Before exploring why femicide, the gender-based murder of women, occurring within intimate partner violence (IPV) remains invisible in Thai society, one must first comprehend the core essence of this issue.
It is not an uncontrollable outburst of male rage. It is not a tragedy that occurs without prior warning signs. And it is not merely a private matter between two individuals.
Femicide is rooted in gender inequality and discrimination deeply embedded within the social structure. This violence is sustained by what scholars term “hegemonic masculinity”—a mindset instilled by society that leads men to believe they must hold dominance, possess entitlement, and dictate the direction of a relationship (Connell, 2005). When this ideal is challenged, particularly when a woman attempts to withdraw from that control, the desire to reclaim power erupts into violence and murder, driven heavily by a perceived loss of control. Consequently, the most perilous period is not during the relationship, but when a woman attempts to leave it. Research indicates that over 50 per cent of cases occur within the first year following separation (Tripi et al., 2026).
Intimate partner femicide is rarely an isolated incident that occurs in a vacuum; rather, it represents the ultimate, catastrophic culmination of a prolonged pattern of violence, accumulated through intimidation, stalking, social isolation, and coercive control aimed at subduing the woman entirely.
In 2024, UNODC and UN Women reported that nearly 50,000 women and girls worldwide were killed by intimate partners or family members, averaging 137 victims per day. Furthermore, 60% of all murdered women lost their lives within private spaces.
Case studies, such as those from Albania, reveal that a quarter of femicide victims had previously filed police reports; some even held active protection orders on the very day they were murdered. This demonstrates that these women had exhausted every avenue available to them at the time, only for the justice system to fail them through an inefficient and inadequate capacity to safeguard their welfare.
Thailand still profoundly lacks a systematic framework for gathering and disaggregating homicide statistics regarding female victims that accurately reflects underlying gender-based motivations. As a result, when horrifying incidents occur where women are stripped of their lives at the hands of current or former partners, these cases are routinely recorded and processed as ordinary homicides. The systems fail to identify or analyse how the underlying motives are deeply intertwined with power dynamics, possessiveness, or gender-based control.
Consequently, the currently available data fails to mirror the true scope of this structural issue embedded within Thai society.
Furthermore, a significant volume of intimate partner violence (IPV) completely evades state registries. Even where data is compiled, it frequently suffers from a lack of granular disaggregation (Disaggregated Data). Statistics are predominantly presented in a generalised, aggregated manner, omitting crucial details regarding age variations and gender nuances. They also lack the inclusivity required to illuminate intersecting identities, such as the experiences of women with disabilities.
Moreover, there is a distinct lack of clarity in categorising criminal offences; IPV data and sexual violence statistics are frequently conflated, thereby erasing the distinct dimensions of each specific issue.
In addition to these shortcomings, the Thai apparatus lacks a mechanism to facilitate data linkage between different agencies or ministries. This causes frontline criminal justice actors to operate in silos, leading to flawed risk assessments and leaving survivors entirely undetected by welfare protection mechanisms.
The fundamental dilemma is clear: without data, there is no overview; without an overview, it becomes exceptionally difficult to prove that this is a systemic failure rather than a series of isolated, case-by-case incidents. When these crimes are left uncounted, the perpetrator’s behaviour is never recognised as part of a grander paradigm: Gender-Based Violence (GBV).
For many women, the early warning signs do not suddenly materialise on the day of the tragedy. They have confronted them over a prolonged duration through stalking, the restriction of liberties, life control, or death threats made when they attempted to sever the relationship. Yet, in reality, many victims who attempted to seek recourse from officials received no protection, and those who sought medical attention found that their injuries were never recorded as domestic abuse. Consequently, state statistics remain disconnected and entirely detached from reality.
As long as the frontline justice system lacks effective instruments to compile and classify statistical data on violence, it remains blind to the repetitive patterns of intimidation operating beneath the surface. It will never understand that these acts are not driven by a sudden loss of temper or temporary jealousy, but are rather a systematic process of harassment driving towards a catastrophic conclusion, a tragedy that could be intercepted and prevented, provided the state maintains precise data systems to guide intervention and deliver timely risk assessments.
Throughout the course of advocacy and frontline support for survivors, numerous cases emerge involving individuals with a continuous history of experiencing violence, stalking, harassment, or severe control by their partners. These individuals live in constant terror of a reoccurrence. What they urgently require is a proactive welfare protection mechanism before the situation escalates, rather than reactive remedies when it is tragically too late.
Yet, in various instances where petitions for protection orders are submitted, the justice system deems the risk insufficiently grave. This occurs because the Thai frontline justice system lacks a gender-sensitive lens to view violence as a “continuous pattern of behaviour”, choosing instead to treat it as a series of “isolated incidents” or a “crime of passion”. The system routinely asks what happened today, but rarely inquires into what the survivor has endured over the preceding months or years.
If the system refuses to scrutinise these prolonged processes, it will remain forever blind to the fact that what appears to be mere rage or jealousy on the day of the crime is actually the final breaking point of a long-standing process of coercive control. The critical question we must pose is not merely whether the perpetrator’s actions have caused the survivor sufficient terror, but rather: what are we waiting for before we acknowledge the presence of mortal danger? Must we wait for physical wounds, the deployment of weapons, or a loss of life before the system mobilises?
From the initial point of reporting, international frameworks utilise specialised tools, such as:
The Danger Assessment (DA): Developed by Campbell (1986) alongside experts to evaluate the risk of a victim being killed by an intimate partner. This is a free public tool that requires training for accurate scoring and interpretation.
The Lethality Assessment Program (LAP): A rapid 11-item screening tool used by practitioners to assess immediate, life-threatening risks.
The DASH Risk Model: A multi-agency framework used by police and various sectors in the United Kingdom to protect victims and children. It shifts institutional practice from a reactive stance to proactive questioning, focusing explicitly on coercive control, stalking, and honour-based abuse—all of which are high-risk indicators for lethality.
These instruments train officials to identify early warning signs linked to severe injury or homicide, enabling them to recognise accumulated patterns of violence. Conversely, the Thai system still lacks such standardised risk-assessment tools integrated into frontline justice processes, remaining heavily weighted towards proving past events rather than assessing impending harm.
Beyond the deficits in statistical systems and legal processes, the narrative framing adopted by society further ensures that the loss of Thai women to femicide remains a transient headline that quickly fades away.
When a woman is murdered by her partner, society and the media habitually resurrect familiar, reductive explanations: “marital disputes”, “the poison of jealousy”, “romantic feuds”, or “private family matters”.
These narratives do not merely trivialise the violence; they simultaneously operate as a dual mechanism of obfuscation:
They erase the perpetrator’s true, underlying motives from public awareness.
They frame the perpetrator as merely a hot-headed man acting on a fleeting impulse, rather than an individual who has systematically weaponised violence to assert dominance over a woman throughout the duration of the relationship.
Therefore, the rhetoric of “marital disputes” and similar tropes must never be reproduced by the media or any societal actor. We must cease legitimatising violence by framing it as a matter of “mutual fault”, “shared responsibility”, or through the harmful discourse that “no one is a 100% victim”.
The danger is real. The crime is real.
A failure to comprehend the true essence of femicide is not merely an academic oversight or a debate over terminology; it has a direct, binding bearing on the lives and survival of women and society at large. It dictates whether a woman’s terror will be heard, whether her petitions for protection will receive a swift response, and whether—when the worst occurs—society will view it as a structural failure of the system or dismiss it once more as an isolated, personal tragedy.
As long as we continue to label these crimes with superficial phrases like “the poison of jealousy” or “marital friction”, as long as our legal system waits for tangible, physical evidence before intervening to mitigate danger, and as long as we fail to statistically record how many women we lose to gender-based killings, their deaths will remain entirely invisible in Thai society. True structural transformation is the only remedy.
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References:
Connell, R. W., & Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005). ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’. Gender and Society, 19(6), 829–859. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243205278639
Corradi, C., Marcuello-Servós, C., Boira, S., & Weil, S. (2016). ‘Theories of Femicide and Their Significance for Social Research’. Current Sociology, 64(7), 975–995.
Khan, A., & Akram, M. (2025). ‘Understanding and Addressing Intimate Partner Violence: A Comprehensive Review’. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, 20(1), Article 43. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13010-025-00175-1
Miller, L. (2012). ‘Stalking: Patterns, Motives, and Intervention Strategies’. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 17(6), 495–506. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2012.07.001
National Resource Center on Domestic Violence. (n.d.). Tools & Strategies for Assessing Danger or Risk of Lethality. VAWnet. https://vawnet.org/sc/tools-strategies-assessing-danger-or-risk-lethality
Tripi, D., Ghamlouch, A., Duca, F. D., et al. (2026). ‘Intimate Partner Femicide, Understanding Perpetrator Behaviour: A Cross-Cultural Analytical Review of Weapon Choice, Injury Patterns, and Cultural-Criminological Insights’. International Journal of Legal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-026-03843-9
UNODC, & UN Women. (2025). Femicides in 2024: Global Estimates of Intimate Partner/Family Member Femicides. United Nations publication.
