Remember their names.

What femicide is, and why we record it

Femicide is the killing of a woman or girl because she is female. It sits at the far end of a continuum of violence that runs through coercive control, harassment, and physical and sexual abuse. In Malta, as across Europe, most of these women were killed by a current or former partner, or by a family member. Most had already lived with the warning signs. The signs were there to be read.

The Women’s Rights Foundation set up the Observatory, together with the Commission on Gender-Based Violence and Domestic Violence, to make that pattern visible. Each killing tends to be reported on its own, as a single tragedy. Set down together, name after name, they stop looking like isolated events. So does the failure to prevent them.