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Summary
Across Nigeria, Canada, and beyond, women are being killed with impunity and then erased by the very systems meant to record and mourn them. This reveals a global crisis where femicide is both a physical violence and a violence of silence.
Every 49 hours in Nigeria, a woman is killed because she is a woman. In Canada, a woman is murdered by her intimate partner every six days. Between the statistics and the silence sits a haunting truth: these women are being killed twice. First by violence. Then by erasure.
When twenty-six-year-old Iniubong Umoren left her Akwa Ibom home for a job interview in April 2021, she became a hashtag: #JusticeForHinyUmoren. Her friend’s desperate tweets, her killer’s eventual conviction, and the nationwide protests all seemed to promise that Nigeria would remember.
Yet two years later, most Nigerians could not name three other women killed that same month. Their faces never trended. Their stories never led the news. Their families grieved without a national witness.
This pattern repeats itself across continents. In Montreal, when Synthia Bussières was killed by her partner in 2012, French-language media covered her death extensively. Weeks later, when Naomie Maxime died under similar circumstances, the story barely registered. The violence was not less brutal. Naomie was Haitian. Her family navigated systems in languages not their own. The message was clear: certain deaths are treated as more “grievable” than others.
“We are fighting two wars,” says Ololade Ajayi, founder of Nigeria’s DOHS Cares Foundation, which operates the country’s only Femicide Dashboard. “The first is against the men who kill us. The second is against the systems that erase us from memory and record. That second war is just as deadly because it ensures the first war never ends.”
Nigeria has no official femicide registry. Canada has partial, inconsistent data that varies by province. In both countries, feminist activists have become archivists by necessity, building databases the state refuses to maintain.
The DOHS Femicide Dashboard documented 150 cases in Nigeria in 2024, and 88 in just the first half of 2025, a 240 per cent surge. These numbers dwarf official police statistics, which classify most gender motivated killings as “domestic disputes” or generic homicides. Each entry on the Dashboard represents hours of volunteer labour: scanning news reports, verifying details with families, documenting circumstances that police dismissed as irrelevant.
“When Osinachi Nwachukwu died, the gospel singer, suddenly everyone wanted to talk about domestic violence,” Ajayi recalls. “But we had documented seventeen other women killed by partners that same month. Their names? Nobody remembers. They were poor, rural, and not famous. The media moved on.”
In Quebec, the Observatoire québécois de la violence envers les femmes relies on media monitoring rather than government data to track femicides. Researcher Dominique Damant has noticed a pattern. “Immigrant women, Indigenous women, women with disabilities, sex workers, their deaths are systematically undercounted. Not because they experience less violence, but because the systems recording violence were never designed to see them.”
This invisibility is structural. Nigeria’s Penal Code permits husbands to “correct” wives through physical violence as long as no “grievous hurt” results. The law effectively legitimises the continuum of abuse that can end in femicide. Section 84 of the Evidence Act sets standards for digital evidence that police lack the training and tools to meet. Threatening texts, GPS logs of stalking, and videos of abuse on phones often become useless in court. With only one functioning DNA forensic centre serving more than 200 million people, cases collapse even when perpetrators are known.
Mariam Moustafa was eighteen when she was attacked in Nottingham, UK, in 2018. She was beaten on a bus and died weeks later from her injuries. Her story captured the attention of the Egyptian media due to her family’s roots in the country, but it barely registered in British coverage. When it did appear, headlines focused on “gang violence” and ignored the gendered and racialised dynamics: young men targeting visibly Muslim women, harassment escalating to murder.
“Media decides whose deaths are tragedies and whose are statistics,” explains Oluwafunmbi Ogunsola, Community Engagement Officer at Naija Feminists Media, which trains journalists in ethical femicide reporting. “When reporters write ‘prostitute found dead’ instead of ‘woman murdered,’ when they ask ‘what was she wearing’ instead of ‘who killed her,’ those choices shape whether communities mobilise or move on.”
During the 2025 “16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence” campaign, Naija Feminists Media held workshops with journalists. The core message was simple: reporting on femicide is never neutral. Neutrality often sides with power. Journalists learned to name perpetrators rather than relying on passive constructions such as “woman killed.” They practised writing “man killed woman” and “husband killed wife” and learned to show patterns instead of treating each death as an isolated event.
Language barriers deepen erasure. In Montreal, where services operate primarily in French, Anglophone and Allophone immigrant women face particular vulnerability. Aisha’s story, with her name changed for safety, illustrates these layers. Fleeing intimate partner violence, she struggled to navigate shelters, police reports, and court orders in her second language. Her abuser, fluent in French and born in Quebec, used his familiarity with the system to maintain control.
“I kept telling them he would kill me,” Aisha says now, two years after escaping. “Because my French was not perfect, because I was working cash jobs, because I did not have the right immigration papers, nobody wrote my story down. If he had succeeded, I would be a statistic no one could even categorise properly.”
About the Author
Adanna Sophie Okorie is a feminist researcher and journalist who focuses on gender based violence, data justice, and transnational feminist movements. This story was produced for the 2025 “16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence” campaign.
