Homicide means murder, but actually it comes from the Latin for MAN – Hominis. This means that literally homicide means the murder of men only. Women are an add-on. To cater for this, there is a new word called femicide which means the murder of women by men.
Now it becomes a much more important crime although officially, femicide, the killing of women and girls because they are female, is not a specific offence in the UK. Women are no longer add-ons as victims, but are seen as important victims. Then we look at who is killing women.
Before I go any further, I will face up to the fact that women can be violent in domestic relationships, but it is an extremely small percentage. Studies have shown that women who are violent in domestic situations are normally reacting to violence so it is either through fear or self-defence.
In the worldwide look at murder, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 78% of victims are men. These are men killing men. This is because men are more likely to be in that world than women. In the domestic world it is a very different picture.
Wednesday the 25th November was the International Day for the Elimination of violence against women.
On that day was the latest publication in the UK of the Femicide Census, which analyses the shocking killings of women and girls from the age of 14 to 100, at the hands of men and boys, over a ten year period from 2009-2018.
It demonstrated that on average a woman is murdered every three days, and this disgraceful statistic has not changed during those ten years.
The police themselves have said “There is no risk to the wider community .” In the old days they would just call it “ a domestic” and do nothing about it at all.
Over this ten year period, the average of women killed in a domestic situation is 145 a year.
This report states: ”Patterns of male violence are persistent and enduring”.
Judith Nibbs a mother of five and married to the same man for 30 years, said to her colleagues at work, “IF I’M NOT IN ON FRIDAY, I MIGHT BE DEAD.”
She was beheaded by her husband, Dempsey Nibbs. She had obviously lived in terror with this man trying to bring up her children and to protect them from him.
Women’s organisations have talked for years about consent, body image, pornography, and media influence.
You find a lot of this stuff on Facebook, where, for example , someone put on a Facebook page a body of a woman wearing a see-through tee-shirt, to make a joke about how he knows what he will get the wife for Christmas. This is not appropriate humour as it denigrates women.
There has to come a time when men have to learn about the objectification of women. Men actually have to stand up and be counted so that they will not protect other men who are committing these crimes.
Karen Ingala Smith, chief executive of NIA, a sexual and domestic violence charity and Clarissa O’Callaghan, a former solicitor, published the first Femicide Census in 2016. Three annual reports have followed since. These reports have revealed some damning conclusions which should have been noticed by the authorities.
Of the 1425 victims, almost half were killed by a sharp instrument and horrible extra violence and this is called “overkilling”. Most women are killed by stabbing. The next most common method is strangulation.
62% of women were killed by a current or former partner, mostly in their own homes. 4 out of 10 women were planning to leave when they were killed.
In 59% of women, there was a history of regular abuse including coercive control, stalking, harassment and physical, financial and emotional persecution.
The police had received reports of abuse of at least one third of these women. Nothing was done and these women died anyway.
The Femicide Census was started in 2012 because a young woman, Kirsty Treloar, had reported an abusive boyfriend to the police. They did nothing about it but referred her to Karen Ingala Smith at NIA. In January 2012, Kirsty was killed by this boyfriend, stabbed 29 times.
This was when Smith decided to research women murdered through domestic abuse, she was horrified by the high numbers and that is how the Counting Dead Women website started. This later led to the Femicide Census.
The reality is that, of course, not all men commit violence against women in domestic situations, but when it happens it does occur across all backgrounds. No background is exempt.
As I said before the men who do not do domestic abuse should stand up and not consider it a joke, or make jokes demeaning women or think that laddish behaviour is acceptable, expecting women to laugh when they are not funny and actually offensive.
This sounds harsh, but we look to men to help us not harm us. While homicide in the UK is on the decline, femicide is on the rise. Our society thinks that male predatory behaviour is normal and they learn it from an early age.
The easiest way is to blame the victim and there are a myriad of excuses to do that.
This violence against women will not disappear until we look at sex inequality and the beliefs, attitudes and institutions that prop it up and the misogyny or woman hatred that is seen as normal.
Unless governments address these factors and attitudes, violence against women, girls and children will continue.
