International Women's Day

Musings on Femicide

When I was a teenager, I used to go to my friend Lucy’s house for sleepovers, and we would watch Time Team. We LOVED Mick Aston. I would dream of being a historian, while Lucy dreamed of being an archaeologist.
Many years later, we both came to do PhDs - mine on dead Victorians, hers on Viking coinage - and this week Lucy has been in the paper for her ‘side-project’, which is a truly astonishing body of work on women on Wikipedia. Well done Lucy, I am in awe.

My side-project is this blog, where the majority of reconstructed lives are women. Last month, Jess Phillips stood in the House of Commons today and read out the name every woman killed by a man this year. Ninety-eight this year, it took around five minutes. These names are collected by the Femicide Census, not the government, and are a way of drawing attention to the level of lethal violence experienced by women in our society.

In the nineteenth century, these names were not collected by anyone. The government collected statistics on homicide in two ways: they collected statistics on people who were murdered via inquest numbers, and people who committed murder via police and court data. The two numbers never matched, but the government waved that discrepancy away as an issue with concealed birth prosecution.

In 1891, 66 males and 95 females were murdered: a verdict of murder was brought in by the coroner’s jury. The coroner’s jury could name a suspect or not, but the statistics don’t differentiate between murders with an identified suspect. The government didn’t combine age, sex and verdict data, so we don’t know how many of these murdered folk were babies.

In the same year, 54 people were tried for murder. Twenty were acquitted. Fifteen were found insane. The remaining nineteen were sentenced to death, but seven (including two young women) had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.

Of the twelve executed murderers, all were male. Eight of their victims were female. Eight of those ninety-five murdered females recieved the full weight of justice.

And for the other 107 people found murdered at inquest? Either their killer remained undetected, the case was thrown out at some stage before trial, or the killer was found guilty of a lesser charge.

I don’t present these numbers to baffle, but to illustrate that the cases I talk about here are part of a much wider pattern of ‘getting away with it’. It’s been argued that the death penalty was a strong deterrent against finding people guilty of murder if there was a shadow of doubt. The cases I discuss here seem to reinforce that, but it often seems that the person on trial is the victim.

Did she deserve it? Was she a ‘good’ victim? Was she a ‘respectable’ woman?

Is she worth executing a man for?

True crime, true historical crime, is HUGE in modern media. There is entertainment in poring over the details of a hideous crime, its detection and denouement. I participate in this myself, with this blog, with media work.

But too often, the victim is a woman who vanishes from the stage early on in proceedings, at the point of her death, reduced to parts or clothing. She loses her identity as the focus shifts to her killer and his (because it’s usually a man) motive and his bloody hands, his actions, his defence, his punishment.

I have tried, and will continue to try, to redress the balance. Little acts of remembrance, to keep the focus on the victim, to remind you that the victims of homicide are not just names. They are not a dead dress, they are not a wound to examine, a blood-spattered puzzle to solve.

They were people who laughed and cried, hoped and loved, cared and trusted.

They were people.