Domestic violence has been criminalised in Uzbekistan for two years. Now I investigate the extent to which gender-based violence continues to persist despite this measure, and I discuss the recent demands to legally recognise femicide as a separate criminal offence.
In April 2023, following the examples of Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Ukraine, Uzbekistan became the fifth country in Eastern Europe and Central Asia to criminalise domestic violence. However, while domestic violence against women and children has been legally recognised in Uzbekistan for the last two years, femicide as a term remains unwritten and absent in the law, currently bearing no specific legal definition. Therefore, while a woman’s gender may have served as an aggravating factor that resulted in her killing, the perpetrator would not be charged on this account. Instead, gender-based violence and murders are prosecuted under homicide laws such as “premeditated murder”. The vast majority of crimes against women continue to be registered in this way, dismissing the inherently misogynistic motivations for such crimes.
The term femicide was first coined in 1976 by sociologist Diana E.H. Russell at the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women, and is defined as “the killing of a woman or girl, in particular by a man and on account of her gender”. Russell later added to this definition to include the specification that it is“the murder of women by men motivated by hatred, contempt, pleasure, or a sense of ownership of women.” In 2022, the UN officially defined femicide as“killings of women committed by an intimate partner or other family members (e.g., honor killings) and committed by other known or unknown perpetrators with a particular course of conduct or in certain contexts indicative of gender motivation.”
The rapid increase in Femicide and Gender-based violence in recent months
Prior to the criminalisation of domestic violence in 2023, Tashkent had passed a law in 2019 which aimed to reduce violence and harassment directed at women. This ensured that women who sought support were able to receive protection orders for one month. On average, 40,000 women continue to apply for these protective orders every year, with 85 percent of cases being filed against close family members. In 2021 alone, 1,500 women sought protection orders against their mother-in-law.
Yet despite the adoption of these laws and protective measures, the number of domestic violence incidents continues to grow. The majority of cases are recorded in the Tashkent (9,414), Bukhara (5,612), Kashkadarya (5,268) and Andijan (4,808) regions, with 930 women from these regions seeking and receiving repeated protection orders.
Domestic violence has historically been the most prevalent form of abuse faced by women in Uzbekistan. In a recent study, 26% of participants noted that the spousal abuse they had been subjected to was triggered by their husband perceiving them as having behaved disrespectfully towards their in-laws.
Earlier this year, the press secretary of the Supreme Court of Uzbekistan, Aziz Abidov, claimed that in the first six months of this year, more than 6,000 people were prosecuted for domestic violence and sexual harassment in the country. However, only 65 out of these 6,000 have been imprisoned. Other statistics show that in the first half of 2025, cases of harassment and violence against women registered in Uzbekistan have increased by 121% when compared to the same period last year, highlighting that although domestic violence has been criminalised, cases have surged. This aligns with predictions made by human rights activist Dilfuza Kurolova, who firmly argues that the criminalisation of domestic violence will not have a great impact on reducing femicides.
Bunafshi Fayziddinzoda, the Chairman of the Committee on Women and Family Affairs, outlines that the most common causes of physical violence in the home include misunderstandings between spouses, unreasonable jealousy, interference by third parties, and illnesses suffered by one of the spouses.
In 46% of domestic violence cases women have been killed by an intimate partner, and in 15% of cases women have been killed by a close relative, including, but not limited to, mothers, fathers, stepfathers, brothers and parents-in-law. Additionally, nine out of ten women murdered in Uzbekistan are victims to male perpetrators. Following the aforementioned UN definition, these incidents ought to be considered and treated as femicides, yet despite the prevalence of such a crime, femicide is still not legally recognised as a term or separate crime in Uzbekistan.
Limited data and recognition of femicide
The absence of a legal definition and the lack of recognition of femicide has consequently led to a lack of documentation and crucial data. This means that, while incidents of domestic violence are criminalised, cases of women being killed as a result of domestic violence or femicide, are not being treated as distinct crimes by the media or the judicial system. Instead, these murders are continuing to fall under the broader crime of homicide, and are often registered as “premeditated murders”.
Premeditated murder has accounted for 57% of women’s murders, including cases when the aggravating factor for the killing was the woman being pregnant. In most cases, these murders resulted from women not birthing sons, ‘emasculating their husbands’, not competently performing household responsibilities, initiating a divorce, being bullied by their mothers-in-law, or simply as a result of systematic domestic violence enacted by their husbands.
Tashkent does not publish statistics on premeditated murder of victims, circumstances of crimes, or motivations. Crucial information that is missing in most of these crime reports includes the victim’s name or initials (undocumented in 36% of cases), the victim’s age (undocumented in 40% of cases), the victim’s occupation and employment status (undocumented in 75% of cases), the victim’s educational background (undocumented in 74% of cases), the victim’s disability status (undocumented in 97% of cases), and whether the victims had children (undocumented in 28% of cases). This not only erases the victim, reducing them to a mere statistic, but conveniently erases all crucial information that would point to the nature of the crime being femicide.
Additionally, almost a quarter of crimes that should be considered an indirect form of femicide fall under the label of “driving someone to suicide” and the cause of these women’s deaths is registered as “suicides”. Women killing themselves as a result of domestic violence persists. The Ministry for ‘Support of Mahalla and Family’ claims that almost 600 women in Uzbekistan commit suicide each year, with the primary factor being conflicts with their husbands or in-laws. During the Covid-19 lockdown, when women were confined with their husbands and in-laws at home, 900 women committed suicide. Female activists at the Moscow Women’s Museum’s FEMICID.NET project claim that these cases of women being driven to suicide as a result of having endured years of psychological and physical torture, are an indirect form of femicide.
Femicide in recent media reports
The project “Nemolchy. Uz”, headed by Irina Matvienko, aims to destigmatise news about domestic violence and femicide – which has only been reported and considered ‘news worthy’ in recent years. The main Russian-language news outlet gazeta.uz first began reporting such cases in 2018.
While more cases are reaching the headlines, issues abound regarding the nature and tone used by media outlets when reporting women’s murders. A recent example of such problematic reporting occurred when the Uzbek Radio Liberty service “Ozodlik” reported on a case of femicide where a woman was stabbed with a knife. The report focused on the murder weapon and the familial conflicts which led to the victim’s stabbings, rather than the gendered nature of the crime.
The Uzbek-language media has also been accused of victim-blaming in their news reports regarding the murder of women at the hands of their husbands. When motivations for the killing included a husband’s ‘jealousy’, these women’s murders were reported under what were intended to be humorous headlines, such as “Samarkand’s Othello Killed His Wife”.
Recent calls for the legal recognition of femicide as a separate crime
While femicide is now reported in the media, the term lacks legal legitimacy. International human rights organisations are campaigning for the recognition of femicide as a distinct crime that exclusively threatens women’s lives. Amnesty International’s report, “Eastern European and Central Asian Women Need Protection from Violence in Crisis and Usual Times,” noted that “the situation is further exacerbated by a sharp increase in traditionalist, patriarchal and overtly misogynistic political rhetoric” and is working to adopt legislation that supports women and improves their current status under the law.
Other campaigns include that of Aigerim Kussainkyzy, a feminist activist and researcher based in Kazakhstan, who stated that for murder-related crimes in Uzbekistan “we only have article 99 on homicide, which does not differentiate based on gender or any other intersectional characteristics”. This is problematic as it dismisses the possibility of a woman’s gender as the cause of her murder. Kussainkyzy is part of the research group “The femicide research in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan”,which is a joint initiative of UN Women, the School of Data, and Data against Feminicide, and works under the regional programme “Making Every Woman and Girl Count”. Through her research, she aims to provide suggestions and alterations to policymakers, and works with law enforcement to embed tougher anti-femicide policies.
Despite this, Amnesty International researchers still argue that “much remains to be done to implement the new law, prevent domestic violence, and overcome patriarchal attitudes in society”. Nonetheless, these combined efforts highlight the potential Uzbekistan has for progress.
Many hope that Uzbekistan will continue to work with researchers and international human rights groups to improve their current legislation and reduce their distressing crime figures.
Any nation, society or person that degrades a woman’s status and dignity steps in the way of progress and human rights.