Dawn Wilcox adds more names to her list every day. Sometimes as many as 50.

From her home in a quiet cul de sac in Plano, Texas, Wilcox runs Women Count USA – a project honoring victims of what she believes to be America’s unseen crisis: femicide.

Wilcox has spent much of the past two years scouring online news stories and social media for reports on women and girls killed by men in the US. She compiles their names in a publicly available spreadsheet and shares details about their lives and deaths with nearly 6,000 people on the Women Count USA Facebook page.

It is no small task. By Wilcox’s count, in 2018 it happened to at least 1,600 women and girls from Alaska to New York, of all races, ages and income status. They were killed in their beds and in their cars, at work and in yoga class, by their fathers, husbands, ex-boyfriends, cousins, sons, neighbors and strangers.
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.

Read More – The nurse tracking America’s ‘epidemic’ of murdered women – The Guardian