Black women in the U.S. are six times more likely to be murdered on average than white women, researchers wrote Thursday in The Lancet. The more than two decade long study is the first to break out homicide trends among women between ages 25 and 44, when they are statistically more likely to be murdered, Axios reports.
The study drew on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data covering nearly 32,000 murders of women that occurred between 1999 and 2020. It included data from 30 states that had a sufficient number of homicides for analysis. In 1999, the homicide rate among Black women was 11.6 per 100,000, compared with 2.9 per 100,000 for white women, and 11.6 per 100,000 in 2020, compared with 3 per 100,000 for white women. The greatest regional inequity was found in the Midwest, where Black women were 12 times more likely to be murdered than white women. In the Northeast, Black women were six times likelier to be slain with a gun, and Black women were 20 times more likely to be murdered than white women in 2019 and 2020 in Wisconsin. States with the greatest racial inequities in homicide rates correlated with areas with the most "substantial structural inequities," and with enduring histories of slavery and lynching.