Whichever way you look at it, Britain has a big gender-based violence problem. Between 2009 and 2015, men killed over 900 women in England and Wales, and – perhaps even more shocking – 64% of these women were victims of a current or former partner, while another 8% were killed by their sons.These are only some of the alarming figures revealed earlier this month in the first detailed analysis of the Femicide Census , a database collating information on deadly male violence against women. It was developed by Karen Ingala Smith, founder of Counting Dead Women – a project launched in 2012 to record all UK women murdered by men – in partnership with national charity Women’s Aid Tracking and comparing data from the past six years, the census aims to provide a clearer picture of femicide – a term that became popular in the 1970s and generally refers to the killing of a woman because she is a woman – whether committed by a partner, ex-partner, relative, acquaintance, colleague or stranger.“Unless we gather as much information as possible about the incidents, we won’t ever understand how to stop [them] from happening,” explains Polly Neate, chief executive of Women’s Aid. “What happens at the moment is that nobody is joining the dots, nobody is looking at common factors.”Often, she reports, both the police and the media record these killings as isolated, random events. Yet as the census shows, there are many cases that follow a similar pattern of violence against women, deeply rooted in inequality and discrimination. Identifying those patterns may be the first necessary step towards effectively addressing the issue of femicide, and saving women’s lives.“The first thing [we learned] is that the overwhelmingly biggest category of women killed is women killed by a current or former intimate partner,” Neate points out. “That is very shocking, and it needs to be highlighted because there is a very big contrast to [the circumstances in which] men [are generally killed].”In 2013, the UN Global Study on Homicide revealed that, while 79% of all homicide victims globally are male, intimate partner or family-related homicide disproportionately affects women, who make up two-thirds of victims. And the UK is no exception. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that, in the year ending March 2015, 44% of female homicide victims were killed by their partner or ex-partner, compared with only 6% of male homicide victims.