Relentless murder of women

Today, March 8 is International Women’s Day but celebrations ring hollow when day after day, year after year, generation after generation women and girls are murdered by men in their lives.

Illustration from Femicides 2023, Global Estimates of Intimate Partner/Family Member Femicides

        An estimated 51,000 women and girls murdered globally by partners or family members in 2023 alone. It’s too easy to read the numbers, shake our heads and forget the subject when you haven’t felt the terror of not knowing when the next punch will hit your head or breasts; haven’t felt hands squeeze your neck; haven’t heard the crack or felt the pain of an arm or a shoulder breaking and haven’t experienced the agony of lying awake next to someone night after night wondering if this will be the one when he splits your head open with an axe as he’s threatened to do.  

        Try to imagine what it would feel like to be caught in a house of horrors with your naked feet glued tight to the floor, like a fly or a mouse, and there’s nothing you can do to stop the man who thinks he owns you and can do to you whatever he likes. Just imagine it.    

        A recent report by UN Women, Femicides 2023, Global Estimates of Intimate Partner/Family Member Femicides, makes hair-raising reading.  (Femicide is defined as the murder of a woman because of her gender.) The organization estimates 51,000 women died at the hands of intimate partners or other family members in 2023. That works out to an average of 140 women and girls worldwide each and every day.

        The appalling numbers contained in the report are estimates. The reality is even worse since four in ten such killings go uncounted due to gender-related national variation in criminal justice recording and investigation practices.         

Read the full report here: https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2024/11/femicides-in-2023-global-estimates-of-intimate-partner-family-member-femicides

        For all I know, women’s lives today, including the demands of motherhood and community expectations, may be pretty much what they were 300,000 years ago when homo sapiens began infesting this poor Earth. The difference between then and now, I suspect, is that way back then women were valued members of their communities if for no other reason than life was truly hard and women were recognized as essential to survival.       

        Although no region of the world is immune to femicide, the largest share of female victims was recorded in Oceania (80 per cent), followed by Africa (74 per cent), Asia (56 per cent), Europe (53 per cent) and the Americas (47 per cent).

        Why must so many of us live in fear generation after generation after generation?

Elviracordileone.com