The Femicide Census usually reports on women killed by men annually, but we had incomplete data from 2019, which continued into 2020 and beyond, largely due to the pandemic’s impact on the court system. We’re finally publishing the findings for each of those years this weekend. It may seem surprising that during a time when men’s violence against women led mainstream news for a while, we recorded two consecutive years of falls in the numbers of women killed by men. In fact, 2020 finds the lowest numbers of women killed by men since our records began in 2009. This is largely driven by a reduction in the number of women recorded as killed by current or former partners. For the 10 years ending in 2018 on average, 89 women (62% of all women killed by men) were killed by current or former partners every year. In 2019 this was 65 women (51% of all women killed by men) and in 2020, the number was 57 women (51% of all women killed by men).
We know, thanks to Karen Ingala Smith’s project Counting Dead Women, that the number of women killed by a male suspect increases again in 2021 to 141, higher than the number of women killed in 2019 and 2020. We must therefore ask what happened in 2021 that could have a discernible impact and how should that inform policy-makers, particularly around support for women in relationships with violent men.
At the end of March 2020, the country went into lockdown in response to Covid. During the first week , 10 women were killed by men in the UK. Between April and June 2020, there was a 65% increase in calls to the National Domestic Abuse Helpline, when compared with the first three months of the year. So, we saw increased reporting of domestic abuse but by the end of the year, a fall in the number of women killed by partners or ex-partners compared with what we usually see.
The Femicide Census has consistently shown that separation is a risk factor for intimate-partner femicides, or more accurately, a trigger for violent, abusive and/or controlling men. Between 2018 and 2019, on average 43% of all women killed by current or former partners had left or were in the process of leaving.
We believe the real figures may be higher because women don’t always tell anyone that they’re planning to leave and it doesn’t always get reported in court. In fact, what is reported in court is often led by the accused killer’s defence narrative and he may give a very different picture about what was going on in the relationship, compared with his victim were she able to tell her side of the story. In 2020, evidence of separation was found in far fewer cases, reported in 37% of intimate-partner femicides. Looking at the numbers alone, this falls from an average of 38 a year to 21. Lockdown and the restrictions to movement made it more difficult for women to leave abusive men, instead they were often stuck with him. It is possible that this reduced the numbers of women killed by the men they were trying to leave.
We believe our data shows that providing real and tangible pathways to safety for women leaving violent men is critical if the government is serious about protecting women from the most extreme outcomes of men’s violence. All too often the law seriously and fatally fails women who need to leave. Injunctions need robust enforcement for breach including the use of tags to monitor men so that women can stay in their homes; violence and abuse needs to result in appropriate sanctions so that men’s violence and attempts to coercively control never go unpunished; refuges need increased and sustainable funding so there is always space to go if women and their families have to leave; and the family court system needs to address men’s use and abuse of the system by enabling control through child contact and finances.
Women should never feel that it is safer to stay with an abusive man than to leave him. If the government is serious about tackling violent men then the full force of measures already available, yet woefully funded and resourced, need to finally achieve the result they were designed for. They can work in many circumstances, but not all. When they fail, it is too often fatal.
Clarrie O’Callaghan and Karen Ingala Smith are the founders of Femicide Census
