Women are ‘kept in their place’ in myriad ways – by economic discrimination, by legal structures that treat women as lesser beings, by denying them reproductive rights. However, it is violence, or the credible threat of it, that is by far the bluntest instrument deployed by men to control women.
Murder is the extreme culmination of the ubiquitous violence that women face every day in every part of the world. Despite its shocking ordinariness, the murder of women by men also has distinctive manifestations: femicide clusters in Argentina, Mexico, South Africa and Russia; dowry murders in India and Pakistan; ‘honour’ killings in Syria and Afghanistan. Indigenous women are at particular risk in Canada and Australia; sex workers are more vulnerable to all types of violence; and in the US, a society saturated with guns, women are 16 times more likely to be killed with a gun than in other high-income countries.
