The Violence Policy Center (VPC) released a study analyzing 25 years of data, from 1996 to 2020, from its annual report, When Men Murder Women.
The center says it has been forced to suspend the state rankings usually contained in the report because of the unreliability of 2021 federal crime data as the result of the FBI's ongoing transition from its Uniform Crime Reports Summary Reporting System to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
During the report's 25-year publication history, 33 states had rates of females killed by males in single victim/single offender incidents that placed them among the jurisdictions with the 10 highest rates for a given year.
Eight states ranked in the top 10 in more than half of the past 25 years: Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
Virtually all of these states are southern or southwestern states and the majority have higher rates of household firearm ownership.
--Alaska was in the top 10 states for 18 out of the last 25 years and has consistently ranked number one or two among states with the highest rates in the last decade.
--Arkansas was in the top 10 states for 14 out of the last 25 years.
--Louisiana was in the top 10 states every year with the exception of 2008.
--Nevada was in the top 10 states for 23 out of the past 25 years.
A total of 45,817 women were murdered by males in single victim/single offender incidents between 1996 and 2020 as reported to the FBI UCR’s Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR).
Of these, 29,503 victims were white (64 percent), 14,038 were Black (31 percent), 1,216 were Asian or Pacific Islander (three percent), and 522 were American Indian/Alaska Native (one percent). Information about race was missing for 538 victims (one percent).
National homicide rates of women killed by men decreased slightly between 1996 and 2014, and then began increasing in 2015.
Over the past 25 years, 92 percent of female victims knew their male killers. Among female victims who knew their male killers, 61 percent were murdered by an intimate partner.
Fifty-three percent of female victims killed by males were killed with a firearm, the majority of which were handguns.