(2017) 1 African Human Rights Yearbook 9 deliberate extrajudicial killings and assaults resulting in unintended deaths. Reports of the UN Special Rapporteur provide useful information on the subject of extrajudicial killings generally. However, they tend not to detail the specific problem of extrajudicial killings of women. The problem is not limited to cases of men killing women, denoted in feminist literature as ‘femicide’, meaning ‘gender-motivated killings founded on particular patriarchal beliefs about women, such as that they are the possessions of men’.25 Feminists consider femicide an extreme manifestation of male dominance and sexism as well as a form of male control over women.26 The term also covers cases where women kill men or other women.27 It is not possible to construct a distinct profile or prototype of either the victim or the perpetrator in the context of extrajudicial killings of women. However, anecdotal evidence and occasional media reports suggest that women rather than men are overwhelmingly the victims of gendered extrajudicial killings. In fact, a 2002 study conducted in South Africa concluded that men are four times more likely to kill their female partners than the other way around.28 Continent-wide statistics on extrajudicial killings specifically are not available. Even at national level it is doubtful that law enforcement agencies keep statistics on extrajudicial killings as such. A 2014 general study on the subject by the Centre of Governance and Human Rights in Cambridge University (CG & HR) provides some useful data on unlawful killings taken from a number of sources, some dependable, some not.29 Extrapolating from that data, one notes that an average of about 3 000 unlawful killings take place each year in Africa. There were 128 623 persons who died in Africa in 2011 as a result of interpersonal violence, compared with 486 493 persons worldwide in the same year. In Sub-Sahara Africa, 15 796 people died in 2011 of collective violence while 86 307 died worldwide in the same year. Drawing from various data sources, CG & HR estimates the 2013 homicide rate in Africa to be 11.4 per 100 000 (slightly over 110 killed each year per one million people). That rate is double the global rate of 5.8 per 100 000. In Africa, the highest homicide rate in 2013 was in Southern Africa (about 30 per 100,000), followed by West Africa (about 16 per 100,000), East Africa (about 8 per 100,000), and North Africa (about 3 per 100,000). These figures paint an interesting broad picture of unlawful killings in Africa and give some general idea of the phenomenon of extrajudicial killing in the continent. They are however not current. More importantly, they are not disaggregated by gender 25 E Bonthuys & C Albertyn (eds) Gender, law and justice (2007) 339. D Russel ‘Introduction: the politics of femicide’ in D Russell & R Harmes (eds) Femicide in global perspectives. 27 S Mills ‘Intimate femicide and abused women who kill: a feminist legal perspective’ in Russell & Harmes (n 26 as above) 71. 28 L Vetten & C Ngwane I Love You to Destruction: Selected Preliminary Findings from Five Year Analysis of Convictions and Sentences for Spousal Killings in Three Gauteng Courts (CSVR: Johannesburg 2003). 29 CG & HR (n 9 above) 6-8. 26