Beyond the Numbers: How Bogotá Is Building Better Evidence on Femicide
“To name them all, to say: this body could be mine. The body of one of my own.”
Sara Uribe (2023), Antígona González
These are the words that open Lives that Matter, Data that Counts: Understanding Femicide in Bogotá, the latest research by Bogotá’s Secretariat for Women’s Affairs through its Observatory of Women and Gender Equity (OMEG), under the District Development Plan Bogotá Camina Segura (Bogotá Walks Safely) 2024–2028. Those words establish the moral premise of the report: every statistic represents a life that might have been saved. They also point toward the study’s central ambition—not simply to document femicide, but to understand the pathways that lead to it so that future deaths can be prevented. CHANGE spoke with Nataly Escobar, a leading qualitative analyst at the Observatory, to better understand the innovative methodology behind the research—and what other cities can learn from it.
The study is remarkable not only because of the evidence it generated, but because of the methodological challenge it set out to solve. Researching femicide presents an inherent ethical dilemma: directly engaging victims’ families or survivors of severe violence can involve significant risks of revictimization, while relying solely on administrative statistics often reveals little about the pathways that lead to the most extreme forms of gender-based violence. Bogotá’s research sought to bridge that gap by producing rich qualitative evidence without depending on primary testimony from those most directly affected.
Rather than relying on a single source of information, the study brought together administrative records from four district institutions—the Secretariats for Health, Social Integration, Women’s Affairs, and Security, Justice and Coexistence. Those records were then complemented by interviews and focus groups involving psychologists, lawyers, social workers, and other professionals who had accompanied women through the city’s response services. This mixed-methods approach was made possible through a collaboration between the Secretariat for Women’s Affairs, the Institute of Public Health, and Mujeres para la Salud de las Mujeres, a research initiative led by the Pontifical Xaverian University and the University of Antioquia.
The result is not simply a richer picture of femicide, but a systems-level understanding of how institutions encounter women before lethal violence occurs—and where opportunities for prevention are being missed.
For Escobar, this represented an important shift in how femicide gets studied. While the city routinely integrates quantitative information from multiple government agencies to monitor gender-based violence, she explained that these reports “revealed only one dimension.” The purpose of this research was to go further—”not only with an academic and research interest, but to strengthen institutional responses… with a preventive approach.”
From evidence to action
The value of this methodology lies not simply in what it revealed, but in what it enables the city to do differently. By reconstructing women’s interactions with different public services over time and combining these records with the experiences of frontline professionals, the study was able to trace trajectories that are rarely captured through statistics alone. Rather than simply documenting cases, it generated evidence that the city can use to strengthen services, but most importantly to make a strong case for coordinated action across the many institutions responsible for preventing and responding to gender-based violence.
For professionals working in gender-based violence, many of these findings may not come as a surprise. What Bogotá has achieved is to transform knowledge and frontline experience into systematic evidence that can support coordinated institutional action across justice, health, child protection, social services, and other actors.
The research identified several opportunities to strengthen prevention:
Femicide occurs along a continuum of violence. Repeated abuse, threats, and conflicts often precede femicide, with many women having already sought support from public institutions before being killed. This provides concrete evidence to strengthen due diligence across institutions, improve follow-up with women identified as being at risk, and reinforce that femicide can, in many cases, be prevented through earlier intervention.
Intimate femicide was the most common form of femicide in Bogotá between 2023 and 2024. Most cases involved someone known to the victim, such as a current or former partner, family member, or another close relation. The findings reinforce the importance of behaviour change initiatives that challenge violent gender norms, taking early warning signs seriously, and avoiding revictimization throughout institutional responses.
Child femicides occurred within family environments and were frequently associated with sexual violence and previous domestic violence. This highlights the need for stronger coordination between justice and child protection systems, as well as differentiated response pathways for girls.
Children are often the hidden victims of femicide. Sons and daughters were the main indirect victims, and in two out of every ten cases they witnessed the killing of their mother. This points to the need for immediate psychosocial support and for systematically incorporating indirect victims into institutional responses.
Femicidal violence affects women differently depending on structural inequalities and discrimination. The research reinforces the importance of adopting an intersectional approach when designing prevention, protection, and support strategies.
Differences between institutional classifications reveal opportunities to strengthen investigations. Comparing the Secretariat’s characterization of cases with those formally classified by judicial authorities highlighted opportunities to improve evidence collection, gender-sensitive investigations, risk assessment, and coordination between city services and justice institutions.
Taken together, these findings do more than describe the characteristics of femicide in Bogotá. They provide a common evidence base that the city can use to convene institutions around concrete actions, strengthen coordination, and improve prevention efforts. As with many of Bogotá’s gender equality initiatives, the objective is not for one institution to act alone, but for multiple agencies to use shared evidence to improve how they work together. The research provides a shared foundation from which these conversations can move forward.
For other cities, Bogotá’s experience offers an important lesson. Integrating data across sectors remains essential, but understanding femicide requires going beyond administrative statistics. Combining institutional records with qualitative evidence from frontline responders offers a practical way to overcome many of the ethical and methodological barriers that have traditionally limited research on femicide while producing findings that are directly relevant for policy and practice.
Rather than simply counting cases, cities can aim to understand trajectories, identify missed opportunities for intervention, and build the coordinated institutional responses needed to prevent femicide before it occurs.
about the Author:
Eloisa Cardona
Project Manager, CHANGE
Eloisa is a project manager for the City Hub and Network for Gender Equity (CHANGE), and has been since 2024. Previously, she worked at Bogotá’s Secretariat for Women’s Affairs, where she contributed to the city’s Care System and broader equity policies, including efforts to address gender-based violence and expand opportunities for women. Eloisa has also consulted for UN Women Colombia, supporting the use of gender-sensitive budgeting and planning tools for local governments across the country.
Eloisa holds a degree in International Relations and a MSc in Development Management from the London School of Economics.
Tags: Bogotá, GBV, Gender Based Violence
City: Bogotá
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