Thirty women have been murdered in the first month of January in Honduras, on par with last year's statistics.

In Honduras 30 women have been murdered during the month of January according to the Observatory of Violence at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH).

Migdonia Ayestas, director of the observatory, said that femicides in Honduras are "a serious concern." She added that nearly 60 percent of the killings took place in the capital of Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula and their surrounding areas. Victims were between 4 and 70 years of age and most were killed by their partners or a family member.

Over 90 percent of the 31 femicides during January of last year remain unpunished, reported Ayestas. Overall, about 95 percent of the country’s femicides are still unpunished.

Ayestas told reporters that women in particular in Honduras are victims of domestic and sexual violence. In a September 2018 report, the Honduran Statistics of Forensic Medicine said that between January and June of the same year 141 women were violently murdered and that between May 2014 and 2018, 2,020 women were slain, mainly by their partners of loved ones, though some were killed by organized crime members.

The number of femicides in Honduras has lessened over the past few years but remains high and is orphaning children by the thousands. A September report by the Association of Quality of Life (LCA) and the Women's Tribe Against Femicides found that over 17,000 children in the country have been orphaned as a direct result of rampant femicides.

The United Nations has named "machismo", or male superiority that normalizes violence against women in Honduras as one of the leading causes behind the phenomenon of violent femicides.

“[The women have been killed] in a very cruel way and very bloody and that is very worrying,” Alda Facio international expert in gender and human rights in Latin America and member of a U.N. fact finding mission to Honduras last November.