It is the grimmest of roll calls: to mark International Women’s Day, the names of women killed by men over the past year are read out in the House of Commons by Jess Phillips MP, now the minister for violence against women and girls. This year the number stood at 95. It was accompanied by a report by the charity Femicide Census setting out the characteristics of the 2,000 killings of women by men since 2009 where criminal justice proceedings have been completed.
The charity compiles the list annually, and without this important work, based on freedom of information requests to the police and extensive media monitoring, we would have no national oversight of the number of women known to be killed by men in the UK. Since 2009, it has amounted to one every three days on average. And these are just the cases we know about; the campaign group Killed Women estimates that there could be as many as 130 “hidden homicides” a year where a woman is killed by a partner or family member but the death is recorded as accidental or suicide.
Male violence against women and girls is the most toxic symptom of a patriarchal society that is riven with gender inequalities. In recent decades, despite some important changes, too little has been done to address the scourge of men physically and emotionally abusing women and children.
The data shows that the most dangerous place for these women is behind closed doors: for seven out of 10 women killed by men, it happens in their own home. Six in 10 are killed by their partners; almost one in 10 by their son; just 9% are killed by a stranger.
Work by the criminologist Dr Jane Monckton Smith has found that men do not kill women they know out of the blue: there is almost always a pattern to femicide that includes a pre-relationship history of stalking or abuse; a romance quickly developing into a serious relationship that becomes dominated by coercive control; a trigger that threatens the man’s control, such as a threat to leave the relationship or the relationship ending; and a resulting escalation in his control, such as stalking or threatening suicide.
These behaviour patterns mean that such killings should be preventable. Yet we still have a criminal justice system that – despite recent reforms – sometimes allows men who kill women to be treated lightly by pleading manslaughter on the basis of loss of control.
Femicide Census argues that this appears to constitute “a state-sanctioned means by which previously violent men can limit their liability for fatal violent acts”. In many of the cases reviewed in the report, the qualifying trigger for a loss of control was the victim leaving an abusive relationship or entering a new relationship. The most dangerous moment for a victim is the point at which she leaves her male partner, or indicates a desire to leave. It is perverse that this aspect of the law appears in practice to make allowances for men who kill women exercising their right to leave an abusive and violent relationship. And too little is spent on monitoring men with a known history of violence against women, including those known to be repeat offenders.
The Labour government has an ambitious target to halve male violence against women and girls. But it has yet to define what would constitute success against this, let alone set out a properly resourced plan for keeping women and children safe from the dangerous men who kill. Only that can bring the rate of femicide down.
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