When the Federal Criminal Police Agency (BKA) immediately publishes figures regarding acts of violence against women, these figures should be taken with a grain of salt. Because statistics have crucial weaknesses. This report does not capture someone’s motive for committing murder. That’s why it doesn’t show how many murders of women occurred in Germany. This information is important to protect women at risk.
Femicide is the killing of a woman because she is a woman. It sounds simple, but it assumes a lot. The (alleged) motive of the perpetrator must be known to classify the murder of a woman as femicide. Only when you know what (might have) driven the person can you know whether the victim’s gender played a significant role in the murder.
If a man shoots a woman at the counter during a bank robbery, her gender may be irrelevant from the man’s perspective. If a man repeatedly humiliates his wife, cannot bear the fact that she wants to separate from him and finally stabs her to prevent her from living independently – then gender is clearly a determining factor in the crime. This constellation is not rare, so we need a term for it: femicide.
Femicide is not officially counted in Germany
However, the BKA considers both cases to be the murder of a woman. The murder of an ex-wife is also considered a murder of an ex-spouse. Two statements can be made using BKA statistics: How many women in Germany are killed in a year? And: How many women are killed by their partners or ex-partners? The number of murders of women falls somewhere in between. BKA cannot say where exactly.
Femicide is not counted because the state has not defined the term. This is despite Germany’s commitment in the Istanbul Convention, a Council of Europe treaty, to regularly collect “relevant and detailed statistical data” on homicides against women. The definition of femicide is not a bureaucratic act, but rather a first step in tracing its motives. Only those who understand how violence arises can fight it.
In Spain, femicide figures are available on the website of the Ministry of Equality. In Italy, the Ministry of the Interior compiles statistics on femicide. In Germany, a federal state working group on crimes against women was created in 2023. Regarding femicide, he wrote that “the existing issue of scientific definition (needs) to be resolved urgently.” Since then, nothing has changed in police work.
What are the consequences of not having a definition?
The lack of definition causes confusion even at the highest political levels. When the BKA presented the situation report “Gender-specific crimes against women” in November 2024, Nancy Faeser, then Federal Minister of the Interior (SPD), sat at the podium. She said: “Almost every day a woman or girl is killed in Germany. You have to call it what it is. When women are killed because they are women, then this is femicide.”
However, Faeser has referred to the total number of murders of women and stated that the 360 cases were all murders of women. The data doesn’t show that. However, Faeser’s false statements have been circulating in many media. If the term femicide were to be used for all killings of women and girls, then the term would become useless. After all, it was created to mark gender-based killings: to highlight acts of degradation, humiliation and possessiveness towards women. A term that encompasses these crimes makes it possible to recognize these forms of violence, talk about them and prevent them.
It has long been observed that many femicides are similar to each other. Only those who recognize the dynamic are able to break through it. Countries that do not even document this kind of violence will not be able to effectively protect those who need protection.
The nature of an act of gender-related violence is not easy to measure. But there are several ways. In August, North Rhine-Westphalia conducted a special analysis of crime statistics to determine which murders were femicides. What is meant by relationship crimes are crimes that have no other clear motive, sexual crimes that result in death, murders of sex workers, honor killings and prolonged suicides where there is no indication that the woman wants to die. Between 2014 and 2023 there were 522 cases of femicide in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Therefore, determining femicide criteria can be carried out. BKA finally had to follow in his footsteps. A working group is working on the definition, he said. One impact is long overdue steps to protect women from targeted violence – which harms them because they are women.
