WAR ON
WOMEN.

Introduction:
The Weaponization of a Statistic

We often hear a single number used to silence conversations about violence against women: 80% (~81%) of all murder victims are men.” This statistic is presented as a trump card, a definitive proof that the focus on women’s safety is misplaced. But a statistic without context is a weapon of misinformation.

We must dismantle this narrative with rigorous, contextual analysis. We will prove that the high male homicide rate reflects specific, high-risk behaviors and environments, not a greater risk of random victimization. In contrast, violence against women is a targeted epidemic, occurring in the place of greatest supposed safety, with devastating ripple effects across society.

This is not a competition of suffering, but a clarification of facts to ensure we are fighting the right battles, together. Battles that are being, and must be fought, all around the world to help end the overall war on WoMen.

Part 1:
Deconstructing the “80% Male Victim” Myth

The common claim commits an ecological fallacy – it mistakes a broad trend for a universal truth. To understand risk, we must analyze context. The following data is sourced from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and other global bodies.

Let’s categorize all homicides by motive and circumstance:

Category 1: The “High-Risk” & “Violence-on-Violence” Contexts (Over 50% of Homicides)

These are homicides tied to specific, often voluntary, engagements in high-violence settings.

Organized Crime & Gang Violence (22% of all homicides)

• Victim Profile: >95% Male. 
• Perpetrator Profile: >95% Male. 
• Context: This is intra-gang and inter-gang violence. This is not “violence against men” as a class; it is almost exclusively male-on-male violence within a chosen, high-risk subculture.

Sociopolitical Violence (14% of all homicides)

• Victim Profile: Overwhelmingly Male.
• Perpetrator Profile: Overwhelmingly Male.
• Context: This includes wars and terrorism. While civilians suffer, the core participants and victims in armed conflict are predominantly male.

Robbery & Other Crime-Related (16% of all homicides)

• Victim Profile: Heavily Skewed Male (est. 70-80%).
• Perpetrator Profile: Overwhelmingly Male.
• Context: Data on occupational homicide reveals the truth. The most dangerous jobs (taxi drivers, police officers, security guards, late night shop keepers) are male-dominated (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Men are overrepresented here because they are overrepresented in these high-risk, public-facing professions.

The Takeaway: Over half of all global homicides occur in contexts where the victims and perpetrators are predominantly men by virtue of occupation or voluntary association. This is a measure of risk-by-context, not random societal victimization.

Category 2: Interpersonal Conflict (31% of All Homicides)

• Victim Profile: Overwhelmingly Male (approx. 80-90%). 
• Perpetrator Profile: Overwhelmingly Male (approx. 90%).
• Context: This includes bar fights, arguments, and disputes. This category is heavily influenced by social norms that condone physical aggression as a conflict resolution tool between men.
• The Gender Dynamics of Conflict: Research confirms that women are socialized to de-escalate conflict and are far less likely to engage in physical aggression. A study in the journal Aggressive Behavior found that men are significantly more likely to respond to provocation with physical violence. Therefore, women are often subjected to verbal abuse, intimidation, or non-lethal assault, but their avoidance behavior removes them from the lethal escalation that claims male lives. When violence is truly random (terrorsim attacks, stray bullets, public shootings, etc), the gender split is more even. The skew in this category exists precisely because the conflicts are not random; they are often escalated by and between men.

The Takeaway: A significant portion of male homicides are the result of male-on-male violence in the public sphere, often stemming from conflicts that are escalated to a lethal level based on gendered behaviors.

Part 2:
The Isolated Epidemic. Femicide and Its Ripple Effects

Now, let’s examine the one category of homicide that exists outside these high-risk, public contexts: the private sphere.

Category 3: Intimate Partner & Family-Related Homicide (18% of All Homicides)

This is the category that exists outside the “violence-on-violence” framework. It occurs in the private sphere, in the home, the place meant to be safest.

• Victim Profile: Flipped. Approximately 65% of the victims in this category are female, 35% are male.
• Perpetrator Profile: Overwhelmingly Male.
• Context: This is not about rivalries or high-risk occupations. This is violence within the family unit. Let’s break it down further:
• Intimate Partner Homicide (a subset of the 18%): This is where the gender disparity is most extreme. Over 80% of intimate partner homicide victims are women. A woman is far more likely to be killed by her partner than a man is by his.
• When a man is killed in this category, it is often in the context of a woman acting in self-defense or as part of a conflict where he was the primary aggressor. The dynamics are fundamentally different.
• The Ripple Effect on Children: This is not just a woman’s issue. Children are the invisible victims. Witnessing domestic violence is a recognized form of childhood trauma (Adverse Childhood Experience or ACE) with lifelong psychological consequences for both boys and girls. They lose their mothers, their safety, and their childhoods to this violence.

The “Couch” Analogy: 

Imagine a man and a woman living in the same safe, suburban home, in a neighborhood with no gang activity, low crime, and no bars where brawls break out. They are sitting on the same couch. 

• His statistically significant, context-driven risks (gang violence, street fights, occupational hazards) have been reduced to near zero.
• Her primary, statistically significant risk—being killed by an intimate partner—is sitting right there on the couch with her.

This is the core of the issue. A man can largely mitigate his primary homicide risks by choosing his environment. A woman cannot mitigate her primary homicide risk by simply avoiding “bad neighborhoods.” Her greatest threat is often the person she shares her life with. This is the definition of a targeted epidemic.

Part 3:
The Hidden Numbers and a Unified Front

The official statistics on femicide are almost certainly a significant undercount.

• Disguised Homicides: Many femicides are misclassified as accidents, suicides, or overdoses. A landmark investigation by the Femicide Census in the UK found that in many cases where a woman’s death was recorded as a suicide, there was a documented history of abuse by a partner. They highlighted the blurred line between a woman being murdered and being driven to take her own life. When a woman “commits suicide” to escape an abuser, that is a fatal outcome of intimate partner violence.
• The “Perfect Crime”: Historically and even today, poisonings, a method often associated with femicide, are difficult to attribute as homicide without thorough investigation, which is often lacking.

Acknowledging the Full Picture:

We are not claiming that all women are angels or all men are abusers. Yes, women can be perpetrators of domestic violence. However, the data is unequivocal: the violence perpetrated by men against female partners is far more frequent, severe, and likely to end in homicide. Furthermore, men are profoundly impacted by this epidemic, not as the primary targets of femicide, but as the sons, brothers, fathers, and friends who lose the women they love. This is a human issue that requires a unified front. The enemy is not “men”; it is the culture of impunity and the specific pattern of violent behavior that leads to femicide.

The Unavoidable Conclusion:
A Call for Clarity, Not Comparison

We have seen that the statement “80% of murder victims are men” is not evidence that men are more victimized. It is evidence that men are disproportionately both the perpetrators and victims of a specific type of public, often transactional or conflict-based, violence.

The violence women face is fundamentally different. It is not a consequence of their career choices or their willingness to engage in a street fight. It is violence targeted at them specifically because they are women, in the private sphere, by those they trust.

Therefore, when a man and a woman are living in the same “safe” community:

His risk is concentrated in contexts he can, for the most part, see and choose to avoid. He can choose not to join a gang, he can de-escalate a confrontation, he can be aware of his surroundings in a high-risk job.

Her risk is concentrated in the one context she cannot avoid without abandoning her home and family. She can also choose to avoid dark alleyways and de-escalate conflict – and the data shows she already does, more so than men – but this does not protect her from the partner who becomes violent behind closed doors.

To use the “80% men” statistic to dismiss the cry of “stop killing us” is a logical and moral failure. It is a refusal to see a devastating, targeted epidemic that destroys women, traumatizes children, and devastates entire communities. We must stop conflating these two separate issues. We can, and must, work to reduce male-on-male violence while simultaneously confronting the unique, systemic epidemic of femicide. To do anything less is to abandon half the population in the place they are most endangered.

Our Call to Humanity:
Ending the Silent War on WoMen

This is our argument, laid bare by the unassailable data. But this is more than a statistical correction; it is a plea for a fundamental shift in our understanding of safety, violence, and justice – not just for women, but for the very fabric of our shared humanity.

The evidence before us leads to one harrowing conclusion: there is no guaranteed safe space for a woman. She can, like a man, choose to enter the world of high-risk activities. But when we ignore that world and focus solely on the shared spaces of life – the home, the relationship, the family – we are forced to confront a devastating truth. In the place where men and women are supposed to coexist in peace, women are dying at a disproportionate rate.

And remember, this grim analysis only covers homicide. This does not include the millions of cases of abuse that leave psychological scars, the rapes that destroy lives, or the daily threats and intimidations that are never reported, never recorded, and never make it into these statistics. If we could quantify that full spectrum of terror, the story it would tell would be the same, only magnitudes worse. It is a grim tale of a world women should not have to constantly be trying to survive in.

This is not a random occurrence. It is a pattern. It is a culture. It is a silent war waged within our homes, against our mothers, our daughters, our sisters, and our friends.

For centuries, this war has been minimized, ignored, and explained away. But the data now gives us nowhere to hide. We can no longer plead ignorance. So we must ask ourselves: if we do not act now, with courage and conviction, what will the next century hold? What will we tell our daughters when they ask why they aren’t safe in their own homes? What will we teach our sons about their responsibility to break this cycle? How will we face the grannies and mothers who have endured this reality for generations? And how will we answer to the countless men who stand firmly beside us, demanding a better world for the women they love?

This is our argument. This is the evidence. The epidemic of femicide is not a debate; it is a reality we can no longer afford to overlook. The time for silence is over. The time for action is now.