Femicide is Preventable

Femicide is increasingly recognized as a global, widespread, and persistent human rights’ violation.

The way in which nation states or governments respond to femicide has become the focus of international attention because no country is free from this type of violence.

And Canada is no exception.

The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability (CFOJA) was established in response to a call for action from the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences for countries to document sex/gender-related killings of women by collecting, analyzing, and reviewing data on femicides with the aim of prevention.

In Canada, we know that:

• One woman or girl is killed every other day, on average, somewhere in our country, mostly by men.
• A woman is killed by her male partner, on average, once a week.
• Some groups of women and girls are disproportionately impacted by femicide, depending on where they live in Canada, or because of their race, religion, sexuality, ability, and/or age.

Various other forms of discrimination and oppression such as poverty and/or housing precarity increase the marginalization of women and girls by society and, in turn, their vulnerability to violence, including femicide, in various contexts.

Women’s experiences of oppression and inequalities as well as outdated and negative attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes about gender norms and violence perpetrated against them help to perpetuate and maintain practices that are harmful to women and girls.

The overarching goal of the CFOJA is to establish a visible and national focus on femicide in Canada and globally. While not all killings of women and girls are femicide, most of them are as demonstrated by the presence of sex- or gender-related motives and indicators.

In addition to ensuring their killings are counted and remembering all women and girls who are killed by violence, the CFOJA examines patterns in femicide over time, seeks to better identify factors indicative of femicide, and conducts research on social and legal responses to femicide, primarily represented by the media and the criminal justice system, respectively.

By confronting stereotypes and biases about violence against women and girls, including femicide, our goal is to empower girls and young women and promote their sex/gender equality overall.