Counting women's deaths 'with' male violence and 'from' male violence: lessons from the pandemic death counting practices

From January to June 2020, academics, advocates and media commentators became increasingly concerned with the impact that lockdowns and stay-at-home directives might have on women and children living with violence. Indeed, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women named the gendered consequences of COVID-19 isolation restrictions as 'The Shadow Pandemic' (UN Women, 2020). A view shared by Action Aid (2020) who declared that the world was 'sleep walking into the shadow pandemic of global femicide'. However, Fassin (2021, p. 155) observed that rather than the pandemic itself being unprecedented 'it is the response to the pandemic that has been unprecedented' further commenting on the consequences of these public health responses for 'missing lives and injured lives' (Fassin, 2021, p. 169). Moreover, in many countries people were presented with daily counts of the missing and injured in the form of 'deaths with' and 'deaths from' COVID-19. Such counts emphasised the fragility of human life in which the ability to 'colonise the future' (Giddens, 1991) became problematic for everyone; though for women and children living with violence such fragility has always been mundane and ordinary-an everyday experience (Genn, 1988). The coronavirus pandemic may or may not have increased femicide rates globally. However, in relation to counting such deaths there is much to be learned from the pandemic practices of counting 'with' and 'from' COVID-19. This chapter will explore the implications and relevance of these practices for understanding how to measure women's deaths 'with' male violence and 'from' male violence.