GBV Patterns
GBV Patterns
No US state defines femicide. New York has the data, the courts and the advocates to be first. This page is the case: who is killed and by whom, what the city already knows and refuses to count, and what the law would change.
The NYPD publishes every domestic violence incident report, felony assault and rape from 2020 and 2021 with the victim's age, sex and race, the suspect's age and sex, whether they were intimate partners, and the borough. About 484,000 records. The charts below query that dataset live from NYC Open Data, with a saved snapshot if the city's API is down. This is CATW's first outcome, demographics of victims and perpetrators, from public data.
Source: NYC Mayor's Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, ENDGBV: The Intersection of Domestic Violence, Race/Ethnicity and Sex, NYC Open Data, dataset 2rb7-7eqa, incident-level NYPD data for 2020 and 2021. Counts are incidents, not people. Race and age are as reported on the form. A relationship flag of "missing" means the officer did not record one.
New York City has reviewed every domestic violence homicide since 2005. The committee's 2024 report covers ten years. Its findings are the strongest local evidence that these deaths are patterned and predictable.
The city can already tell you the relationship, the borough and the race of every domestic violence homicide victim for a decade. What it cannot tell you is how many women were killed by buyers or exploiters, because those deaths are not domestic violence under the current definition and no other category exists. A femicide definition does not create new deaths. It creates a column.
Six in ten intimate partner victims had never touched the system before they were killed. Prevention that depends on a prior report misses most of them. Counting all femicides, including those outside the home, is the first step to finding the rest.
NYC Domestic Violence Fatality Review Committee, 2024 Annual Report, published 30 December 2024. Urban Resource Institute, Every Death Was Preventable. Decade figures quoted via secondary summaries and marked for verification against the PDF.
Three New York cases from the public record. For each, what happened, and the words the system used. The naming is the evidence for CATW's fifth outcome.
An open-air sex market along the Long Island Rail Road's Penn line. Police estimate as many as 350 pimps operate along the corridor and link nearly half of the shootings recorded there to the sex trade. Omari Scott, known as "Prince", was convicted in June 2025 of sex trafficking and of murder in the course of sex trafficking, for orchestrating the killing of a rival pimp, and sentenced to 50 years. Joel Forney, "Sirbar", was convicted in August 2025 of trafficking two women there, beating them and threatening to kill them when they refused.
Michael Johnson was convicted in October 2025 after a two-week trial and sentenced in April 2026 to 22 years for sex trafficking women out of a motel. Prosecutions like this one establish the pattern CATW describes: coercion, drugs, violence, a motel room, and women who appear in the record only as "victims" of the trafficking count, not as people with ages, histories and, in some cases, deaths.
Rex Heuermann was arrested in July 2023 and charged with the murders of women whose remains were found along Gilgo Beach, several of whom had advertised as escorts online. For more than a decade the case was reported through the lens of the women's work. Women Count USA records them by name. The media record is the one CATW's word map will measure.
US Attorney's Office, Eastern District of New York, press releases on Omari Scott, Joel Forney and Michael Johnson. Penn Track police estimates via Hoodline, secondary. Gilgo Beach: Suffolk County District Attorney filings, public record.
The demand side is not hidden. In 2022 CATW geolocated 141 reviews that sex buyers posted about the women they bought, across ten regions of the state, and set them against an arrest record that had collapsed: Brooklyn made 279 patronizing arrests in 2018 and 28 in 2020. The full map, region by region, with the impunity ledger, is on its own page.
Region by region, with the impunity ledger
Source: CATW, From Impunity to Accountability (2022).
Five steps, from the cheapest to the one this project exists for. Each has a precedent.
Record "commercial sexual exploitation" as a relationship type on the domestic incident report, as Women Count USA already does. Cost: a form change.
Extend the Fatality Review Committee's mandate to women killed outside the home by buyers, pimps and traffickers. Precedent: the committee itself, since 2005.
The Sex Trade Survivors Justice and Equality Act, introduced in 2021: decriminalise the women, hold buyers accountable. Precedent: Maine, June 2023, and France since 2016. Also finish the 2018 law with S8723.
Let survivors claim punitive damages from a deceased abuser's estate, the gap Epstein's survivors named. Precedent: the Adult Survivors Act window of 2022.
Define it in the penal law, including killings in the sex trade, with a reporting duty. Precedent: about three dozen countries, and the Cotton Field judgment's database order.
See the CATW section for the organisation's own framing, and the politics timeline for the legislative record.
New York City 24-hour HOPE hotline: 1-800-621-4673. National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233. Family Justice Centers in every borough, Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. CATW's global resource list for leaving the sex trade.