Stephanie Gadlin November 30, 2024
A new report by the United Nations (UN) reveals that femicide—the most extreme form of violence against women and girls—is still pervasive globally. Black women in the U.S. are three times more likely than white women to be killed by a domestic partner or family member.
Released by UN Women and the UN Office of Drug Control, “Femicides in 2023: Global Estimates of Intimate Partner/Family Member Femicides,” noted that 85,000 women and girls were killed intentionally, with 60 percent of these homicides (51,100) committed by an intimate partner or family member accounting for 60 percent of all female homicides. In too many cases, victims of femicide had previously reported violence and their killings could have been prevented. With that said, the UN says 140 women and girls are killed every day by someone they know, equating to one every 10 minutes.
“Violence against women and girls is not inevitable—it is preventable. We need robust legislation, improved data collection, greater government accountability, a zero-tolerance culture, and increased funding for women’s rights organizations and institutional bodies. As we approach the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action in 2025, it is time for world leaders to unite and act with urgency, recommit, and channel the resources needed to end this crisis once and for all,” said Sima Bahous, UN Women executive director, in a statement.
UN Women, formally known as the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, is based in New York, and was established in July 2010 to accelerate progress on meeting the needs of women and girls worldwide.
In addition to eliminating violence against women, the agency ensures women’s rights are protected and promoted globally by promoting access to education, employment, political participation and leadership and economic viability.
The UN report comes at a chilling time in Chicago where advocates, journalists, public officials, and grieving relatives have decried the disappearance, unsolved deaths, attacks and domestic homicides against African American women and girls. The resounding cry seems to be that unlike cases involving other races, that when Black women “go missing” or are killed, the public response is either lackadaisical, slow, or non-existent.
The same can be said for their children. Black children make up about 33 percent of all missing child cases. The FBI noted there were 375,304 reported entries for missing children in 2023, meaning 123,850 were African American. Despite the shocking number and the pleas from their families, research published in Communication Research Reports found that in 2015 missing Black children only compromised 7 percent of media references.
There is even more disturbing data.
The Invisible Institute and City Bureau released an analysis of police data that showed that of the nearly 340,000 missing persons cases in Chicago between 2000 and 2021, Black children made up 57 percent of all incidents. Black girls between the ages of 10 and 20 made up nearly one-third of all missing person cases in the city despite comprising only 2 percent of the city population as of 2020.
An additional analysis of more than 20 years of crime data, by local CBS journalist Dorothy Tucker last fall, revealed in 2022 that nearly 30 percent of all crime victims were Black women, even though they make up just 16 percent of the city’s entire population. African American women in Chicago also represented 24 percent of property theft victims, 38 percent of battery victims, and 40 percent of rape victims.
Tucker’s report came two years after noted journalist and Roosevelt University professor John W. Fountain released “The Unforgotten: The Untold Stories of Murdered Chicago Women,” chronicling hundreds of cases of missing and/or murdered Black women and girls that had gone unsolved and unnoticed by mainstream media. His groundbreaking investigative series sparked conversations across the country and inspired other local reporters to pick up the banner of missing and murdered Black women and build off of Fountain’s work.
“The facts don’t lie. Black women are murdered at twice the rate of women of other races in the United States,” Fountain wrote in 2021. “Indeed, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis of female homicide statistics between 2003 and 2014, Black and indigenous women were killed as a result of homicide at rates more than double women of other races.
“That speaks nothing of the vast well-documented disparity in the media’s coverage of murdered Black women versus the coverage of murdered white women,” he said.
https://chicagocrusader.com/deadly-violence-against-black-women-persists-in-the-u-s/
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