Summary
Across Nigeria and Canada, feminist activists are fighting femicide by creating counter-archives that preserve victims’ names, expose systemic failures and challenge the institutional silences that allow violence against women to persist.
The women most at risk of femicide are often those most easily forgotten. Yet across Nigeria and Canada, feminist activists are refusing to let their names vanish, constructing what might be termed “counter-archives” that challenge state silences and institutional erasure.
Memorialisation as Political Practice
On 24 November 2024, hundreds gathered in Lagos for the “Run for Her” race, organised by DOHS Cares Foundation. Participants wore printed shirts bearing the names and faces of women killed in the past five years: Iniubong Umoren, Uwaila Omozuwa, Barakat Bello, and Osinachi Nwachukwu.
Osinachi’s death in 2022 generated significant national discourse. However, while public attention focused on her case, seventeen other women were murdered by intimate partners that same month, their names known only within their immediate communities.
“When we speak their names, we are refusing the state’s attempt to disappear them,” explains organiser Chioma Agwuegbo. This act of naming constitutes what scholars call “resistant memorialisation,” a practice that challenges official narratives through collective remembrance.
The educational materials distributed at the event documented systemic failures: conviction rates below 2% for gender-based violence, police officers who advise women to “save their marriages” rather than file reports, and judges who cite cultural norms when sentencing men who kill their wives.
These institutional failures are evident in recent documented cases. The murder of a pregnant woman in Edo State by her husband, the Lagos hammer killing, and the case of an Akwa Ibom pastor who killed his wife, Victoria Okoh, in an act of domestic violence earlier this year each briefly dominated news cycles before vanishing beneath subsequent tragedies.
Digital Archives and Transnational Solidarity
Following the killing of Uwaila Omozuwa, a University of Benin student murdered while studying in a church, the #JusticeForUwa campaign evolved beyond demands for prosecution. Activists constructed an online memorial featuring photographs, personal narratives, and testimonies that insisted she be remembered as a complete human being rather than merely a victim.
This digital archival practice reflects broader transnational feminist movements. #NiUnaMenos in Latin America, Counting Dead Women in the UK, and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement in Canada all employ similar strategies. Within these frameworks, visibility functions as a form of protection, and storytelling becomes evidentiary practice.
Feminist Data Praxis
In Montreal, data scientist Marie Claude Plante maintains a personal database documenting every woman killed by intimate partner violence since 2010. Her dataset tracks variables the Quebec government does not systematically record: immigration status, disability, language, and race.
Her analysis reveals structural inequalities obscured by official statistics. Immigrant women wait an average of 14 months longer for protective orders. Deaths of Indigenous women are twice as likely to be classified as “undetermined cause,” a designation that prevents their inclusion in femicide counts.
In Nigeria, student researchers across three universities have documented parallel institutional failures. Their findings reveal what feminist scholars term a “continuum of violence”: mental health crises, financial precarity, and histories of unreported abuse. These patterns, invisible in state records, map the conditions that enable femicide.
This approach aligns with what Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein call “data feminism,” the practice of challenging power structures by making visible what dominant systems render invisible.
Epistemic Injustice and the Crisis of Credibility
In Toronto, Fatima (pseudonym) reported threats from her former partner five times before he attacked her, fracturing her skull and ribs. “They wrote it down, but they didn’t believe me,” she recalls.
Her experience exemplifies what philosopher Miranda Fricker terms “testimonial injustice,” the systematic devaluation of certain speakers’ credibility based on identity-based prejudice. When women’s reports of violence are discounted, the epistemological failure often proves fatal.
In Nigeria, such disbelief is codified in law. Section 55(1d) of the Penal Code grants husbands legal permission to “correct” their wives, institutionalizing violence and enabling escalation from abuse to homicide.
Intersectional Erasure and Compounded Vulnerability
Sex workers, rural women, internally displaced persons, women whose organs are harvested in ritual killings, and Indigenous women in Canada whose disappearances rarely provoke national attention all face elevated risk alongside reduced visibility.
As legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw observes in her foundational work on intersectionality, “Intersectional invisibility means some women are erased at several levels at once.” Their experiences fall through the gaps between single-axis frameworks that cannot adequately theorize compounded marginalization.
Grassroots initiatives attempt to address these structural silences: WhatsApp networks that circulate safety warnings, informal trackers documenting disappearances, and community organisations that record deaths the state refuses to acknowledge. These practices constitute what anthropologist Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” the reconstruction of lives from archival absences.
In tomorrow’s final installment, we explore what justice could look like, from legal reforms to feminist counterpublics, and why the archive of femicide remains painfully unfinished. This story was produced for the 2025 “16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence” campaign.
