Seoul, Republic of Korea – 25-27 September 2023 As part of continued efforts to enhance awareness of gender-based violence and gender-related killings, the UN Women Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, the UN Women Centre of Excellence for Gender Equality, and the CoE organized the International Conference on Ending Gender-Related Killings of Women and Girls. The conference brought together experts and practitioners to discuss the challenges of and good practices in implementing and evaluating relevant policy and legal measures to address gender-related killings of women and girls, starting by monitoring and measuring such killings through the UNODC-UN Women jointly developed Statistical Framework for Measuring Gender-Related Killings of Women and Girls (“femicide/feminicide”).
The International Conference on Ending Gender-Related Killings of Women and Girls opened with welcoming remarks delivered by Hyoung Il Lee, Commissioner, KOSTAT, opening remarks from Jeongshim Lee, Director, UN Women Centre of Excellence for Gender Equality, and a keynote message from Reem Alsalem, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Its Causes and Consequences. The Conference offered presentations by experts in the field and national representatives sharing their countries’ experiences, with sessions ranging from national definitions of femicide to methods and tools to measure such crime, as well as the availability of data and its use for evidence-based policymaking. Experts from the following countries shared their experience on strategies and methods for collecting homicide and femicide data: Viet Nam, Mongolia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Fiji, Pakistan, and Republic of Korea.
The mission fulfilled its objective of stimulating inter-agency cooperation, highlighting the need for an international approach to measuring femicide and enhancing system responses, and providing a forum to share needs, experiences and challenges. The Conference consisted of a total of 9 sessions over the course of three days, with 25 speakers sharing their expertise in the field. The sessions were arranged in a hybrid format, with speakers joining both online and in-person, and each session was followed by an interactive Q&A session. Throughout the conference, interpretation was available in English and Korean. Throughout the three days, a total of 68 participants joined the Conference.
Claudia Pontoglio, Associate Research Officer, CoE, and Roberto Murguia-Huerta, Project Specialist, UNODC-INEGI Center of Excellence, presided over the session “Statistical Framework for Measuring the Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls”, where they discussed in depth the use of the framework itself, which was introduced by UN Women in the previous days. In particular, they explored the use of the disaggregated variables introduced in the framework in the crime and criminal justice statistics system, as well as the implementation process with examples from the pilot study started early in the year in four countries in Latin America.
In closing, Jonghee Choi, Coordinator of the CoE, emphasized, “Our collective efforts here show a strong commitment to ending gender-related killings of Women and Girls. It's through collaborative initiatives like this that we can bring about lasting change. Especially by encouraging countries to collect specific information about where these killings happen, the gender motives, and to analyze root causes based on the Statistical Framework for Measuring Femicide developed jointly by UNODC and UN Women, it enables evidence-based policymaking on femicide."
This conference was organized as part of several initiatives pushed forward by UNODC and UN Women to raise awareness and introduce tools to tackle the lack of data on gender-based violence.
Further information on the CoE can be found here, Twitter @CoE_UNODC and Facebook @UNODC.KOSTAT.CoE.
