[ad_1]
Breaking News Emails
Receive last minute alerts and special reports. News and stories that matter, delivered the mornings of the week.
By Farnoush Amiri
A new UN report says that about 50,000 women were killed in the world last year by their "intimate partner" or a member of their family.
This equates to 137 women a day – nearly six per hour.
The report, released Sunday by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), linked to the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, shows that Americas rank third in the world worst.
"While the vast majority of homicide victims are men, women continue to pay the highest price because of gender inequality, discrimination and negative stereotypes," said the Executive Director of UNODC, Yury Fedotov, in a statement accompanying the report. "They are also the most likely to be killed by their intimate partners and their families."
According to the study: "A total of 87,000 women were deliberately killed in 2017. More than half of them (58%) 50,000 were killed by an intimate partner or their family member which means that 137 women worldwide are killed by a member of their own family every day.More than a third (30,000) of women killed intentionally in 2017 have been by their intimate partner current or former, someone they would normally trust. "
In the US alone, a study conducted in 2017 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly half of female homicide victims are killed by an intimate partner, their family, or their friends. .
Rachel Goldsmith, Vice President of Domestic Violence Centers at Safe Horizon, a victim assistance organization, said the figures in the global report were not surprising.
"In the United States, we have known for a long time that, statistically, women are not killed at the same rate by strangers or bystanders," Goldsmith told NBC News on Monday. "The recent incident in Chicago is the most poignant example."
She was referring to last week when a 32-year-old man, Juan Lopez, shot dead his former fiancée and two other passers-by before committing suicide in front of a Chicago hospital. The incident occurred while Dr. Tamara O'Neal, 38, was leaving her position at Mercy Hospital and the medical center when she had a confrontation with Juan Lopez, according to reports. officials.
Lopez had a history of red flags that included the threat of confronting his ex-wife at his workplace and aggressive behavior towards women at the city's fire academy, according to a file filed in a county court and official statements at NBC Chicago.
The recent CDC study on the role of intimate partner violence shows that women are at greater risk of domestic violence just after leaving their partner.
"It happens all over the country where the women who made the decision to leave a relationship and their partners decided to react with guns or with violence," said Goldsmith.
Among the US findings, the report calls on women to have greater access to a full range of services provided by the police and the justice system. It also recommends greater involvement of health and social services, highlighting the importance of early education.
"In reality, domestic violence is about power and control, but some measures can be protective, such as restricting access to guns and setting up mental health services," Goldsmith said. .
Shortly after the publication of the US report, thousands of protesters took to the streets of major cities in Europe and the Middle East to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
The events were part of a 16 – day campaign led by the UN, urging organizations and individuals to combat this type of violence against women.
