data, but an absence of institutional commitment. The distance between women’s lived realities and what ends up in official statistics has become one of Europe’s most dangerous blind spots. And the fact that this visibility depends on the labour of civil society rather than the state speaks volumes about how violence against women is understood, prioritised and addressed.
When Home Isn’t Safe
Homicide data shows a clear distinction between the experiences of men and women. Men are more often killed in public spaces and usually by strangers or acquaintances. Women are killed overwhelmingly by people they know, most often inside their own homes. In fact, according to UNODC, homes remain the most dangerous place for women[5]. They are not dying because they take risks; they are dying because society has allowed their closest relationships to become sites of danger.
Homes remain the most dangerous place for women. In Europe:
- Data available from 35 European countries indicates that at least 2,871 women were victims of femicide in 2024[6]. The breakdown below is based on disaggregated data available for only 23 out of the 46 countries, covering 1,120 documented femicide cases
- 73% were killed by a current or former partner,
- 17% by another family member.
- Only 6% percent were killed by strangers.[7]
This is not because women face less random violence but because the violence they face is deeply tied to gender norms, control and unequal power dynamics. These dynamics take shape inside families and intimate relationships. The reality is evident. Femicide in Europe mostly occurs in private spaces, not in public. The private sphere is still the place where states intervene the least and where data is the weakest. Many countries continue to classify these killings simply as homicide or domestic violence, concealing the gendered patterns that define them.
Each missing detail, each generic category and each unrecorded case silently reinforces the idea that women’s deaths are inevitable rather than preventable.
Abuse-Driven Suicide: The Invisible Femicide
Beyond homicides, there are women whose deaths never appear in femicide statistics. These are women who die by suicide after months or years of experiencing domestic violence, coercive control, sexual assault or psychological abuse. Their deaths are rarely acknowledged as gender-related killings, even when the chain of events is painfully clear. Only Belgium and the Republic of Moldova recognise and collect data on suicides linked to gender-based violence.[8] Across most of Europe, these deaths quietly vanish from institutional records. They slip through the cracks of policy, prevention and support services, and in doing so, disappear from public consciousness.
When a woman ends her life after enduring violence, the state usually treats it as an individual tragedy, something private and unconnected to systemic failure. But this interpretation erases the reality that many of these women were already dead even before pulling the trigger. Abuse destroys slowly. Coercive control isolates. Psychological violence erodes the sense of self until survival becomes a negotiation between enduring and escape. Calling these deaths “suicides” without naming the violence that produced them is a form of institutional blindness. It implies choice where there was entrapment, agency where there was coercion, and freedom where there was only fear. Many of these women were already trapped long before they died.
Recognising suicide driven by gender-based violence as femicide requires more than new terminology. It demands a profound shift in how we understand responsibility. If a woman’s death is the culmination of years of ignored warnings, inadequate protection, and institutional indifference, then her death is not a private matter. It is a public failure. Counting these deaths would force governments to confront the continuum of violence rather than its final manifestation. It would also reveal how many opportunities for intervention were missed, and how many lives could have been saved had institutions acted earlier, believed victims sooner, or provided meaningful support instead of procedural gestures.
Facing this category of femicide means acknowledging something deeply uncomfortable. It means admitting that some women do not die because their partners kill them directly, but because violence has left them with no space in which to live. It demands that prevention begins long before the threat of homicide, in the everyday moments where women’s suffering is minimised, dismissed or unseen. Recognising abuse-driven suicide as part of the femicide continuum is not only about counting the dead. It is about finally valuing the lives of those who were never allowed to live freely in the first place.
Sexual Violence as Part of the Same Spectrum
Violence that ends in femicide does not begin with murder. It develops along a continuum that can include sexual harassment, coercive control and rape. Yet even in these forms, official numbers capture only part of the picture.
According to the European Union survey on gender-based violence from 2021:
- 1 in 3 women has experienced physical or sexual violence since age 15,
- 35% of women ages 18 to 29 report gender-based violence,
- 20% of women have experienced physical or sexual violence by a non-partner,
- 4% percent have been raped by a non-partner.[9]
And yet, these numbers tell only a fraction of the story. Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg are some of the countries where reporting rates are the highest. But this does not mean violence is more common here. Often, it means women know what violence is, are taught to name it, and believe they will be heard. In countries with low reporting, the silence itself becomes a kind of violence. Women may not realise that what they experience is a crime, or they may realise it but have learned that no one will listen.
This silence has consequences for how we understand femicide. When so many forms of violence are unreported, misclassified or ignored, the final act of violence appears sudden or unpredictable. Sexual violence is often normalised to the point of invisibility; victims are doubted, their full accounts examined with suspicion, and their experiences dismissed as misunderstandings or exaggerations. In such an environment, what precedes femicide rarely registers as danger at all. What looks like an isolated killing is often the culmination of a long pattern that went unnoticed or unaddressed. Silence can be a form of violence, too.
Institutional Neglect and the Politics that Sustain it
Institutional neglect in cases of femicide is not a recent phenomenon, nor can it be attributed solely to present-day political shifts. These failures have long existed within European institutions. However, today’s changing political climate makes the situation even more concerning. Across Europe and beyond, a widening ideological gap between young women and young men is becoming visible: while many young women have increasingly progressive views, a notable portion of young men move in the opposite direction, often embracing more conservative or explicitly anti-gender narratives.[10] This trend does not create institutional neglect, but it does reinforce an environment in which efforts to combat femicide struggle to gain social and political attention and the resources they require. When public discourse becomes less supportive of gender equality, institutions become less responsive to the violence that disproportionately affects women and girls. When institutions stop listening, violence grows in silence.
This climate intersects with long-standing structural problems. Europe often portrays itself as a global leader in human rights, yet many states still fail to meet basic responsibilities to prevent, investigate, and prosecute femicide. Only 11 out of every 100 women worldwide live under legal frameworks that explicitly recognise femicide, and many EU member states continue to address these killings within gender-neutral policies that overlook the patterns and motivations behind them.[11] As a result, restraining orders are ineffective, police fail to act on clear warnings, and courts routinely underestimate the danger posed by known perpetrators.
Families of victims are rarely supported, and cases where women are murdered after reporting abuse are treated as isolated misfortunes rather than signals of systemic collapse. By refusing to name femicide, institutions fail to recognise the predictable escalation of misogynistic violence. This sustained institutional neglect, now amplified by a less sympathetic political climate, leaves women dangerously unprotected.
Collecting Data on Femicide Means Valuing Women
Europe’s challenge is not only to prevent femicide but to finally recognise it, define it, count it and understand it. Counting femicides means valuing women. When their deaths are not counted, their lives are treated as negotiable.
Violence against women is not a series of unrelated incidents. It forms a continuum that spans harassment, coercion, sexual violence, family abuse and homicide. As long as institutions treat these forms of violence as separate, and as long as the gender-related deaths of women remain misclassified or unrecorded, prevention will remain partial and inadequate.
Better data will not restore the lives of the women who have been killed. But it can honour them by exposing the structures that failed them and by demanding accountability. It can also bring into focus what women have long understood. Violence is rarely random, rarely sudden and seldom a private affair.
Recognising every form of violence, including those that remain hidden, is the first step toward building a Europe where women’s safety is not negotiable. Every woman’s life is valuable, deserves to be protected, and thus every femicide must be prevented.
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Author Bio:
Iratxe Iglesias Otero is a Political Scientist specialising in sexual and reproductive health and rights. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political and Public Administration Sciences from Pompeu Fabra University and is currently completing a Master’s in Global Sexual and Reproductive Health at Dalarna University, where her research focuses on how gender roles and stereotypes influence intimate partner violence in LGBTQ+ relationships.
She has hands-on advocacy and communications experience from roles with the United Nations Association of Bulgaria, Casal Lambda, and BEITU!, supporting LGBTQ+ rights, youth empowerment, and accessible sexual health education. At WAVE, she contributes her background in gender equality, community engagement, and feminist policy to strengthen work on preventing and responding to gender-based violence across Europe.
Iratxe is originally from Bilbao, Spain, and is passionate about creating safer and more inclusive spaces for women, girls, and LGBTQ+ communities. She is fluent in English and Spanish, with additional knowledge of Basque and Catalan.
References
[1] Richardson, H. (2025) Femicide Census says more mums killed by sons than by strangers. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czxw1yrlx5go.
[2] Femicide Census – Profiles of women killed by men. https://www.femicidecensus.org/.
[3] Trends in addressing femicide in the OSCE region (2025). https://www.osce.org/secretariat/587250.
[4] European Observatory on Femicide (EOF) – Annual Reports https://eof.cut.ac.cy/?page_id=223.
[5] UNODC Femicides in 2024: Global estimates of intimate partner/family member femicides (2024). https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2025/11/femicides-in-2024-global-estimates-of-intimate-partner-family-member-femicides.
[6] This figure includes estimates supplied by WAVE delegates, national experts and feminist organisations where official data were missing. No data on femicide were available from the following countries: Azerbaijan, Belarus, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, and Latvia. In several others, only partial or unofficial information could be collected. Of the total, 969 femicides were recorded in EU Member States and 3,013 in European countries outside the EU. In many cases, these figures represent minimum estimates, as systematic monitoring of femicide remains uneven across Europe. The data were gathered from a combination of official sources, media reports, research findings, and tracking by Women’s Specialist Services.
[7] Data from the WAVE Country Report 2025 to be published at the end of 2025.
[8] Data from the WAVE Country Report 2025, which will be published at the end of 2025.
[9] Eurostat, Gender-based violence statistic https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Gender-based_violence_statistics
[10] Financial Times (2024) A new global gender divide is emerging. https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998.
[11] Elefante, M. y Wang, S. (2025) ‘Femicide laws worldwide: 50 years of evolution and ongoing gaps’, World Bank Blogs https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/femicide-laws-worldwide–50-years-of-evolution-and-ongoing-gaps.
