Femicide is a hot topic in Italy, where I live. To understand what all the discussion is about, I was reading the latest UN report on femicide, which you can find here.

In this specific brief, they narrow their focus to women killed by intimate partners or family members, and they refer to those cases as femicides.

The data

On page 8, and in more detail on page 17, they state two things:

  1. Around 80% of all homicide victims are men and 20% are women.
  2. The share of victims killed by an intimate partner or family member is 11.2% for men and 60% for women.

So 11.2% of murdered men were killed by a family member or partner, versus 60% of murdered women. This gap is what, according to the UN and almost every secondary source, qualifies femicide as a specifically female emergency.

60% vs 11%

The difference between this two values catches the eye and is used to sell the idea that women are much more affected by these types of murders. But you have to be precise about what these percentages actually measure.

They are conditional ratios:

(Number of victims of a given sex killed by a partner/family) / (total homicide victims of that sex)

In my opinion, giving so much significance to these ratios is a mistake. To see why, a simple thought experiment helps.

Two cities

Imagine there are two cities: Mafia City and Domestic City.

In Mafia City:

  • Every single citizen is involved in violent organized crime.
  • The population is 95%-99% male and 1%-5% female.
  • People kill each other all the time.

In Domestic City:

  • There are only non-criminal families and couples.
  • The population is 50% male and 50% female.
  • It’s not completely peaceful: sometimes conflicts escalate, and someone ends up dead.

This is a very simplified version of our world. But it works. People involved in crime are almost always male. People involved in domestic life are 50/50 male and female.

These two cities, obviously, have completely different gender expectations for murder victims.

In Mafia City, almost everyone who actually plays the game is male. If 95–99% of the people involved in that world are male, then the neutral baseline expectation is that almost all the murder victims will be male too. If men and women had the same risk within that world, you’d expect the share of male victims to roughly match the share of men in that population: something like 95–99% men, 1–5% women.

In Domestic City, the “population at risk” is completely different. Families, couples, cohabiting partners are roughly 50% men and 50% women. If men and women had the same risk within that domestic world, the neutral baseline expectation would be that about half of the victims are men and half are women.

Now imagine to mash together Mafia City and Domestic City and pretend they are one single population. That would be, in my opinion, a destructive move. In the sense that it would destruct information. By doing so, you are hiding the difference in the baselines. You implicitly act as if, in any random homicide, regardless of context, the “natural” thing to expect was that about 80% of the victims are male and 20% are female.

That’s absurd. Context is everything. The relevant comparison is not “men vs women in all murders mixed together”, but “men vs women within each context”.

If you add context back in, than the 60% vs 11% statistic becomes banal. Of course the majority of female victims were killed in Domestic City: there's barely any women in Mafia City. Of course the male domestic victims look “few” in relative terms: they are numerically drowned in a statistics that includes all the murder victims of Mafia City, which are almost all male.

Shifting the viewpoint

The only reasonable way to represent the phenomenon, in my opinion, is in terms of absolute numbers. That is, counting the victims in a specific context without letting other contexts, with completely different population distributions, pollute the picture.

For every 100 murder victims, 80 are men and 20 are women. Apply their percentages:

  • Men killed by partners/family: 11.2% × 80 ≈ 9
  • Women killed by partners/family: 60% × 20 = 12

Therefore, for every 100 murdered people, about 21 were killed by a partner or a family member: 9 men and 12 women.

That means that, in the context of domestic murders:

  • Women account for about 57% of the victims
  • Men account for about 43% of the victims

These are the statistics we find in Domestic City. It's a way more honest framing of how this type of murder impacts the two gender. And it turns out that women are most affected, while men represent a large minority.

This I find disturbing. It's U.N. Women we're talking about. They are expected to keep their focus on women. I get that. But they could have used these percentages (57% vs 43%) to still highlight how the problem mainly affects women, while at the same time fairly representing male victims. Instead, they chose to be misleading. To use that share of all male homicides as a proxy for “how serious domestic violence against men is”. To hide the men killed in Domestic City (a context where there are both men and women) behind the mountain of men killed in Mafia City (a context where there are almost only men).

And note that this choice was purposefully made to under-represent men. Because 60% (the percentage they went for to signal how much the issue affects women) vs 57% isn't a big difference. They went for the relative values specifically to show a very low value for males (11% instead of 43%).

That choice hides the men killed in Domestic City (a context where there are both men and women) behind the mountain of men killed in Mafia City (a context where there are almost only men). It makes it sound as if domestic homicide were an almost exclusively female phenomenon, when the numbers clearly show that men make up a large minority of victims in that specific context.

The 60% vs 11% statistic is not false. It's both accurate and true. The problem is that it's a shallow way to describe the phenomenon. It flattens different contexts into one and quietly pushes a large group of victims off the stage. That may be effective in terms of advocating against femicide, but it's not honest nor morally good.