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Data

Homicides of female victims

See all data and research on:
Homicides

What you should know about this indicator

  • UNODC collects intentional homicide data from criminal justice systems (law enforcement records) and public health systems (death certificates).
  • Intentional homicide requires three elements: one person killing another, intent to kill or seriously injure, and the act was illegal. For example, a person who kills another in self-defence is not considered to have committed an intentional homicide as justifiable homicide in self-defence is not illegal.
  • All killings that meet the criteria listed below are to be considered intentional homicides, irrespective of definitions provided by national legislations or practices.
  • Terrorist killings are included as intentional homicides.
Homicides of female victims
Number of intentional of female victims .
Source
UN, World Population Prospects (2024); United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 28, 2025
Next expected update
May 2026
Date range
1990–2024
Unit
homicides

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Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime – United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime - Intentional Homicide Victims

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Intentional Homicide data are sourced from either criminal justice or public health systems. In the former, data are generated by law enforcement or criminal justice authorities in the process of recording and investigating a crime event, whereas in the latter, data are produced by health authorities certifying the cause of death of an individual.

The criminal justice data was collected from national authorities with the annual United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (UN-CTS). National focal points working in national agencies responsible for statistics on crime and the criminal justice system, and nominated by the Permanent Mission to UNODC, are responsible for compiling the data from the other relevant agencies before transmitting the UN-CTS to UNODC.

Following the submission, UNODC checks for consistency and coherence with other data sources. The population data used to calculate homicide rates is sourced from the World Population Prospects, Population Division, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

The statistical definition contains three elements that characterize the killing of a person as “intentional homicide”:

  1. The killing of a person by another person (objective element).

  2. The intent of the perpetrator to kill or seriously injure the victim (subjective element).

  3. The unlawfulness of the killing (legal element).

For recording purposes, all killings that meet the criteria listed above are to be considered intentional homicides, irrespective of definitions provided by national legislations or practices. Killings as a result of terrorist activities are also to be classified as a form of intentional homicide.

In several cases data from multiple sources were combined to expand the number of available years within a country’s time series, so that a consistent time series of total homicides back to 1990 could be compiled. Time series adjustments were performed when a country had two sources covering an overlapping time period had similar trends but differing values.

Retrieved on
May 28, 2025
Retrieved from
https://dataunodc.un.org/dp-intentional-homicide-victims
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNODC (2025), UNODC Research - Data Portal – Intentional Homicide. https://dataunodc.un.org/dp-intentional-homicide-victims (Accessed on [2025-05-28]).

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Intentional Homicide data are sourced from either criminal justice or public health systems. In the former, data are generated by law enforcement or criminal justice authorities in the process of recording and investigating a crime event, whereas in the latter, data are produced by health authorities certifying the cause of death of an individual.

The criminal justice data was collected from national authorities with the annual United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (UN-CTS). National focal points working in national agencies responsible for statistics on crime and the criminal justice system, and nominated by the Permanent Mission to UNODC, are responsible for compiling the data from the other relevant agencies before transmitting the UN-CTS to UNODC.

Following the submission, UNODC checks for consistency and coherence with other data sources. The population data used to calculate homicide rates is sourced from the World Population Prospects, Population Division, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

The statistical definition contains three elements that characterize the killing of a person as “intentional homicide”:

  1. The killing of a person by another person (objective element).

  2. The intent of the perpetrator to kill or seriously injure the victim (subjective element).

  3. The unlawfulness of the killing (legal element).

For recording purposes, all killings that meet the criteria listed above are to be considered intentional homicides, irrespective of definitions provided by national legislations or practices. Killings as a result of terrorist activities are also to be classified as a form of intentional homicide.

In several cases data from multiple sources were combined to expand the number of available years within a country’s time series, so that a consistent time series of total homicides back to 1990 could be compiled. Time series adjustments were performed when a country had two sources covering an overlapping time period had similar trends but differing values.

Retrieved on
May 28, 2025
Retrieved from
https://dataunodc.un.org/dp-intentional-homicide-victims
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNODC (2025), UNODC Research - Data Portal – Intentional Homicide. https://dataunodc.un.org/dp-intentional-homicide-victims (Accessed on [2025-05-28]).

United Nations – World Population Prospects

World Population Prospects 2024 is the 28th edition of the official estimates and projections of the global population that have been published by the United Nations since 1951. The estimates are based on all available sources of data on population size and levels of fertility, mortality and international migration for 237 countries or areas. If you have questions about this dataset, please refer to their FAQ. You can also explore data sources for each country or visit their main page for more details.

Retrieved on
July 11, 2024
Retrieved from
https://population.un.org/wpp/downloads/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2024). World Population Prospects 2024, Online Edition.

World Population Prospects 2024 is the 28th edition of the official estimates and projections of the global population that have been published by the United Nations since 1951. The estimates are based on all available sources of data on population size and levels of fertility, mortality and international migration for 237 countries or areas. If you have questions about this dataset, please refer to their FAQ. You can also explore data sources for each country or visit their main page for more details.

Retrieved on
July 11, 2024
Retrieved from
https://population.un.org/wpp/downloads/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2024). World Population Prospects 2024, Online Edition.

Various sources – Population

Our World in Data builds and maintains a long-run dataset on population by country, region, and for the world, based on various sources.

You can find more information on these sources and how our time series is constructed on this page: https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources

Retrieved on
July 11, 2024
Retrieved from
https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
The long-run data on population is based on various sources, described on this page: https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources

Our World in Data builds and maintains a long-run dataset on population by country, region, and for the world, based on various sources.

You can find more information on these sources and how our time series is constructed on this page: https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources

Retrieved on
July 11, 2024
Retrieved from
https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
The long-run data on population is based on various sources, described on this page: https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

Values for the United Kingdom are calculated by Our World in Data from UNODC data for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Rates for the most recent year are calculated using medium population projection estimates from the United Nations World Population Prospects.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Homicides of female victims”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Fiona Spooner, Hannah Ritchie, and Max Roser (2013) - “Homicides”. Data adapted from United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, United Nations, Various sources. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260325-171315/grapher/female-homicide-victims.html [online resource] (archived on March 25, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

UN, World Population Prospects (2024); United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

UN, World Population Prospects (2024); United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Homicides of female victims” [dataset]. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime - Intentional Homicide Victims”; United Nations, “World Population Prospects”; Various sources, “Population” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260325-171315/grapher/female-homicide-victims.html (archived on March 25, 2026).

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Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-homicide-victims.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-homicide-victims.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-homicide-victims.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-homicide-victims.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-homicide-victims.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-homicide-victims.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-homicide-victims.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-homicide-victims.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear