Rebecca Cheptegei is not the first female athlete to be murdered in Kenya. But femicides are not unique to Africa.
Africa: Deadly Misogyny
Rebecca Cheptegei is not the first athlete to be murdered in Africa. In 2021, Agnes Jebet Tirop, another Kenyan long-distance runner, world record holder and Tokyo Olympian, was stabbed to death in her home. Her husband was charged with her death, and the trial is ongoing. In 2022, Damaris Muthee Mutua, born in Kenya and competing for Bahrain, was strangled. Her partner is in hiding and is still wanted. The two murders sparked a wave of protests to draw attention to the number of similar cases in several African countries.
In Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa in particular, male violence is particularly common in women’s murders. The whole world watched the trial of the South African runner and star paralympian Oscar Pistorius, who was convicted and imprisoned for shooting his fiancée, whom he allegedly mistook for a burglar.
The UN report on femicides, published at the beginning of the year, shows that in 2022, more than 20,000 women were killed across Africa at the hands of men, usually those closest to them. The authors of the list note that the data is incomplete and significantly underestimated; the actual scale of the tragedy and deadly misogyny on the continent is at least several times greater. In 2022, the pandemic was still ongoing; the restrictions, crises and uncertainty that accompanied it were to overlap with the traditional discrimination against women. It is also manifested in the fact that law enforcement agencies and the justice system are not quick to prosecute brutal men. Now, even after the pandemic.
But femicides are not confined to Africa. Colombia is grappling with a similar crisis, with women’s rights organizations there counting 109 cases this year alone (through the end of May), of which 69 women were killed by a current or former partner.
Read also: WHO report. One in three women has experienced violence in a relationship
Femicide: A Wave of Murderous Violence
The European Commission only proposed the provisions of a directive in May that is to finally tackle violence against women and domestic violence. Everywhere in the world, the failure to notice femicides means that their statistics are incomplete. Another manifestation is the practice of courts that treat men who abuse women leniently, and the police similarly do not have them on their radar. And yet a certain number of the later perpetrators of murders have already sat in the docks and been convicted, among other things, of domestic violence.
Activists in Greece are sounding the alarm about a wave of murderous violence against women, where the number of women murdered by men in the European Union is the highest. The number of victims has increased since the pandemic. There are also more and more victims in Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and Germany. Such disturbing events are starting a debate on the need to introduce femicide into criminal codes as a separate category of crime. In April, Croatia added femicide to its code. This is the culmination of a campaign that has been ongoing for over two years, initiated after the murder of a 44-year-old woman in Split, murdered by her former partner in November 2021. Only four countries in Europe still have femicide in their codes – Belgium, Cyprus, Malta and North Macedonia.
In Poland, the debate about the need for such a change is of course ongoing, but it does not penetrate the media and political mainstream. Dominated by men, who clearly see no problem in the fact that hundreds of citizens of the Republic of Poland are dying in this way. The Women’s Rights Center Foundation says that it is about half a thousand victims. Every year.
