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.
