Source: The Guardian
The new census listing women killed by men aims to shed light on a dark subject. But femicide will not stop until we change the culture that supports it.

Last week saw the launch of the Femicide Census , a list of murdered women that digs down into the internet like a terrible well. It was reported at length in this paper, in a piece that detailed what has changed since Karen Ingala Smith first started counting dead women in 2012, and contained tributes to some of the victims, pictured smiling and beautiful, looking off to the side of the photos, shy.

Since that piece was published though, it's likely that in the UK alone, four more women have been murdered by their partners. This thing is going to take some time. The numbers continue to rise. These deaths are being defined not just as murders, but as "femicide", because these are very particular deaths. These 150 women, the word acknowledges, were killed for being women. They were killed for being women because killing women is the endgame of inequality. So the word is important, because it defines their deaths as sexist acts, as tragedies that we are all witness to. The aim of the census is to connect the cases in order to analyse this violence properly, and then to end it.

Patterns are already clear. There were more than 64,000 sexual offences recorded by police last year, Ingala Smith tells me, and 1.4 million domestic violence assaults against women. "When men kill women," she wants to stress, "they are doing so in the context of a society in which men's violence against women is entrenched and systemic. When misogyny, sexism and the objectification of women are so pervasive that they are all but inescapable, can a man killing a women ever not be a sexist act?"

An aside: since the launch, reports of the census have inevitably been pissed on with the question: "What about the men?" Like the commenter's cliché "Not all men", it's a question noisily applied to derail feminist arguments, and sometimes it is worth answering and sometimes, well, no. This time, the what-about-the-menners are claiming that in concentrating solely on female victims the census is itself sexist. But when men kill their partners they have usually been abusing them for years. When women kill, they themselves have usually been abused. In the decade up to 2012, 93.9% of adults who were convicted of murder were men. So.

There is still a long way to go. Notably absent from the census are any details of the victims of abuse who kill themselves. Just as Ingala Smith took on that forbidding task in 2012, after suffering abuse herself Karen Blatchford (at the Twitter account @10womenaweek ) is now attempting to collate suicidal women. Earlier this month 23-year-old Kylie Payne, who said she'd been raped by a fellow patient, was found hanging in a mental health unit. At the end of January, after 22-year-old Anita Kubicka left a suicide note on her voicemail, an inquest heard that her family believed her boyfriend had been monitoring her phone.

But Jesus. For all the cautious steps forward, the thing that always stays with me after talking to Karen Ingala Smith, despite her positivity, is the despairing realisation that in order for this killing to end, we have to change the culture in which the violence happens. Individual abusers might be rehabilitated (is that the word?) and individual women rescued (is that the word?), but until we are all equal – until women are no longer thought of as lesser – there will be another Jason Hughes (who battered and cut his ex, Natalie, to "make her look ugly") standing behind a door with a dumbbell in his hand.

So yes. Women's Aid 's census is important, the word is important, public acknowledgement of the women whose deaths might have been prevented is important, but mumbling away behind it all is the even bigger struggle. And that is on all of us.