Before Femicide – What the Warning Signs and Patterns Tell Us
- Apr 13
- 8 min read
Updated: Apr 20
Written by Zsuzsánna Boni, Life & Relationship Coach
Zsuzsánna Boni is a coach, psychologist, and adult learning specialist. She empowers individuals and couples to lead a conscious life, own their confidence and clarity, and build the life they truly love, one rooted in awareness, growth, and self-leadership.
How does a relationship move from closeness to control, from tension to fear, from abuse to lethal danger? These are uncomfortable questions, but necessary ones. Femicide is rarely a sudden act. It is often the final outcome of relationship patterns marked by coercive control, entrapment, and escalating danger.
What is femicide, and how common is it?
Femicide is not simply the killing of a woman. According to UN Women, femicide refers to the intentional killing of women or girls because of their gender, shaped by gender-based violence, coercive control, misogyny, and unequal power. It is not just an isolated act of violence, but often the most extreme end of a wider pattern of abuse, control, and dehumanization.
Femicide data is methodologically difficult to compare across countries because definitions, legal categories, and reporting systems vary widely. Some countries record intimate partner homicide, others domestic or family-related homicide, and some do not use a distinct legal category of femicide at all. This means that even when women are dying, data systems may still fail to fully identify, classify, or count those deaths.
Keeping that in mind, there are still some important statistics that are screaming at us, wanting to be heard. In 2024, globally, around 50,000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members worldwide, which means that about 137 women were being killed daily. In 2023, in the EU, out of 1 million women, 4.1 were victims of intentional homicide by family members or intimate partners, which was nearly double the rate for men, 2.2 per million. In the U.S., CDC data covering 2018 to 2021 recorded 3,991 female victims of intimate partner homicide across participating states. The same CDC report found that 66.6% of these killings involved a firearm, and 98.5% involved a male suspect.
For me, as a Hungarian woman based in Romania, this is not just an abstract global issue. It is also a regional and local one. In 2022, in Hungary, a total of 101 women were victims of homicide, including intimate partner and domestic homicide as well. In Romania, in the same year, a total of 134 women lost their lives due to domestic homicide or homicide overall.
What is perhaps most disturbing is not only the scale of femicide, but the absence of a clear decline. In many regions, the numbers remain stubbornly high year after year, suggesting that awareness alone has not yet translated into consistent protection.
Femicide as a process, not a sudden act
Femicide is never a single, sudden explosion of violence. Research across public health, criminology, and gender-based violence studies suggests that it is more often the endpoint of an escalating process in which multiple forms of danger build over time. These factors do not mechanically “cause” femicide, and no timeline fits every case. Still, the literature shows that many femicides are preceded by identifiable patterns. This is why it is more accurate to think of femicide as a process of accumulating risk than as an isolated act of sudden rage.
Five interacting domains of risk
The markers of escalating danger can be organized into five interacting domains, aggressor-related factors, victim entrapment and vulnerability factors, relationship-related dynamics, environmental and situational factors, and social factors. These categories do not operate separately. They overlap, reinforce one another, and usually accumulate over time. Some shape the background conditions in which abuse can escalate more easily, some describe the pattern inside the relationship, and some intensify danger at key moments such as separation or disclosure. Together, they help explain why femicide can be better recognized as an escalating process than as a sudden, isolated act.
Pre-existing conditions, the context in which risk takes shape
Before there is an obvious crisis, there may already be a set of underlying beliefs, vulnerabilities, and societal conditions that increase risk. On the aggressor side, this can include rigid gender beliefs, prior violent behavior, a need for dominance, access to weapons, and difficulty tolerating rejection or loss of control. These factors do not mean femicide will happen. Still, they can create a foundation in which control and aggression are more likely to emerge when the relationship becomes emotionally threatening to the perpetrator.
On the victim side, there may be economic dependence, trauma history, social isolation, limited family and friends’ support, and, in some cases, existing vulnerabilities created by earlier violence, poverty, discrimination, or lack of access to services. These are not “reasons” for femicide, but conditions that can increase entrapment. At the wider social level, gender inequality, victim-blaming attitudes, and the normalization of male control can make early abuse harder to identify as dangerous. Cultural narratives that romanticize jealousy, possessiveness, and control can blur the line between genuine attachment and domination. Weak institutional recognition of coercive control can also mean that the early signs of abuse remain invisible until the violence becomes more overt.
Early warning signs, when control begins to show itself
At this stage, the relationship begins to show patterns that often disguise themselves as jealousy, care, conflict, insecurity, or personality problems. These can include excessive monitoring, possessiveness, pressure for constant contact, isolation from friends and family, verbal degradation, intimidation, accusations, and demands for access to the victim’s time, phone, movements, or social world, gradually narrowing the victim’s autonomy. Coercive control starts to become visible, even if physical violence is still absent, infrequent, or hidden. The aggressor may test boundaries, punish resistance, and reward compliance, resulting in the victim’s behavior being adjusted to prevent conflict, calm the perpetrator, or avoid escalation. Others might underestimate this as passivity, when in reality, it may be a survival strategy within a relationship that is becoming increasingly unsafe. Friends, relatives, and even professionals may interpret the situation as a “difficult relationship” rather than an emerging pattern of domination.
Pattern consolidation, when abuse becomes a system
Here, control becomes more systematic and more central to the relationship. Abuse may extend beyond emotional intimidation into financial control, repeated threats, sexual coercion, stalking, surveillance, humiliation, and physical violence. The aggressor’s behavior begins to function as a system for regulating the victim’s choices, movements, relationships, and sense of self. Thus, the victim may increasingly organize daily life, trying to avoid certain topics, change routines, limit contact with others, hide information, or try to anticipate the aggressor’s moods. This can create the appearance of compliance from the outside, but in reality, it often reflects adaptation to chronic danger. The real concern is that a whole pattern of coercion is becoming normalized, harder to interrupt, and more capable of escalating. By the time the abuse reaches this level of consolidation, the survivor may already be deeply isolated, psychologically worn down, or practically trapped, while institutions may still be responding only to separate incidents rather than to the pattern as a whole.
Escalation, when danger intensifies
Risk often rises sharply when the aggressor experiences a loss of control or anticipates one. This can happen during separation, after disclosure of abuse, during legal action, in custody disputes, after the victim seeks help, or when she becomes more emotionally, socially, or financially independent. For an outsider, it is easy to say, “Why didn’t she just leave?” Research consistently identifies separation as a particularly dangerous period, not because leaving causes femicide, but because leaving can threaten the aggressor’s control and trigger retaliatory violence. During escalation, stalking may become more persistent, threats more explicit, surveillance more invasive, and violence more severe.
The aggressor may shift from controlling the relationship to punishing the victim for trying to leave, resist, expose the abuse, or reclaim autonomy. This is also the stage in which access to weapons, prior threats to kill, forced sex, and escalating physical violence become especially important warning signs. Paradoxically, the closer the victim gets to separation or safety, the more dangerous the situation may become if the perpetrator is highly controlling, entitled, and unwilling to tolerate loss.
Lethal danger, when the risk becomes acute
The final stage is marked by acute indicators of potential lethality. These may include threats to kill, prior strangulation, weapon threats, obsessive pursuit, breaches of protective orders, suicidal-homicidal statements, extreme possessiveness, and the logic of “if I cannot have you, no one will.” These indicators appear with striking regularity across femicide research.
By this stage, the abuse has often moved beyond control into openly life-threatening behavior. The perpetrator may communicate lethal intent directly or indirectly, or act in ways that show desperation, revenge, or a collapsing tolerance for the victim’s autonomy. Not every abusive relationship ends in femicide, and no single indicator guarantees a tragic outcome. However, the evidence shows that combinations of these warning signs precede many femicides. This is why prevention efforts that wait for severe physical assault may come too late.
Why this model matters
This timeline should not be read as universal, perfectly linear, or deterministic. It is also not a recipe for femicide. Cases differ, and not all risk factors appear in every case. Still, the literature strongly suggests that femicide often emerges through accumulation and interaction across personal, relational, situational, and societal levels. Understanding that pattern matters because it shifts the question from “How could this happen?” to “What warning signs, patterns, and institutional failures were already visible before the killing?” That shift is essential for prevention, because it places attention where it belongs, on coercive control, escalating danger, and the systems that too often fail to respond in time.
Why recognizing the pattern earlier matters
Understanding femicide as a process is not only a matter of naming violence more accurately. It is also a way of recognizing danger earlier, before the final act makes the pattern impossible to deny. For a closer look at what prevention, protection, and institutional responsibility require, continue with the second part of this series.
Read more from Zsuzsánna Boni
Zsuzsánna Boni, Life & Relationship Coach
Zsuzsánna Boni is a coach, psychologist, and adult learning specialist helping individuals and couples transform the way they live, love, and connect. Having turned her own challenges and setbacks into growth and purpose, she brings depth and authenticity to her work. Blending a science-based perspective with consciousness and a can-do attitude, she guides people to turn awareness into action and growth into lasting change. Her mission is to empower others to own their confidence, cultivate healthy relationships, and shape a life aligned with their values. She believes that transformation begins with self-leadership, to build the life you love and love the life you build.
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