Femicide partner femicide rate of one woman every two days. Yearly, India's government reports the deaths of 5,000 woman to this cause, but this number is believed to be grossly underestimated due to the under-reported prevalence of honor killings and dowry-related murders. However, intimate partner homicide only accounts for 5–8% of all murders of men, disproportionately affecting women to a large extent, making it a gendered problem. In fact, women are disproportionately represented as victims of all family violence including incest, sexual harassment, rape and battering. These acts of violence are found to escalate over time within a relationship, possibly resulting
Femicide motive is not always empirically possible to be determined, and so must be removed from the qualification for femicide in order to gather data. On the other hand, authors Desmond Ellis and Walter Dekesedery take a different approach by viewing the definition for femicide as "the intentional killing of females by males". These feminists require that femicide always be intentional unlike the inclusion of covert femicide in Diana Russell's definition. Most of these definitions imply that the perpetrator of femicide is a man, but South Asian feminists differ in their definition stating that femicide is "the intentional killing of females