By Sani Meier
Almost 85,000 women and girls were deliberately killed in 2023—233 per day. Last year’s UN report triggered widespread outrage, but the latest statistics, published in November 2024, show little has changed.
More than half of the murders of women take place in the victims’ partner or family environment, i.e. in the private sphere. The perpetrators are their husbands, partners, fathers, brothers or supposed friends. The motives range from jealousy and separation anxiety to revenge and the restoration of family ‘honour’. The media still downplay these murders as ‘family drama’, ‘acts of jealousy’ or ‘domestics’. To counteract this, the term ‘femicide’ is used today, which focuses on the specifically anti-woman violence behind the acts.
Turkey
In October, a 19-year-old man murdered and beheaded two young women in Istanbul. In response, hundreds of activists took to the streets. They not only hold the perpetrators individually responsible, but also the patriarchy and president Erdogan and his government. Islamist brotherhoods and parts of the governing alliance have repeatedly called for the abolition of laws to protect women from violence.
By September, women’s rights organisations had already counted 295 femicides and 184 suspicious deaths in Turkey in 2024. Two thirds of the perpetrators stated that they had killed the women because they wanted to separate or because they had rejected a partnership or marriage.
In 2021, Turkey withdrew from the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women. They alleged that this convention promotes homosexuality and undermines so-called ‘traditional family values’. This justification makes it clear what role the bourgeois family, consisting of father, mother and children, plays in violence against women.
South Africa
The links between violence against women and the class system are clearly evident in South Africa, where femicide rates are five times higher than the global average.
More than half of South African women live below the poverty line in the townships, many people live in confined spaces under precarious conditions. They have little chance of buying their way out of financial hardship and dependence on the family.
However, it is important to note that domestic violence is not only a working class issue: risk factors such as stress, change and dependence can also occur in middle-class families. However, the wealthier a man is, the more easily he can avoid prosecution.
India
India was shaken by the rape and murder of a young medical student at her workplace in August. For years, doctors, 60% of whom are women, have complained about understaffing and a lack of security. In response, more than a million doctors struck to enforce their demands against the government.
It is our task as a revolutionary left to deprive femicides of the economic breeding ground by advocating social improvements and welfare programmes as well as the socialisation of domestic work. This can only be ensured by workers’ control over the production and distribution of resources. At the same time, we must organise self-defence wherever necessary, as police across the world systematically fail to prevent violence against women. Such violence is endemic to the capitalist system and can therefore only be overcome by a global, proletarian women’s movement that can pave the way for a future free from femicide.
