Feminicides | In search of lost lives

Official data on feminicide cases are missing around the world. Activists have decided to take matters into their own hands.

Philippe Robitaille-Grou
special collaboration

September 6, 2022. In the early morning, a woman is stabbed in her home by her partner in Uruguay. The fifth feminicide in a month in the country.

For Helena Suárez Val, a doctoral student specializing in feminicide and digital activism at the University of Warwick, this is one tragedy too many. From her home in Uruguay, she scans all the publications related to the event on the web. It classifies the information in a table. Woman’s name: Salome. Age: 38 years old. Location: Talar district, in the city of Pando. Category: murder of trans woman. Etc.

This exercise has been the researcher’s daily routine since 2015. Helena Suárez Val is behind the Feminicidio Uruguay project, aimed at overcoming the lack of official data on feminicides in her country. Every day, she scours local newspapers and social media, looking for new reported cases. “Collecting this data is really sad and frustrating,” she says in English. But at the same time, it’s a way of feeling that I’m doing something. »

Hundreds of initiatives like that of Helena Suárez Val have come to life over the past few years, in response to government inaction: Women Count USA in the United States, Féminicides par accomplis ou ex in France, Femicide.net in Russia… Based on local news or judicial and police documents, these activists identify and analyze cases of feminicide in their country.

For Canadian data

According to Myrna Dawson, professor of sociology at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, this work is necessary to prevent new tragedies. Adequate documentation makes it possible, in particular, to identify the factors likely to put the lives of women and girls at risk. “Femicide is a specific problem and requires specific data, research and solutions,” she stresses.

In Canada, “there is no official documentation of femicide, largely because there is also no official recognition of femicide as a significant social issue in the country,” says Myrna Dawson. .

A Statistics Canada survey collects information on homicides in the population every year. “But this police-reported data is insufficient when it comes to determining whether it is a sex- or gender-related murder,” she explains. This is partly because data collection instruments were historically designed to study male-by-male homicides. »

In 2017, Professor Dawson created the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability (CFOJR) with the goal of improving the literature on femicide and raising awareness of this issue. The Observatory’s latest #CallItFeminicide report reports 173 women and girls violently killed across the country in 2021, or nearly one every two days.

United for the cause

“The data is a way to draw attention to this issue, but also to remember these women and their lives,” emphasizes Helena Suárez Val.

To support the initiatives that collect it, the Uruguayan researcher has surrounded herself with two other activists: Catherine D’Ignazio, director of the Data+Feminism Lab at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Silvana Fumega, head of the Research and Policy at the Latin American Open Data Initiative (ILDA). Together, they created the Data Against Feminicide project.

One of the aspects of the project: the development of technologies based on artificial intelligence. An alert system has been trained by machine learning to recognize any article related to femicide. It scans local newspapers continuously and sends emails to its users to report the latest cases.

Since this year, several groups have been using the alert system, particularly in the United States and Latin America. “This tool makes our job easier,” says Helena Suárez Val. It also reduces our exposure to violence, as it filters out the homicide-related articles we will have to read. »

But even more, Data Against Femicide aims to form an international community among the activists who collect this data. The instigators of the project have listed more than 150 groups that do this work around the world. They organize events to give them the opportunity to meet and share their know-how.

“There is an effervescence, enthuses Helena Suárez Val. Several networks are created among the militants. Our project participates in this phenomenon, and I am proud of it. »

A whole system to rethink

Despite the successes of the project, much work remains to be done to ensure that collecting accurate official data is a priority for governments, insists Myrna Dawson of the CFOJR. “We need to start asking ourselves why this important data for the prevention of femicide and male violence against women and girls is not being collected systematically today,” she argues.

“There are still several limits in legislation, in human resources working with data and in the recognition of this issue,” adds Silvana Fumega. But the ILDA researcher is not giving up. Within her organization, she works with the governments of several countries to standardize the documentation of feminicides.

“Perhaps one day we will no longer need to collect this data because it will no longer be an issue,” the researcher allows herself to dream. This is the ultimate goal of the project, to be useless! I really wish I was still alive then. »