“If we lose sight of this, we lose all hope in ending this epidemic.”
As I speak, 29 women and nine children are gone this year.
Last year, we lost 79 women to violence and the year before, there were 206 femicides.
In 2025, 27 children were killed.
This is the tip of the iceberg. For every woman I count, there are many others whose deaths fly under the radar.
The hidden homicides. Those women who deliberately disappeared. The women whose deaths are misidentified as self-inflicted, misadventure or accident.
And then there are the women we lose to suicide post abuse, stalking or sexual violence.
For every one woman killed by an intimate partner in Australia, another 10 female domestic violence victims will end their own lives as a direct impact of their trauma.
Rates of suicide among rape and sexual assault survivors are also high. These are homicides by proxy and yet no jurisdiction in Australia prosecutes abusers where their actions resulted in the victim ending her own life.
We are only just starting to understand the toll of post-abuse suicide. A national inquiry is in its final stages, and the federal government is working to overhaul superannuation laws to ensure abusers do not benefit financially from a woman’s death if there is a correlation between her suicide and the other person’s actions.
I have been documenting the violent deaths of women and children for almost 11 years.
My femicide and child death tolls are the most accurate and up-to-date in this country, if not the world — this is because I dare to go where others will not.
Multiple times each day, I search media and police news releases for dead women and children.
I speak to the police and other legal contacts across the country.
I liaise with frontline workers, including domestic violence specialists, emergency room physicians and nurses, morgue professionals and, most importantly, I talk with families.
I keep two databases — one with all the confirmed women and children lost to violence.
This database is extensive, maintaining information around cause of death, context of death, legal stages, perpetrator’s gender and relationship to the victim and the backgrounds of the victims.
The other database contains suspicious or misidentified deaths that I cannot quite get enough information to publish on.
You can find my work — and the femicide and child death database at my website AustralianFemicideWatch.
It’s important to stress that my work encapsulates ALL women and children killed regardless of the perpetrator’s gender or relationship to the victim. This means I cover domestic and family violence, associated violence — that is deaths perpetrated by someone outside the family circle — and stranger violence.
My research shows, 95 per cent of women killed died at the hands of a man they knew.
Source: Femicide in Australia: Here’s what needs to change now.