On this episode of en(gender)ed, our guest is Dawn Elizabeth Wilcox, a domestic violence survivor, activist and educator. Dawn has been working as a registered nurse for 23 years and runs Women Count USA, a national database that compiles data on femicides in the United States. Dawn began this project in 2017 out of her home in Plano, Texas, and has collected more than 2,500 names over the past 2 years. Our conversation with Dawn will cover the urgency of femicide and violence against women as not only a national crisis, but an international one, and the ways in which the criminal justice, healthcare, and social welfare systems in our country continue to fail survivors of intimate partner violence and their children and communities. Dawn will also share with us her thoughts for how her work can be used to inform changes in the ways in which the media and law enforcement can better respond to intimate partner violence in our country. You can email Dawn with news story links at .
During our conversation, Dawn and I reference the following resources:
- The 2018 United Nations Global Study on Homicide: Gender-related Killing of Women and Girls
- Julie Owens’ work
- Melissa Jeltsen’s article on the underestimated risk of strangulation
- How we can prosecute domestic violence even without the testimony of the victim
- Pilot programs in NYC focused on “fixing the abuser“
- Our interview with Kathleen Russell of the Center for Judicial Excellence’s Child Murder Map
- The high rates of domestic violence in law enforcement families
- Level Up’s work on producing journalistic standards for reporting on domestic violence
- Equal Press’s work on media accountability in reporting on gender-based violence
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