I started counting dead women in January 2012. In the first three days of the year, eight women in the UK were killed through men's violence. Eight dead women in three days: three were shot, two stabbed, one strangled, one smothered and one - 87-year-old Kathleen Millward - was beaten to death by 15 blunt force trauma injuries inflicted by her own grandson.
Eight women aged between 20 and 87; their killers, five men aged between 19 and 48, were husbands, partners, boyfriends or exes, a sister's partner, an aunt's partner, a robber and a grandson. I was outraged that these murders were being reported as isolated incidents - that connections weren't being made about the occurrence and impact of men's violence.
I didn't intend to start a campaign, but once I'd started counting and naming the women, I didn't feel able to stop. Initially I focused on women killed through domestic violence, but the boundaries of who I was counting were continually tested. At the end of the year, I tried to define who I was counting and who I wasn't, using the term ‘gender related murder’. I was trying to express that fatal male violence against women goes beyond ‘domestic violence’; that there is more to men's misogynistic murders of women than the widely used phrase ‘two women a week are killed by partners or ex-partners’, and that socially constructed gender has an influence on men's violence against women that goes beyond domestic violence.
Nearly three years after I started counting, I now include all women aged 14 and over who have been killed by men in the UK and UK women killed overseas: regardless of the relationship between the woman and the man who killed her; regardless of what is known, not known or assumed about his motive; regardless of how he killed her and who else he killed at the same time; regardless of the verdict reached when the case gets to court in our justice system created by men, which repeatedly delivers anything but justice to women. I do it because I believe that - in a world where sexism and misogyny are so pervasive that they're all but inescapable - a man killing a woman is always a sexist act, a fatal enactment of patriarchy.
Because I'm counting dead women, I've been able to make connections that others simply wouldn't know about. It’s not just that in the UK men killed 126 women in 2012, 144 in 2013 and between January and the end of September this year at least 112 women have been killed through suspected male violence. It's that 37 of these have been women who have been killed by their sons, and that 20 elderly women have been killed in so-called botched robberies or muggings. On 4 September this year, 82-year-old Palmira Silva was beheaded in London, but most people didn't know that she was the third women to have been beheaded in London in less than six months. I did, though. On the 3 June 2014, Tahira Ahmed, 38, had also been decapitated. Her husband, Naveed Ahmed, 41, was charged with her murder; and in April, Judith Nibbs, 60, was decapitated, allegedly by her estranged husband Dempsey Nibbs, 67.
The Home Office currently records and publishes data on homicide victims’ gender and the relationship of the victim to the principal suspect - but it does so in a way that does not reveal the sex of the killer. We may be able to see how many women were killed by a partner and assume that most of them were male, but the records don't show us that most women killed by their child are killed by a son, or that most women killed by a relative, acquaintance or stranger are actually killed by a male relative, acquaintance or stranger. The Home Office records don't allow us to make connections across the different forms of men's fatal violence; in fact, the official government statistics hide the extent to which the problem of fatal violence is a problem of male violence.
This is significant, because it's by making the connections between instances of fatal male violence against women that we can get a true understanding of what is going on. I started this project because I wanted to remember and commemorate the women who have been killed by men, to raise awareness and motivate others to speak out and oppose men's violence. That is still important to me, but I also want to contribute to reducing, if not ending, men's violence against women and girls. If this is going to happen, we need to name and analyse male violence. So I started a petition calling for a ‘femicide observatory’, a fit-for-purpose, comprehensive record of fatal male violence against women.
I've been working with Women's Aid and Freshfields solicitors to develop a database of all women killed by men between 2009 and 2013, but we're going to need funding to support the development and maintenance of the sort of records that we'd like to keep. We want proper records, which we could then make accessible to policy makers and academics, in order to build a better understanding of the social, cultural and psychological issues that enable men's violence against women.
To show your support and add your voice to my call for a proper record, please sign my petition 'Stop Ignoring Dead Women'. Men's fatal violence against women is not a series of isolated incidents – it's connected and systemic. Men's violence against women is both a symptom and cause of inequality between women and men. Men's violence against women affects all women, directly or indirectly. And we need to stop it.