GBV Patterns
GBV Patterns
Patterns of femicide and gender-based violence across the world, and the case for New York to become the first US state to name femicide in law.
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In 2024, around 50,000 women and girls were killed by an intimate partner or family member worldwide. That is about 137 a day. The dots below light up at that pace, starting from the moment you opened this page.
Killings, child marriages, money, and sexual assault. Counting from midnight, local time. The third is the one budget committees read.
Rates spread evenly over a year. See the economics section for what a single life costs in lost earnings, and the country comparisons.
Source: UNODC and UN Women, Femicides in 2024: global estimates of intimate partner and family member femicides (November 2025), based on data from 117 countries.
Choose a borough to see what the police recorded there. The red fill shows each borough's share of the city's intimate partner incident reports. Switch years to see what moved.
Source: NYC Mayor's Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, 2024 Annual Fact Sheet. Domestic incident reports are NYPD responses, not unique people. Family Justice Center visits are civil-side client visits.
The NYPD filed 249,077 domestic incident reports in 2024. Each report is sorted by the relationship between the people involved. Click a segment. Then click the striped one.
New York's 2024 gender-based violence dashboard pulls from courts, hotlines, shelters and the criminal justice system. Flip a card to read where its number comes from and what it leaves out.
Source: NYS Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence, 2024 New York State Gender-Based Violence Dashboard. DCJS victim and homicide figures exclude New York City, which had not provided data at publication.
Roughly three dozen countries define femicide in their criminal codes. The United States and New York State do not. No agency counts the women killed in the sex trade. When those deaths are reported at all, the language used often hides what happened.
Most are in Latin America and Europe. Naming the crime is what makes it countable, and counting is what makes it a policy problem rather than a series of private tragedies.
The number is not zero and it is not small. It is unknown, because no agency records it. The only systematic record in the country is a volunteer database, Women Count USA, built from news reports, social media and obituaries. This project exists to replace the question mark with a count.
Jeffrey Epstein was indicted in federal court in Manhattan in July 2019 for sex trafficking of minors; Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted in December 2021. The files released since name the buyers' side of the trade at its wealthiest. In East New York, police estimate as many as 350 pimps work the Penn Track and tie nearly half of its shootings to the sex trade. New York made buying sex from a 15 to 17 year old a felony because the buying was happening. What the state has never done is count the women who did not survive it.
We can say that women are killed by buyers, pimps and traffickers in New York: the cases on the New York page are in federal court records. We can say the city's incident reports have no box for them, and that 40,142 reports in 2024 carried no relationship at all. We cannot say how many, and neither can the state. That is the gap, and it is the state's to close.
Epstein and Maxwell: US Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York. Penn Track estimates: NYPD via Hoodline, secondary. The Epstein files release legislation and its status are on the backlog to verify.
Each step below is a place where a death can be reclassified, softened or dropped. Open one to see what the record says and what it could say instead.
The count of countries recognising femicide is an approximate figure from CATW's project brief. Women Count USA is maintained by Dawn Wilcox at womencountusa.org.
Pick a statistic. The figures fill to match it. The same ten figures are used every time so the eye can compare one measure with the next.
The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women has worked since 1988 to end the trafficking and sexual exploitation of women and girls. Its position is that prostitution and sex trafficking are gender-based violence, and that the law should target the demand, not the women. This site is the data arm of that argument for New York.
Laws that provide access to justice, target demand and ensure women and girls are free from the violence of the sex trade. CATW calls this the Equality Model. Read more
Presenting trafficking and sexual exploitation as sex-based and gender-based violence, and mobilising the public to press policymakers. Read more
Partnering with survivors on prevention and protection policy, so the people with the most knowledge lead. Read more
CATW, catwinternational.org; 2023 to 2024 Impact Report; Failed Promises, on legal prostitution in the Netherlands. Need help now: CATW's global resource list. Legislative details on the sources page.
Technology can reach new audiences. For New York policymakers it can reach the same audience in a different way: a number they can press, a borough they can pick, a gap they can see.
Every figure here traces to a public source. The database and framework behind it will be open source and refreshed as new reports land.
The project works from aggregated demographics and relationship data. No victim is identified. No individual is tracked.
First shown at the Ethical Tech Summit on 20 November 2026, then refined with CATW toward the case for naming femicide in New York law.