14,445 and Counting
Inside a Texas nurse’s quest to document the life and death of every woman killed by a man in America. By Christina Hillstrom magazine.atavist.com/...
The full published version of 14,445 and Counting is a compelling description of the dedicated care of Dawn Wilcox to catalogue the murders of women in the U.S. because they were women. She doesn’t abandon them to statistics. Each are identified by name, the relationship to the assailant, how they were killed, and notations for who they were in their lives. I encourage reading all of14,445 to fully appreciate the the author’s empathy and the depth of collective efforts in the U.S. and other countries to document femicide. The following are excerpts for a less involved overview and shorter read:
To date, Wilcox has assembled 14,445 cases in Women Count USA. The data is organized chronologically, and she has started digging into history, documenting murders as far back as the 1950s. The research backlog continues to grow: She has more than 9,000 unopened emails, most of which she sent to herself, with news stories or research materials attached.Other emails are tips from the public. Sometimes family members of murdered women find Wilcox and ask her to add their loves ones to the database.
As Women Count USA gained recognition, researchers asked Wilcox to track keywords or trends for their own work. In 2020, Danielle Pollack, a policy manager for the National Family Violence Law Center, requested that she flag cases of girls killed by fathers from whom their mothers had separated. Pollack wanted to use the figures to lobby for changes in family-court systems to protect children. More recently, Alison Marganski, a criminology professor at LeMoyne University, began reviewing Wilcox’s data. She was looking for trends in coercive control, stalking, and abuse that preceded murders—behaviors that, if properly identified, could have prompted police or other individuals to reach out to victims before it was too late.
In 2025, the Trump administration removed questions related to gender identity from the National Crime Victimization Survey, a project of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Federal agencies have deleted thousands of online datasets, including ones related to public health and safety. It’s uncertain to what extent, and how reliably, the federal government will continue to collect crime data.
In 2012, Mexico became one of the first countries in the world to pass legislation codifying femicide. Ecuador, Peru, and other Latin American countries followed. Eventually, thirty countries worldwide would adopt similar laws and pledge resources toward rooting out the causes of femicide, including misogynistic social norms and impunity for gender-based violence. But change wasn’t propelled only by the sheer number of femicide cases. Public response was a driving force, too. Governments took action when their citizens demanded it, loudly and often, in mass protests, labor strikes, and public awareness campaigns.
In 2015, Dubravka Simonovic, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women, called for every country in the world to track femicides www.opendemocracy.net/... and determine where governments had failed victims, with an eye toward prevention.
In Puerto Rico, Carmen Castelló, a retired social worker living in a senior facility, kick-started the territory’s primary femicide-tracking project by copying and pasting news stories about women’s murders into a Word document. When Naeemah Abrahams, a researcher in South Africa, realized that media outlets were biased toward covering women’s murders committed by strangers rather than spouses or family members,she started gathering data from detectives, mortuaries, and medical examiners—work that would inform her country’s official femicide-prevention strategy.
Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Karen Ingala Smith, a charity worker, spearheaded the annual publication of the Femicide Census. “If any other circumstances had led to the loss of eight lives in three days in the UK, it wouldn’t be described as a series of isolated incidents,”Ingala Smith wrote in The Guardian in 2021. That year, the Femicide Census reported that nearly 90 percent of victims were killed by someone they knew.
By 2019, tireless activism by Native communities effected change on the issue of missing and murdered women. Lucchesi’s work helped, just as she’d hoped. There were congressional hearings and proposed bills; activists needed data to make their case, and Lucchesi was the only one who had it. In 2020, Congress passed two laws intended to improve the federal response to gender-based violence against Native women. More broadly,though, few people in the United States were talking about femicide.
When the Combahee River Collective started counting Black women’s murders in Boston in 1979, they were insisting on each victim’s value by condemning their shared fate. “What is not true is that the fact that multiple killers were involved means the cases were not connected,” Black feminist scholar Terrion L. Williamson wrote in a paper about the project. “Nor does it mean there was no discernible rationale for the women’s deaths.” They were connected by economic, social, and cultural conditions—by “a thread in the fabric of violence against women,” according to the collective. The same was true of the murders in my county, and across the United States.
