This Nurse Is Building a Huge Database of Femicide Victims

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A Texas school nurse who tends to kids' stomachaches by day spends her free time documenting how thousands of American women died. From her home in Plano, Dawn Wilcox runs Women Count USA, a one-woman database that since 2016 has logged 14,445 US instances of femicide: "the killing of females by males because they are female." Her work was spurred in part by social media arguments, explains Christa Hillstrom for the Atavist: After reading waves of online outrage in 2016 after Cincinnati Zoo employees shot dead a gorilla, she would pose this question in the comments sections of stories on the incident: "What about murdered women?" Wilcox wanted data to back up her belief that femicide was a true crisis—but found only fragmented, anonymous federal crime stats.

And so Wilcox opened a spreadsheet and began entering cases one by one: name, age, location, relationship to the killer, circumstance, and a column she labels "About Her." Wilcox scours obits, local news, and social media for fragments of personality: a passion for Kawasaki motorcycles, an obsession with the Green Bay Packers, a tendency to raid a friend's fridge and talk about God. When she can't find anything, she leaves an opening: "Please send information about her life, dreams, or interests." She also tags patterns she sees over and over—murders during breakups, staged crime scenes, tech surveillance, what she calls "corrective femicide," when men kill women they believe have disobeyed or disrespected them.

Wilcox isn't alone globally. From Native American activist Annita Lucchesi to Latin American and European trackers, women in dozens of countries have been manually counting femicides for decades, often because their governments don't. Their data has helped spur new laws in places like Mexico, Uruguay, and in the US for Native American women. Tech researchers at MIT and elsewhere offered Wilcox automation tools, but trackers largely rejected full-on news scrapers and requested simpler tools; they see the brutal reading and careful entry as a form of witness. "This is sacred work," Wilcox says. (Read the full story, which delves into the case that haunts Wilcox most.)