Since the Mexican Human Rights Commission is working on a report of
femicides in Mexico, but were only able to access data from the police forces of 18 states, I reran the
program I used to analyze the homicides in Ciudad Juárez with data for all femicides.
The only problem is that since I’m using the death certificate database from the vital statistics system, and it takes time to gather all death certificates, I only have data up to the last day of December 2008 (the 2009 vital statistics are supposed to come out during late November/ early December)
The most surprising finding is that in spite of the fact that overall
homicide rates are higher in Mexico than in the US, female homicide rates were lower in Mexico in 2007. Although of course, homicides rates for both men and women have
increased since then due to the drug war.
Rates by state:
As a consequence of the drug war Chihuahua has the highest levels of femicides.
Monthly homicides:
The yearly totals:
The percentage committed with a firearm:
The distributions of the ages of homicide victims grouped by sex:
The percentage in each age group:
Given the low (though increasing) labor-force participation rates for women in Mexico it’s not surprising that most are inactive:
The locations where the bodies were found:
Education:
Marital Status:
It would probably be an interesting topic to compare the marital status of femicide victims to that of the overall population controlling for age
The source code is
available from my GitHub account
