"Violence against women is normalized. And because it's normalized we don't see it as a crisis."

“Violence against women is normalized. And because it’s normalized we don’t see it as a crisis.”


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Wilcox’s work is filling a gap in data on femicide, typically defined as the killing of women and girls because of their gender, said Jodie Roure, an expert on violence against women in the Americas. The federal government tracks domestic violence killings, referred to as intimate partner homicides, but doesn’t specifically compile data on femicide, Roure said, in part because the US hasn’t adopted a standardized definition for the term as in some Latin American countries.

Without a centralized system to gather data on incidents of violence against women and girls, those crimes are underreported, Roure, who is a professor at John Jay College, said. “The data that does exist we know is alarming,” she added. “Violence against women is normalized. And because it’s normalized we don’t see it as a crisis.”

The Violence Policy Center, which produces an annual report on female homicide victims based on FBI data, echoes Wilcox’s concerns about violence against women in the US. There aren’t adequate resources assigned to reducing it, the VPC legislative director, Kristen Rand, said. Congress let the landmark 1994 Violence Against Women Act expire during the most recent government shutdown.

But individual stories can help spur action, Rand said, and that is where Women Count USA comes in. “People look at statistics and they too often don’t see what’s behind the statistics – this humanizes the problem,” Rand said. “Every single one of those people is a human being with a family.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/11/the-nurse-tracking-americas-epidemic-of-murdered-women