About 40 women a year still murdered in the Netherlands

A year after the femicide marches in Rotterdam, their organiser Dolle Mina says the protests achieved results but did not go far enough. Joice Alves dos Santos of Dolle Mina Rotterdam says society itself now has to change.

Alves dos Santos says the marches drew attention to femicide, including among people who had never heard the word before. She says that attention has also reached politics. "And yet it is not going well, because there are simply still too many victims," she says.

CBS reported earlier this year that 38 women were murdered in the Netherlands in 2025. That is slightly fewer than in 2024.

The CBS figures show no lasting fall over the past ten years. One detail has not changed in 15 years: in just over half of cases, the suspected perpetrator was the woman's partner or ex-partner.

Alves dos Santos says the figures are not even complete. Some deaths under suspicious circumstances are not recorded as murder, she says.

In her view the issue no longer lies only with politics and the justice system. "We have to go through a culture change as a society too," she says. She argues that women are still too often seen as weaker or even inferior, and calls femicide the tip of the iceberg, with layers below it that range from domestic violence to a sexist joke in the football canteen.