“Each time a woman or girl is killed by men and [the crime is] tolerated by patriarchal social structures, another fracture occurs in the fabric of society.”
– Myrna Dawson and Saide Mobayed Vega
The word femicide was first coined in 1976 by professor Diana Russel at the International Tribunal of Crimes Against Women. Later, in the 1990s, she defined it as “the murder of women by men motivated by hatred, contempt, pleasure, or a sense of ownership of women.” Since then, the term has grown to encompass broader definitions from “misogynistic killings by men” to “the killing of females by males for being females,” with the intention to include the killing of infants and adolescent girls. Later, Mexican anthropologist Marcela Lagarde drew attention to the role of the state and took the term from femicide to feminicide, highlighting how institutional neglect, omission, or even complicity contribute to the violent deaths of women and girls.
From the early 2000s onward, femicide has become a rallying cry for social movements around the world, driven by grassroots organizations and academia advocating for a legal definition of the term and subsequent state actions to prevent and prosecute the crime.
Uzbekistan, however, is absent from these efforts. Femicide has no legal definition in Uzbekistan. Patriarchal norms in Uzbek society not only enable, justify, and overlook female killings, but also place blame on the victim.
Homicide itself is relatively rare in Uzbekistan. While the total number of crimes registered by the state has steadily increased – from 90,050 in 2010 to 104,096 in 2023, mirroring the country’s population growth – the number of premeditated and attempted murders has significantly decreased. In 2010, there were 868 such cases, but by 2023, that number had dropped to just 363. (This is different from the total number of individuals involved in these crimes, which declined from 868 in 2010 to 384 in 2023.)
Tashkent does not release detailed data on victims, crime circumstances, or motivations in its crime statistics. The only gender-disaggregated data available is related to the gender of the perpetrators involved in these homicides. The State Statistics Agency reports that the proportion of women involved in premeditated and attempted murder cases has been around 10 percent for the past decade. The available statistics, however, do not report on the number of victims or their gender. Since the majority of perpetrators are men, it is reasonable to assume that women make up a significant portion of the victims, but this cannot be confirmed with certainty.
The authors of this article, together with other team members Gulnoza Ahmedova and Deniz Nazarova, conducted research studying femicide in Uzbekistan and among Uzbek migrants abroad. Through the project, we were able to compile a dataset consisting of 305 femicide cases with 334 victims in the last 10 years. The data was collected through scraping online news media for 2014-2024 and court archives (2023). These numbers do not mean that only 334 women and girls were killed over the last decade; they only represent cases we could verifiably document.
Here is what our findings show.
Most Femicide Victims Die at the Hands of Men and at Home
Nine out of ten women murdered in Uzbekistan are victims of male perpetrators: of the 334 victims studied, 91 percent were killed* by men.
Makhliyo Bustanova, a mother of two, simply wanted to ensure her daughter’s safety on March 23, 2023, when she was killed by her husband. On the day of the tragedy, Makhliyo’s two-month-old daughter was vomiting, so she called an ambulance to take her to the hospital. But her husband, Dilmurod, wouldn’t allow it, leading her to seek help from the police. Under pressure from the police officer, reluctantly, Dilmurod walked their daughter to the hospital and back, his frustration mounting.
This was Makhliyo’s second marriage; her first ended after she and her then-husband struggled to conceive. After the divorce, she remarried Dilmurod Daliyev, with whom she had two children. Their marriage took a dark turn when Makhliyo contracted Hepatitis C during her pregnancy, a diagnosis her mother-in-law resented along with her pregnancy. Frequent conflicts emerged, and Dilmurod, siding with his mother, often reprimanded Makhliyo.
When Dilmurod returned from hospital, the argument erupted between them again. In a burst of rage, Dilmurod went to the kitchen, took a kitchen knife out of the drawer and headed toward the bedroom. He stopped only after stabbing his wife 16 times, killing her.
Dilmurod was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment.
Not only are women predominantly killed by men, but in most cases, the perpetrators are men close to the victims. In 46 percent of cases, women were killed by their intimate partners – husbands**, lovers, and boyfriends. Additionally, almost 15 percent of women and girls were killed by close family members, including fathers, brothers, mothers, stepfathers, and parents-in-law.
Most femicides in Uzbekistan, according to the cases studied, occur in domestic settings: 39 percent of the women were killed in their own homes; 19 percent in a residence shared with the perpetrator, usually a spouse; and 20 percent at the perpetrator’s home. This aligns with broader indicators of gender-based violence (GBV) in the country. Law enforcement agencies record around 40,000 GBV cases annually nationwide, all with women as victims. 85 percent of the time, the incidents occur at home.
Most Women are Killed by Knives and Beatings
Makhliyo’s story is one of hundreds. Perceiving women as property is so common that when they “misbehave,” men often grab a knife or any sharp or heavy object nearby.
In an earlier study, Niginakhon Saida reported that women in Uzbekistan kill far less compared to men and they mostly kill with knives (71 percent of the overall cases studied). This trend can be attributed to men’s greater physical strength, which makes it challenging for women to kill a man without a sharp object. The tendency is slightly different in femicide cases. Although kitchen knives remain the most commonly used weapon, appearing in 41.5 percent of these incidents, men also resort to killing women with their bare hands (9.8 percent of cases). Strangulation is also a prevalent method, responsible for just around 5 percent of femicides in Uzbekistan.
These findings suggest that in the cases studied, men killed impulsively, using whatever objects were at hand, or rely instinctively on their physical dominance. The brutality of these murders is often extreme. Recall the case of Makhliyo, stabbed 16 times with a kitchen knife during an argument. In another case, in Samarkand, a man murdered his ex-wife by stabbing her 12 times with a sickle after breaking into her parents’ home. And a 26-year-old man from Namangan killed his wife by stabbing her with a knife 22 times. A different 26-year-old Uzbek migrant in Novosibirsk, Russia killed a female Uzbek migrant by stabbing her at least 78 times.
Sanovar and Safarali had been married for 33 years and had three children when, on the morning of August 29, 2023, Safarali decided to kill his wife. He had never been an ideal husband – often drinking heavily and physically abusing her. Recently, he had begun threatening her more openly, shouting, “I will kill you.”
The timing was opportune for his crime: his daughter Sabrina left for work early in the morning and his son, Saidali, was in Russia as a labor migrant. Safarali, too, had spent time in Russia, where he had even married another woman before eventually returning to his lawful wife in Uzbekistan. (This phenomenon is quite common among male Uzbek labor migrants – they leave their young wives and children in Uzbekistan, often at their parents’ service, and work in Russia for years. While they do send money back home for their family, they also either find a lover or marry another woman in Russia. Islamic norms allow a man to have up to four wives at a time and not rarely, their new wives are Christian Slavic women.) Sanovar and Safarali’s relationship was beyond repair and any intimacy between them had long ceased.
That day, Safarali woke up early and watched his wife clean the house and light the fire in the tandir, a traditional clay oven commonly used in Central Asia to bake bread. He approached Sanovar and asked her to be intimate with him again to which she replied, “I won’t live with you; I want a divorce. Even if I were dying, I wouldn’t be intimate with you.”
For Safarali, her refusal was the last straw, although he knew it was coming. Hearing rumors that she might have been speaking with another man in the village had infuriated him, but her rejection felt unbearable. Remembering she had heart problems, Safarali struck her on the chest. The blow knocked Sanovar out immediately and she fell on the ground, unconscious. He then lifted her, placed her headfirst into the tandir, and stoked the fire.
No sound or cry for help came from inside.
Safarali then tried to go about his day as if nothing had happened. Later in the day, he gathered his passport, intending to flee the country, and left with some villagers under the pretense of running errands. Yet, lacking money, he soon realized escape was impossible. He eventually turned himself in, and a court sentenced him to 19 years in prison.
Although Safarali was a heavy drinker, on the day of murder, he had not had any alcohol. In fact, our findings show that the majority of the time when women and girls are killed, perpetrators are in control of their actions. Only in less than 19 percent of cases are offenders under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or experiencing mental health issues or disturbances.
The dataset compiled within this research represents only the tip of the iceberg. Not only are there far more women killed than what we could document, but there is a lack of crucial data when femicide is reported or documented by the media and the judicial system. Local media tends to publish a dry report, often copying text from notes provided by local district prosecutor’s offices or police, typically shared through their Telegram channels. Other forms of missing data include victim’s name or initials (lacking in 36 percent of the cases), their age (40 percent), occupation (76 percent of cases), educational background (74 percent), disability status (97 percent), and whether the victims had children, which is unreported in 28 percent of cases.
Thorough and accurate documentation of femicide is essential. It honors the victims of brutal violence against women and girls, ensuring they are not reduced to mere statistics or initials. Making this data accessible will also aid the public and media in following ongoing investigations and prevent femicide statistics and related research from being skewed.
In Uzbekistan, femicide is currently prosecuted under general homicide laws. While judges and prosecutors may consider the victim’s gender as denoting a vulnerable status — such as being physically weaker, financially dependent, or a mother — this is insufficient to improve the overall situation. To foster greater awareness, femicide should be recognized as a distinct crime, specifically addressing circumstances faced by women and girls.
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* In cases of suicide linked to femicide, where women took their own lives due to gender-based violence, and where a perpetrator has been prosecuted or convicted under Article 103 of Uzbekistan’s Criminal Code (which addresses driving someone to suicide), we classify the perpetrator as a murderer.
** We also included informally married partners (unregistered husbands) — men who married the victims according to Islamic customs but did not formalize the marriage legally. These marriages are not recognized by the state, nor are women’s rights protected in case of divorce.
The findings reported in this article are based on data collected through the research project Data4Women: Expanding the Existing Database to Tackle Femicides in Uzbekistan, supported by ECA UN Women and School of Data Kyrgyzstan. The authors would like to thank the research team members Deniz Nazarova and Gulnoza Akhmedova, as well as the team’s mentor, Savia Hasanova, for their valuable contributions. Special thanks are also due to ECA UN Women for organizing and funding the research.
The views and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position or endorsement of ECA U.N. Women and the School of Data Kyrgyzstan.