Femicide has been described as the “most brutal and extreme manifestation of violence against women and girls”, but journalists are failing to use their platforms to help eradicate gender-based violence and gender inequality.
Written by Michaela Makusha
Edited by Vicky Gayle
Nearly 89,000 women and girls worldwide were intentionally killed in 2022 — the highest annual number recorded in the past 20 years, according to a report from UN Women and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
They define femicide as an “intentional killing with a gender-related motivation” which “may be driven by stereotyped gender roles, discrimination towards women and girls, unequal power relations between women and men, or harmful social norms”.
Femicide is the “most brutal and extreme manifestation of violence against women and girls”, UN Women says, and a global problem — yet there is a failure to put the femicide crisis first.
The latest Femicide Census claimed at least 147 women in the UK were killed by men in 2021.
As of August this year, the Guardian’s Killed Women Count recorded 50 victims of femicide in the UK, with a man being charged in connection with each of their deaths. The reporting project was launched to ensure women’s stories do not continue to go unheard. It also helps fill a void where journalists are largely failing to call strong enough attention to what has been widely described by experts as a public health crisis.
Individual names and tragic stories breakthrough, such as Sarah Everard, 33, and Sabina Nessa, 28 — but the media focuses on the individual, a “victim” to get behind, rather than prioritising reporting that will help tackle the causes and force us to look inwardly at our society.
Derailing The Conversation
News reports of gender-based violence tend to isolate the problem to communities rather than examining the environment that has allowed such violence to thrive in Britain.
The kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in March 2021 at the hands of Wayne Couzens, a serving Metropolitan Police officer, was a tragic catalyst for conversations about institutional misogyny within policing. BBC News even described the marketing executive’s death as having “sparked a nation’s soul-searching”. Yet, here we are three years later, asking ourselves the same questions with women sharing the same stories of feeling unsafe on the streets. How and why does this happen?
When Cher Maximen, 32, was tragically killed at London’s Notting Hill Carnival this summer, political commentators, particularly on the right, decided to use her death as another opportunity to brand the annual Caribbean festival as an environment of criminality unique to the Black British community. GB News, a news outlet that takes a right-wing stance on British politics, argued the event should be shut down, with presenter Martin Daubney, former deputy leader of the right-wing Reclaim Party, stoking the flames of a culture war and attacking London mayor, Sadiq Khan, for praising the festival’s celebration.
What happened to Cher in front of her three-year-old child not only demonstrates the depravity of her attacker, Shakiel Thibou but also how deeply embedded misogyny is wherein a man feels indifferent about killing a woman in broad daylight. Irrespective of political leanings, journalists’ responsibility when covering femicide should be to discuss the problem of violence against women and how it culminates in femicide, not to encourage race-baiting.
Language Matters
Reporting responsibly on femicide includes being mindful of the language used. Campaign group Womankind Worldwide pointed out the passive language often used when writing about gender-based violence. Using “has died” rather than “murdered”, for example, and not assigning blame to the man who killed her or condemning the crime.
“[Headlines] too often use sensationalist language to describe these acts of violence, presumably to incite shock and drive traffic to their website,” Lucy Morgan, purpose editor and deputy website editor at Glamour UK, said.
Lucy highlighted the case of Californian woman Julie Anne Sanetra, 38, who was killed by her boyfriend, Daniel Allen Aldrich, in October. The Metro’s headline read: “Woman’s body found stuffed in a trash can in her boyfriend’s backyard”. There were also crude references to the former model and Miss Switzerland finalist Kristina Joksimovic being “pureed in a blender” when she was murdered by her husband in January, Lucy said.
“This language could be construed as a continuation of the perpetrator’s abuse.”
She added: “It encourages us to associate the victim with the abhorrent abuse and torture they endured rather than how they were known and loved as a person when they were alive. It deprives women of any dignity in death and is grossly insulting to their grieving family and friends.”
Responsible reporting on femicide and gender-based violence requires interrogating our own biases and our urge to sensationalise rather than grant the victim and those affected dignity.
“Gender violence is a global public health emergency”
The inability to have these conversations at large could indicate more embarrassing failings, in which the media industry itself does not understand the nuances of misogyny or how femicide stems from gender inequality —“…men having access to power in our society, over and above women,” Scottish charity Zero Tolerance states in its media guidelines. Few outlets explicitly discuss how deeply sexism and misogyny are ingrained within British society.
Journalist Megha Mohan became the BBC’s first gender and identity correspondent in 2018 and specialised in reporting on women’s rights globally.
She said: “We are so behind in understanding that gender violence is a global public health emergency and not just, ‘Oh, a woman has been killed, let’s talk about that’.
“The issue we have is that we haven’t linked it all together in this meshwork of understanding that a woman’s social status is still in a bracket that has been designed without her comfort or wellbeing in sight, and so it’s given this perfect vat in which gender-based abuse can happen.”
She added: “It’s easier to get stories commissioned when discussing one woman…the character you can get behind.”
Megha acknowledges the responsible work of some projects to highlight the problem, such as Level Up’s reporting on fatal domestic violence. Other projects in this area include the Guardian’s Killed Women Count, which draws on the work of campaigns such as the Femicide Census, which has gathered data since 2009; Counting Dead Women, run by domestic and sexual violence charity chief executive, Karen Ingala Smith; and Killed Women, an organisation and network for bereaved families.
However, another area that news reports on femicide often score poorly on is incorporating intersectionality, Megha pointed out. For example, violence involving women of colour and trans women is underreported and often not included in coverage or data on femicide in the UK. The same trend can be found in the reporting of missing people.
Megha added: “I feel as though [with] the wider story of violence against women and all the intersections of what it means to be a woman, there’s an overlap with countries all over the world.
“There’s a set of conditions that give the perfect environment in which to devalue a woman’s life…but the upsetting thing is that I think it’s harder to get some stories told than others.”
Who Runs The News?
The stories that end up being told are those which have been pitched to and approved by a senior news editor. A print journalist in London, who asked not to be named, described commissioning editors as “some of the most undiverse groups of people you will meet”.
She said: “They typically come from the same backgrounds and probably went to the same universities. They all know each other and are usually men.”
Data from Statistica shows that in 2022, 59% of journalists and newspaper and periodical editors in the UK were male. In 2020, women made up the majority of the workforce.
It makes sense that when women are not in the room or in commissioning and management positions, there is less will to discuss the framing of nuanced factors impacting violence against women and girls. Sure, it is important and newsworthy, but is there enough understanding, self-reflection and motivation to tackle the patriarchal forces that men in the newsroom may overtly and inadvertently contribute to? Will they state in articles how causal misogyny contributes to an environment that allows for rape culture and gender-based violence to thrive? When women are not editorial decision-makers, the newsroom’s view is likely to be skewed to not recognise the factors leading to femicide.
At Glamour UK, Lucy also manages the Glamour Talks Consent campaign, which has been lobbying the UK government to go further in criminalising the creation of abusive images to protect women’s online and offline safety. She is firm on the role journalists play and the impact of ethical, compassionate and responsible reporting.
“Journalists have a responsibility to report on male violence against women and girls. This issue is clearly in the public interest. The more these stories are spoken about and shared, the more likely they will prompt societal change.”
Over the past year, I have questioned journalists’ place in regard to promoting the safety of women and girls. You could say I have experienced a brief existential crisis on how I reconcile what I want to write about femicide and gender-based violence with the agenda of different publications.
Within the journalism industry, there have been discussions on how to improve the ways in which we report on violence against women, with the End Violence Against Women Coalition and academic Alessia Tranchese having launched a resource to support responsible reporting on sexual assault. This is a step in the right direction to support the press to examine how it shapes the narrative around sexual violence and the influence this has on public attitudes toward it, but what is our industry doing for itself?
I do not have all the answers for how to solve this, but what I do know is that there is not only a want but a need for more news outlets to investigate the femicide crisis in the UK. Doing so signals that we value women’s lives and that there is a desire to keep us safe.
Feature image by Andrej Lisakov at @Unsplash
If you or someone you know is in immediate danger or in need of urgent protection, call the police on 999.
For more info on where to find help, click here.
For advice on how to report violence against women and girls, you can visit Zero Tolerance, the End Violence Against Women Coalition, Women’s Aid and UN Women.
Michaela Makusha (she/her) is a writer and journalist. Her work focuses on the intersections of politics and culture, and she is passionate about politics, racial, and gender issues on and offline. Her work has been featured in publications such as Gal-dem, Glamour, Black Ballad, The Guardian, and Teen Vogue.
