Female Victims of Homicide (325A/23)
Request
Please could you provide us with a list of all female victims of homicide killed between 1 January 2022 and 31 December 2022 (inclusive) which your authority has been responsible for investigating and, for each victim:
- the date of the homicide;
- the names of the victims and the accused / perpetrator;
- the age of the victim;
- the ethnicity/race of the victim;
- the relationship between the accused and the victim;
- the sex of the accused / perpetrator;
- the ethnicity/race of the perpetrator;
- if identified, the way in which the victim was killed;
Also, if possible, we would appreciate the following information.
- whether there were any previous reports from the victim (or any third party) regarding the accused / perpetrator; and
- whether there were any previous reports and / or convictions of any other offences related to violence against women perpetrated by the accused / perpetrator.
However, if you are unable to provide information on points 9 and 10, please provide information on the first eight points only.
I understand that at times, information we request is already available in the public domain. However, to ensure information in the Femicide Census is robust, verifiable and useful in turn as a learning tool for the police, we kindly ask that your force provides us with the information directly, without redirecting us to news sites or weblinks.
Further to this, please note it is not possible nor correct to establish the race/ethnicity of a victim from publicly available information, such as news reports. I therefore kindly request that race/ethnicity is always only provided by your force.
Our intention is to develop the Femicide Census (including by populating it with reliable data of the kind that you can provide us with) so that it can be used to analyse patterns in fatal male violence towards women. Our work on the Femicide Project has received widespread press coverage and interest from third parties. Previous Femicide Census reports are available at:
Response
For questions 1 – 8, please see attached in relation to investigations that have been concluded, any information regarding ongoing investigations is exempt by virtue of:
Section 30 – Investigations and proceedings conducted by a Public Authority
Section 40 – Personal data
These exemptions and explanatory notes are shown here:
In line with the above, I am required to complete a Prejudice Test/Public Interest Test (PIT) on disclosure. Please find this PIT attached.
Section 40 (2) allows for personal data to be withheld where release would breach the third party’s data protection rights. It would be unfair to release this information where any person could be identified from the data and in this case the right to privacy outweighs any public interest in release.
We are unable to answer questions 9 and 10, however this information would be exempt by virtue of:
S40(5) Personal Information
S30(3) Investigations
S31(3) Law Enforcement
Please be aware we do not use the term ‘femicide’, which is a female being killed because they are female – a sex-based hate crime, the information provided purely relates to females that have been killed.