Counting Women: Quantifying Femicide and Shelving Justice

Week 12, April 3, 2019
Media, Gender, and Sexuality
COMS 4604 A
Wednesdays, 2:35 am-5:25 pm
Mackenzie Bldg. 3190
Counting Women
Dr. Tracey P. Lauriault
Assistant Professor, Critical Media and Big Data
Carleton University
Tracey.Lauriault@Carleton.ca
orcid.org/0000-0003-1847-2738
@TraceyLauriault

2006
Counting makes things visible
2011

Quantifying things provides information

http://euclid.psych.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery
/images/dan/quetelet-binomial.jpg
Counting & quantifying reveal the norm

Correlating things shows relationships

When things are known actions can be taken
▪Obesity was considered a moral defect, biology,
research/science and the political economy of demographics
and locales have been shown to be factors associated with
obesity, it is now a social issue
▪Homosexuals were deviants and Genetics/science demonstrated
a biological predisposition, changing the moral argument
▪Air pollution leads to poor health, smog control & catalyzers
▪Unfortunately junk science can also lead to action! Creative
class, gay facial recognition, biased data or corpus, etc.
▪METHODOLOGY & CRITICAL THINKING

http://www.oireachtas.ie/documents/bills28/bills/2015/515/b515d.pdf
Bureaucracy acts upon known things

Classification & counting is resisted by those
counted

Social-shaping qualities of data
Kitchin, 2012

Dynamic Nominalism
Modified from Ian Hacking’s Dynamic Nominalism
Tracey P. Lauriault, 2012, Data, Infrastructures and Geographical Imaginations

Material Platform
(infrastructure – hardware)
Code Platform
(operating system)
Code/algorithms
(software)
Data(base)
Interface
Reception/Operation
(user/usage)
Systems of thought
Forms of knowledge
Finance
Political economies
Governmentalities - legalities
Organisations and institutions
Subjectivities and communities
Marketplace
System/process
performs a task
Context
frames the system/task
Digital socio-technical assemblage
HCI, Remediation studies
Critical code studies
Software studies
New media studies
Game studies
Theoretical approaches
Platform studies
Places
Practices
Flowline/Lifecycle
Surveillance Studies
Critical data studies
Algorithm Studies
Socio-Technological Assemblage
Modified by Lauriault from Kitchin, 2014, The Data Revolution, Sage.

http://kareningalasmith.com/counting-dead-women/
Counting Dead Women

Femicide Definition
Definition
“the killing of females
by males because they
are females.”
PATH, InterCambios, MRC, WHO
(2009) Strengthening
Understandings of Femicide: Using
Research to Galvanize Action and
Accountability. Washington DC.

• The Home Office now records and publishes data on homicide victims and the
relationship of the victim to the principal suspect and sex the of the victim.
• But it does not have the sex of the killer or connect different forms of male violence
against women.
Official Statistics

http://www.womensaid.org.uk/page.asp?section=00010001001400130010&sectionTitle=Femicide+
Census#femcensus
Femicide Census

http://www.womensaid
.org.uk/domestic-
violence-
events.asp?itemid=335
1&itemTitle=Femicide
+Census%3A+Profile
s+of+Women+Killed
+by+Men&section=0
00100010017&sectio
nTitle=Events+calend
ar
Authority &
Legitimacy

Why the Femicide Census?
1. Provide a clearer picture of domestic homicides in the UK by age/ethnic
origin/ relationship/ profession/region/outcome;
2. Provide a clearer picture of men’s fatal violence against women that is not
committed by a partner or ex-partner;
3. Information to create advocacy tools to provide concrete data on
domestic violence homicides;
4. Provide data when NGOs working to end domestic violence against
women is providing expert evidence on domestic homicides in civil
cases or before the Coroners court;
5. Provide comparisons and parallels between cases to identify where there
is the potential for a systemic argument against the State for failing to
protect the Right to Life; and
6. Provide a resource for academics researching femicides

Shelving Justice
▪ Action and Participatory Research project
▪ Qualitative interviews
▪ Archival records
▪ Ethnographic observations
▪ 1. Context about police lethality, excessive
force, neglect and mistrust in Detroit
▪ 2. Detailed description of how data are
collected from victims and how these move
through the system
▪ 3. List of state where there is a backlog of
untested rapekits
▪ 4. Discussed the failure:
▪ Serial rapists
▪ Exonerate the falsely accused
▪ Breach of trust
▪ Justice Denied
▪ 5. Research Questions
▪ Did the police know there were a large
number of untested kits in storage?
▪ Where they aware they had a problem?
▪ If not, how did they not know?
▪ If so, why did they not see this as a
problem?
6. Data
▪ Criteria to establish trustworthiness
▪ Credibility
▪ Transferability
▪ Dependability
▪ Confirmability
7. Described the problem
▪ Using their data
▪ Quotes from interviews
▪ Documentary evidence
(Campbell - 2015)

Shelving Justice
▪ Indicator – Crime lab closed due
to high error rate
▪ Action – Needed to examine
police evidence storage
▪ Accidental discovery of the kits
▪ The record keeping system
▪ did not flag this issue
▪ Evidence is logged and tagged
▪ Distributed storage
▪ When issue was flagged no action
was taken – Letters from the
Prosecutor’s office to Chief of Police
▪ Semantic wars – discovery, Numbers
Debate
▪ IA investigation;
▪ ‘random’ test of 36 kits + police reports
▪ Justifiable reasons?
▪ Victim’s fault were the reasons
▪ Perception of credibility
▪ Assumption that prostitutes cannot be
raped
▪ Complainant refused to prosecute
▪ ‘got what they got’
▪ ‘the assaults were not really rape’
(Campbell - 2015)

Shelving Justice = Justice Denied
▪The failure to test meant that:
▪Serial rapists continue to rape
▪The falsely accused are not exonerated
▪There is a breach of trust
▪ It is Justice Denied

What matters?
▪Counting
▪Qualitative and quantitative data
▪Making things visible
▪Who & what & where
▪The way to count (methodology)
▪Accuracy, reliability, bias, objectivity, quality, completeness
▪Representation
▪Science and critical thinking
▪The story
▪Making the data work

Who Counts?
▪What would you like to see made visible with data?

Counting Women: Quantifying Femicide and Shelving Justice

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