With neat rows of photographs of smiling women old and young, of all backgrounds, classes and creeds, it might be pages from a social media Web site or something from an advertising campaign. Hundreds of women, captured in a moment of vitality and life, at home, at parties, on holidays or with friends.
Behind the pictures lie stories of women who, beyond their families, have been remembered chiefly as statistics.
However, they should be linked, campaigner Karen Ingala Smith says, because they were all killed by men.
Illustration: Mountain People
Tomorrow a database is to be launched online, titled “Femicide Census: Profiles of Women Killed by Men.” It is a project designed to force a recognition of the scale and significance of male violence against women and is the culmination of several years of work by Ingala Smith, who began a grim and time-consuming task of counting Britain’s murdered women and putting their names on her own blog in 2012.
There were 126 women killed through male violence that year, 143 in 2013 and 150 last year.
Scouring newspaper Web sites and police reports, she pieced together what she says is an important pattern that was not being represented in the way crime and other statistics are collated. It became a personal tribute, too.
“It’s really hard sometimes and I admit I’ve had a cry now and again. A photo captures a moment in time that trials don’t. A moment of the person who that woman was. What suffering she endured — and the suffering that continues for their family — is so very hard to grasp,” Smith said.
KEEPING A TALLY
The database launched by Smith — chief executive of London-based domestic violence charity Nia Project — together with Women’s Aid and the legal firm Freshfields, will mean a public tally of the dead is kept in a more formal manner, using police statistics as well as court reports.
The site will also be used to store as much information as possible on the background and the crime, available for approved subscribers — the first time such details have been held together — to make research and studies easier.
The British Home Office now records and publishes data on homicide victims and the relationship of the victim to the principal suspect and sex of the victim. However, it does not have the sex of the killer or connect different forms of male violence against women.
The Femicide project will have to gain some of its information through presenting freedom of information requests to police forces every six months — something Smith hopes might be avoided if they can be persuaded to collate their figures in a different way, allowing easier access to statistics on men killing women.
Things have improved dramatically in the UK since the days when “wife-beating” was the stuff of jokes and marital rape was not a criminal offence — it finally became illegal for a man to rape his wife in 1991.
The UK government has now made it mandatory for a “domestic violence homicide review” to be held every time someone is killed in that manner — although the results are often buried away on local authority Web sites.
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
Refuge, the national charity for abused women and children, has just launched a campaign calling on the government to open a public inquiry to investigate why victims of domestic violence are still not getting the protection they deserve from the police and other state agencies.
Women’s Aid points to the increasing pressure on help services for victims of domestic abuse — its survey found that more than 74,000 women sought help in 2013 and last year.
The same report said that on just one day last year, 112 women and 84 children were turned away from refuges because they could not be accommodated and 369 women were denied help from outreach services in the community because of a lack of capacity.
The charity believes lives are lost every year because there is no national network of women’s refuges.
Smith said men and women have to confront the situation.
“I want us to stop seeing the killings of women by men as isolated incidents: to put them together and to see the connections and patterns; to highlight what a big issue it is; and to make it feel real for people,” she said.
“Many people will now know the statistic for people killed by a partner or ex-partner — that two women a week in England and Wales die that way. But if you humanize that, and you can see that roll of names, then hopefully more people might think: ‘Well, there is a pattern going on here.’ If we continue, as I think most of us are, to deny that this is something that’s happening, then we will never tackle it,” she said.
SEEING PATTERNS
The issue is not confined to women who have been killed by their partners or former partners in incidents of domestic violence, campaigners say, but extends to all women killed by men.
“I started off counting women who had been killed in domestic violence after I noticed that, in the first three days of January 2012, eight women had been killed,” Smith said. “But then I started to realize there was a pattern in other deaths of women at men’s hands. What shocked me was seeing the women killed by a male child. It’s still quite rare, but we certainly don’t see daughters killing their fathers the way we have mothers being killed.”
Even if a mugger or burglar causes the death of an elderly woman, she said, if there is a pattern of that man targeting vulnerable women, it arguably puts him in the same category as a domestic abuser.
When Ahmad Otak in 2012 stabbed and killed Samantha Sykes, 18, and Kimberley Frank, 17, Otak was not the boyfriend of either of them, but of Kimberley’s sister.
Smith said it was this case that made her realize the issue was wider than domestic violence. She said the case made her realize such crimes were just as much about male violence against women as if the perpetrator had been a boyfriend or husband.
And for those who say: “Where can I find the page for dead men?” Smith said she would go ahead and make one, “but no one can change the fact that overwhelmingly, the victim of domestic violence is a woman.”
Official figures show that, between 2002 and 2012, 6.1 percent of adults who were convicted of murder were women, leaving 93.9 percent men.
Although Smith acknowledges that violence is perpetrated by women sometimes and that it should be taken seriously, it is not the major issue.
ATTACKING THE ROOTS
“People are falling for the line that women can be violent too,” Smith said. “Men kill men, obviously. But nearly always when a woman kills a man, the woman herself has been a victim of his violence or abuse. When men kill women, they tend to have been perpetrators of violence against that woman and other women for years. It isn’t good enough just to look at the police either. They are most definitely improving enormously in how they tackle domestic violence.”
“If we had a perfect police force, men would still kill women. The criminal justice system should not be seen as the place where this has to be tackled. It’s deeper, right down in the way we raise our children, the girls dressed in pink and called princesses. Told by their parents that the boy hit them in the playground just because he secretly likes them. What sort of message is that? We need to send clear messages to boys and girls. We need to take a step back and look at how sexist our society is,” Smith said.
She also said the “invisibility” of violence against women is exacerbated by a “hierarchy of the dead.”
“Everything supports the idea of a single incident; there is a widespread connection problem. A pretty young white woman murdered by the ugly bad man is the preferred narrative — I can say from my experience how much harder it is to find a picture that has been published when the victim is a black woman — and that is wrong and it is sad. That is why I think a database is so important,” Smith said.
SEARCH FOR SOLUTIONS
Women’s Aid chief executive Polly Neate said: “It is critical that government continues to show leadership in acknowledging the scale and significance of male violence against women. At the moment the cases that, when taken collectively, demonstrate this scale and significance are too often buried in news reports and statistics, which serve to minimize their collective impact.”
“We will never improve our understanding of violence against women, how to deal with it and how to prevent it, unless we first identify it,” Neate said. “This campaign is an important step towards that understanding.”
Neate said that if it was left to individual feminist campaigners to highlight the problem of male violence and its roots in the culture of misogyny, the debate would simply be too polarized.
“Some claim that simply acknowledging the epidemic nature of male violence means that all men are being stereotyped as perpetrators. We call on the government to take a lead and collect and publicize statistics on female victims of male violence to move the debate towards a purposeful search for solutions,” she said.
Last week Smith added the latest two names to join the rows of photographs of dead women. Last month, seven women were killed. On Feb. 1, Christina Randell was found dead in a Hull hotel room. A man, 51, said to be well-known to her “in a domestic context,” was charged with murder. On the same day, Joanne Harrison, 20, of Wigan was stabbed to death. Christopher Foley, 23, has been charged with murder.
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