Statistics from Switzerland reveal that 61 per cent of men who kill their wives in the country come from migrant backgrounds, despite migrants only making up around a quarter of the country’s population.
For the last ten years, Switzerland has seen a steady rate of around twenty women murdered by their partners each year.
Swiss Federal Statistical Office figures for 2020 note that 61 per cent of perpetrators of spousal homicide that year were foreigners, while the total foreign population of Switzerland sits at around 25 per cent, a report from the newspaper 20 Minutes states.
Frank Urbaniok, the Chief Medical Officer of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychology of the Canton of Zurich, told the newspaper that “cultural influences play a role and not taking them into account is a mistake.”
Migrants from regions such as North Africa, Turkey, and the Balkan countries are said to be massively overrepresented in spousal homicide statistics. Some have argued that other factors, such as economic issues, also may play a role in the trend.
Domestic violence cases, including homicide, have been seen in many European countries since the height of the 2015 migrant crisis. In May of this year, for example, an Algerian-French dual citizen was accused of shooting his wife and setting her on fire in France.
According to reports, Mounir B. shot his wife several times with a shotgun before he sprayed her with a flammable liquid and set her on fire while she was still alive.
Following his arrest by police, the dual national claimed that he only wanted to “leave marks” by setting her on fire, while a source close to the case claimed that the attack was motivated by the woman wanting to live like a French woman.
Last year, a 37-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker was arrested in the German municipality of Obergünzburg after stabbing his wife to death on a public bus in front of other passengers.
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