“‘WHY DO MEN feel threatened by women?’ I asked a male friend of mine… ‘They’re afraid women will laugh at them,’ he said… Then I asked some women students… ‘Why do women feel threatened by men?’ ‘They’re afraid of being killed,’ they said.” Margaret Atwood wrote this profound and provoking account in her 1982 book Second Words.
Across the world, women are disproportionately killed and harmed by men. According to a report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, more than 81% of female murders are perpetrated by men, with a large number of the perpetrators being an intimate partner or family member.[1] A 2023 UN report also estimates 85,000 cases of femicide—wherein a woman is targeted because of her gender—in the same year; 51,100 of them were killed by a husband, partner or family member. Experts believe that this number is likely an underestimation because many countries around the world do not collect data on femicide.[2]
