ABSTRACT
Intimate femicide, the killing of women by their male intimate partners, current or former, is the most common form of femicide worldwide. This chapter provides a global overview of the prevalence, nature, and risk of intimate femicide. The first half of the chapter sets out the prevalence of femicide worldwide and the need for more consistent and comparable data collection on this form of violence against women. Drawing on over three decades of multidisciplinary scholarship which has sought to inform better understandings of the circumstances in which intimate femicides occur, the second half of the chapter demonstrates the global problem which men’s fatal violence against women represents and the commonality of its perpetration and risk profile across national and regional borders. The chapter concludes by examining the changing face of intimate femicide globally in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the pressing need for systematic data collection to better understand women’s risk of fatal male violence at this unprecedented moment in world history.
