The first international investigation on political feminicides
About the investigation
These women weren’t leading the same battles, walking in the same streets or speaking in the same forums. Yet they were all victims of the same crime: political feminicide.
These gender-based political assassinations are invisible crimes. They consist of killing women, both for the cause they are fighting for, and because they are women.
“Femmes à abattre” is the first journalistic investigation that has ever looked into these sexist crimes perpetrated all over the world. We’ve gathered hundreds of texts, images and data in order to build a collective work that will help identifying the specific threats that women human rights activists are facing, and the mechanism of impunity that surrounds them.
Political feminicides are like “cluster bombs”. By committing these murders, perpetrators manage to silence the women who dared taking up the public voice. At the same time, they hang a sword of Damocles above the head of their successors, those who aim to take over their battle.
While women activists are more numerous than ever, it is urgent to document these crimes. This way, states, institutions and NGOs will provide better support to today’s and tomorrow’s activists.
The database
“Femmes à abattre” is also the first worldwide database of victims of political feminicides. By collecting existing databases built by NGOs specialized in political rights, by researching press articles around the world, by diving into these stories with interviews of experts, survivors and relatives of the victims, our journalists have gathered dozens of names of women assassinated both for their political fights and for their gender.
This work will be published by our media partners.
We need your help
Several French and international media, as well as NGOs, are already supporting “Femmes à abattre”. In 2023, you will start finding our articles, images and the first figures of our database in these newspapers and organizations.
But we need your help to push this investigation further. We want to investigate more killings. As independent journalism has a cost, we need your financial support.
We’ll also be posting content each week on Twitter and on Instagram – you can also support us by liking and sharing our work under the hashtags #FAA #Fempol #Feminicidepolitique
Who are we?
Youpress is a collective of freelance journalists. For fifteen years, we’ve been traveling the world and documenting gender-based violence and inequalities, in the context of populist regimes, religious organizations, police institutions or even criminal multinationals.
Youpress has also published several investigative books. We documented gender-based violence in the French army, with La Guerre Invisible by Leïla Miñano and Julia Pascual (Les Arènes, 2014), in the French police, with Silence, on cogne by Sophie Boutboul (Grasset, 2019), but also in hospitals, with Silence sous la blouse by Cécile Andrzejewski (Fayard, 2018) and in the pharmaceutical industry, with Mauvais traitements, pourquoi les femmes sont mal soignées, by Delphine Bauer and Ariane Puccini (Seuil, 2020).
In 2016, Youpress took part in the Zero Impunity project, which documented the impunity that surrounds the use of rape as a weapon of war. We focused our investigation on Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, American extraterritorial prisons like Guantanamo or even the Ukrainian conflict. This work was translated in five languages and was read by over a million people. It has received the Fipa d’Or prize for digital creation 2016 and Leïla Miñano was named “personality of the month” by the UN.
