Today (Thursday 12 March 2026) Jess Philips MP will stand in parliament and read the names of 100 women killed in the UK by men or where a man has been charged since last International Women’s Day, and a further 11 women who were killed before that but whose names we had not known last year. This year marks 11 years working in collaboration with Counting Dead Women, the Femicide Census’ sister project. It is obvious that this roll call is too long and is evidence of a society where women’s safety is not prioritised, but we know that the recorded number of women killed in the last year will increase as there are more cases pending where a man has been arrested but has yet to be charged.
Amongst those 111 names are the names of 19 mothers killed where their son is the suspect. That almost one in five women killed by men in the last year were mothers suspected of been killed at the hands of their own son should be recognised as something that must be stopped. It is the highest matricide rate we have recorded in 16 years of Femicide Census data.
Over the years we have highlighted matricide as a growing problem with issues such as failures in mental health care, problematic substance use, and housing vulnerability being common factors in many killings. Often the men who have killed their mothers have histories of abuse of their earlier partners, so they had moved in with their mother after those relationships broke down. However, despite our reporting on matricides for 10 years, no state agency has yet to acknowledge matricide, let alone take responsibility for tackling it. Women are rarely recognised at being at risk of fatal violence from their sons and there are few dedicated services for older women in the whole of the UK. This must change.
Every name Jess Philips reads out is a woman who would still be here but for men’s violence and abuse. Men’s violence against, abuse and objectification of women is pervasive in society, in media, in attitudes, in homes, in schools and online. Men’s violence remains under reported and even when women have the courage to report it, it is under prosecuted and where prosecuted, subject to unacceptable criminal justice system delays. Femicide is not a gateway crime. Behind so many cases there is evidence of repeated and/or escalating abuse where interventions by the authorities could have changed the outcome for the women who became a name on our list.
The Government’s recent Violence Against Women and Girls strategy is of course a step in the right direction but there are so many areas of intervention that specialist organisations providing vital services to victim-survivors know would and do work that are not fully developed or recognised in the strategy. Funding remains a critical issue. We need new money not previously committed money redistributed. Specialist women-led charities that provide the only service in areas that have some of the highest rates of femicide in the country, or are one of the handful of charities supporting migrant women, are at risk of closure or having services removed through lack of funding or funding models that pit specialist locally-developed charities against companies not grounded in the local community. This has been going on for years in the sector, and this is a government that knows that, and yet there is little change on the ground.
We hope for the day that the reading of the names takes less time every year because fewer women have been killed. The day where Jess, now Minister Phillips, does not need to request special dispensation to speak over the allotted time for each MP in their contribution to the International Women’s Day parliamentary debate. Until the day when society is not conducive to men’s violence and abuse of women, girls and children, we need fully funded and targeted evidence-based interventions to hold perpetrators to account and fully resourced specialist and state services to support victims-survivors. We are very far from that.
