Three women are killed a day by their current or ex husbands, boyfriends, partners or rejected would-be lovers, research by the Gender and Health Research Unit of the SA Medical Research Council found.

The unit has been studying femicide – the murder of women – for the past 20 years. Its latest study was carried out during the first year of Covid, from April 2020 to March 2021.

Although the SAMRC’s estimate of the number of women murdered is lower than that reported by the SA Police Service for the same period, the study gives insight into the perpetrators of the murders in a way the police data does not.

The study estimates femicides as a proportion of the female population of South Africa and each province. In South Africa, the femicide rate is 10.6 per 100,000 women; the Eastern Cape is double that at 21.5 per 100,000 women.

One in three of the women were killed by a firearm. One in six had evidence of sexual violence.

Fewer than one in five of the intimate-partner femicide cases resulted in a conviction.