The women keeping femicide on the front page

November 16, 2023

They’re doing the work the media isn’t ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

November 16, 2023

Darling Meteor readers,

A group of Swifties in Brazil, where Taylor Swift is scheduled to perform on the next leg of the never-ending Eras tour, wants to project her “Junior Jewels” t-shirt onto Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue. If I were a Christian, I would absolutely jump at this opportunity to have Taylor Swift put Jesus on the map. I mean if she can do it for the NFL…

In today’s newsletter, Mariane Pearl writes about the network of citizen journalists tracking the staggering number of femicides across the globe. Plus more news out of Ohio, a very strange blast from the past, and a special Red Cup Day “celebration.”

“Karma is a god,”

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

Republicans in Ohio lost the battle to fully ban abortion in their state, but for them, the war continues. After voters decided to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution last week, a GOP state senator proposed a bill that would provide a tax credit for donations to “pregnancy resource centers,” aka those anti-abortion clinics that lie to pregnant people.
This year’s extreme weather has spoiled the drinking water in parts of Louisiana. After an unseasonably dry summer that depleted sections of the Mississippi River, salt water is the only thing coming out of some people’s faucets.
Unabashed scammer George Santos will not be seeking re-election after the House ethics committee found a mountain of evidence that he violated federal law. What did Scamtos allegedly do? He may or may not have taken donor money to go on a Sephora shopping spree, pay for an OnlyFans account, and get Botox. I believe in due process, but it’s hard not to notice his lack of brow furrows and frown lines…

Today was Starbucks’ annual Red Cup Day, when the chain gives away reusable red cups to customers who order holiday beverages. But this year, the unionized baristas decided not to deal with the staffing and scheduling issues that Red Cup Day creates and staged a walkout, which temporarily closed down 21 locations. Stick that in your cup and drink it.
The Washington Post has taken the extremely rare step of publishing photos, videos, and personal accounts from the immediate aftermath of 11 mass shootings, including the 2022 Uvalde shooting that killed 19 children. It’s a stunning look at the repeated devastation wrought by AR-15s in America. “Had we started doing this decades ago, we might have had reasonable gun laws on the books,” tweeted Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery. “Don’t look away.”

Femicide on the Front Page

Meet the global network of activists and citizen journalists determined to document violence

BY MARIANE PEARL

PORTRAIT OF ACTIVIST AND RESEARCHER HELENA SUÁREZ VAL. (IMAGE BY SOLEDAD MORAGA)

On a sunny, crisp, fall weekend, Dawn Wilcox sits in front of a computer in her suburban Dallas home with her cat perched on her lap, building her database. She scours news reports and police records for details about Ashli Ehrhardt Wonder, a 29-year-old woman allegedly killed by her estranged husband in Kansas City, Missouri, on September 22, 2023. The details are horrific, down to the fact that the assailant wrote his last name in blood on Wonder’s leg.

Wilcox, 60, marks Wonder as the 729th known femicide in the United States this year. A couple rows below, #731 is 26-year-old tech founder Pava LaPere, a beloved Baltimore CEO who was named in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list earlier this year. A man followed her home and strangled her in late September. And LePere and Wonder were far from alone; femicide—the killing of women and girls because of their gender— increased by 24% in the U.S. between 2014 and 2020, according to a 2022 report by the Violence Policy Center.

In the United States, often “people think femicide only occurs in Afghanistan and other so-called ‘developing’ countries, but this is happening right here on an unimaginable level,” Wilcox says. “Each death isn’t a cold number or a statistic, but a human being…a woman with hopes and dreams.”

A few hundred miles away, north of Little Rock, Arkansas, 52-year-old Rosalind Page is adding an entry to her own grim database. On October 3, Sian Cartagena, an 18-year-old woman whose mother described her as “victim to a domestic abusive relationship” died two days after being shot in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

“At least five Black women and girls are killed each day in the U.S.,” says Page, noting that Black women are disproportionately impacted by intimate partner violence and femicide. “This is an epidemic and it’s only getting worse.”

Wilcox and Page aren’t professional journalists. They’re both full-time nurses who, driven by passion and frustration, have become investigative reporters in their spare time. Wilcox, a domestic violence survivor, has spent the last seven years building Women Count USA: Femicide Accountability Project, a database that has recorded 12,500 women murdered since 1950. Page, who has spent the last three decades working at a hospital, launched her database, The Black Femicide Prevention Coalition, after she noticed a pattern: More than half of the Black women she treated were victims of male-perpetrated violence.

Wilcox and Page are part of an unlinked but growing global army of activists and journalists, from Uruguay to Algeria, who are taking it upon themselves to track femicide, one of the most extreme forms of gender-based violence. Exasperated by what they see as government inaction and inadequate media coverage, they are committed to honoring victims, pushing the news industry to do better, and providing the kind of vital data that can actually catalyze change.

“We’re doing this work hoping that it becomes obsolete,” said Helena Suárez Val, who in 2014 started Feminicidio Uruguay, a public database tracking femicide in her country, where gender-based violence is the second most reported crime behind theft. Val has since collaborated with similar women-led data efforts throughout South America through a collective she co-founded called Data Against Femicide. As she describes it: “Our data is our activism…one of the tools that will hopefully bring down the misogynist master’s house.”

This series is a collaboration between the Gender, Ethic, and Racial Justice – International program at the Ford Foundation and The Meteor.

MEET US AT THE THEATER

We are thrilled to announce that In Love and Struggle Vol. 3: The Future is Around Us will be live at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York December 14-16. Come enjoy live performances from Cree Summer, Zainab Johnson, Mahogany L Browne, Amanda Seales, Nona Hendryx and more. Each night promises to be a magical experience with storytelling, music, and comedy.