The most dangerous place for a woman in Cameroon is neither the street nor the road: it is her home. Between 17 and 25 August 2026, eight women were killed in Douala and Yaoundé in eight days — at a market, in a hotel, most often in their own homes, at the hands of a man they knew. The press ran headlines about 'tragedies'. The precise word is femicide.
Cameroonian law does not recognise the word. The penal code punishes murder, with no aggravating circumstance when a woman is killed because she is a woman, and the justice system still files these cases as 'crimes of passion' — a phrase that lends the killer an emotional excuse.
The scale can be counted, however poorly. Around fifty women killed in 2023, 67 in 2024, 77 in 2025: more than 200 in three years, according to combined tallies by advocacy groups and the National Forum against Femicide. For 2026, the Ministry of Women's Affairs presented 50 cases for the first four months alone to the National Assembly on 19 June; civil-society groups count more than 60 since January. That is, on average, one woman killed every 72 hours.
That leaves the question official reports skirt: who kills? In almost every documented case, the perpetrator is the husband, the ex-husband or the partner. Of 33 femicides tallied by the press by mid-April, eleven were explicitly tied to a couple's dispute; for the rest, the motive was usually never established, for want of a completed investigation. Human Rights Watch, in a 28 August report, speaks plainly of 'current or former partners'.
This profile is not specifically Cameroonian. The latest global report from UNODC and UN Women, released in late 2025, records 83,000 women and girls intentionally killed worldwide in 2024; six in ten — about 50,000 — were killed by an intimate partner or a relative, one every ten minutes. Everywhere, the home is where most women are killed. Cameroon is no exception; it simply counts less well.
On causes, specialists describe a repeated mechanism. 'We are seeing a growing number of men committing crimes of passion, often linked to jealousy or social tensions,' says sociologist Claude Abé, quoted by Datacameroon. Jealousy, doubts over paternity and refusal of a separation recur as triggers. The common thread is a man's loss of control over the relationship: an announced break-up, a 'no', a newfound financial independence.
The killing rarely follows a first incident. It comes after months of coercion, insults, blows and threats — a trajectory those around the victim often saw coming without stopping it. Minister Marie-Thérèse Abena Ondoa acknowledged as much before parliament: 39% of Cameroonian women aged 15 to 49 report having suffered physical violence, 44% of women in a couple report violence from their partner. Femicide is the tip of that mass.
That mass stays largely invisible because it goes unreported. Fear of reprisals, family pressure to 'settle' the matter, stigma against the woman who files a complaint: the minister herself called the known figures 'the visible tip of the iceberg'. And when a complaint is filed, it runs into poorly trained police stations — Human Rights Watch flags concrete obstacles as far as obtaining a simple protection order.
At the end of the chain, impunity is the rule more than the exception. The rare trials often end in sentences seen as lenient; a mild verdict handed down in April 2025 had already sparked outrage among advocacy groups. Upstream, complaints filed at police stations in Yaoundé went nowhere, and NGOs report demands for money to open an investigation. Voices, including among local notables and religious leaders, still push for an 'amicable' settlement of what are, in fact, lethal acts. A late-August headline summed up the mood: 'when the killing of women becomes routine news in brief'.
Against this, the state responds first with announced texts. The ministry has spent years finalising a bill creating a standalone criminal offence of gender-based violence; a technical validation workshop was held in February 2026, but the text was never tabled in parliament. Alongside it, five opposition bills, brought in June by MP Joshua Osih, wait at the Assembly without being placed on the agenda. The minister hopes for a review during the November session.
The rest is symbolic. A 27 August service memo asks ministry staff to wear red every Friday to denounce violence. Awareness campaigns, training and support for women's economic independence exist — carried mainly by associations such as ACAFEJ, the women lawyers' body led by Yvonne Akoa. None of these efforts creates an emergency shelter place, funds helplines, or trains magistrates to take the first complaint seriously.
Writing femicide into the penal code would change at least one thing: the country would know what it is talking about. Today, each actor — ministry, NGOs, newsrooms — produces its own count, and the gap between them serves as an argument to decide nothing. But a law without an independent observatory, without a protection budget and without trained police would remain one more word: the countries that legislated without resources did not see their curve bend.
In almost every Cameroonian femicide, there is a moment when the worst could have been prevented: a shelved complaint, an ignored threat, a family that told the victim to go back home. As long as those moments cost no one anything, the home will remain, for dozens of Cameroonian women each year, the deadliest place in their lives.
