When “Divorce” Becomes the Most Dangerous Word: Gender Persecution, Femicide, and the Path to a Safe Exit
A mother and her two daughters have been taken from us in the United Kingdom, by the husband and father. This journal will not name them, will not speculate, and lays the blame at one door only — the man who chose to kill. Out of respect for a family’s grief, we turn instead to the living: to every woman in a dangerous relationship who has thought about leaving and been afraid. Because the hardest, most life-saving truth we can offer you is this — the moment you decide to go is the moment you are in most danger. Here is how to leave, and live.
In Grief, and With Purpose
I write this with a heavy heart, and with restraint. A family in the United Kingdom is enduring the unbearable — a mother and her two young daughters gone, at the hands of the man who should have kept them safest. The family has asked for privacy, and this platform honours that absolutely. We will not name them. We will not sift their private life for clues. We will not join the chorus that always, somehow, finds a way to explain what a man did. There is only one place the responsibility for this crime rests, and that is with the one who took it into his own hands. Everything else is noise, and much of it is the old, dangerous habit of looking anywhere but at the killer.
Many of you know this is not a subject I have come to lately. My work in women’s rights goes back to my student years at the University of Bradford and the National Union of Students, where I served as the NUS Black Women’s Representative in the Women’s Movement (2011/12), representing Black women students across the United Kingdom. Over the years I have sat with women in high-risk relationships and been part of getting some of them out. So I do not write as an observer. I write as someone who has held the phone, packed the bag, and waited at the safe address. And I write now because grief without purpose changes nothing — so let this grief become a guide that keeps another woman alive.
Gender Persecution Does Not Stop at the Diaspora’s Door
We must be honest about something our communities find hard to say aloud. The murder of women and girls by husbands and partners is not a distant problem, and it is not someone else’s. The number of Zimbabwean and African-heritage women killed in the United Kingdom by the men closest to them is alarming — and it sits within a wider, documented epidemic of men’s fatal violence against women across every community in Britain.
For years, this danger has been most visibly named in relation to so-called “honour”-based abuse in some South Asian and Middle Eastern communities — and specialist services grew up to meet it. But let us be clear about two things. First, gender persecution wears many cultural masks and belongs to no single community; patriarchal control, shame and silence operate in ours as surely as in any other. Second, the answer is never to point at another people, but to break the silence in our own. The Zimbabwean diaspora must stop treating a woman’s danger as a private family matter to be managed quietly, and start treating it as what it is: a threat to her life, requiring the same courage we would bring to any emergency.
Sometimes the Word “Divorce” Is Dangerous
If you remember nothing else from this journal, remember this. For a woman in a relationship with a controlling or violent man, the single most dangerous moment is the moment she decides to leave — and the moment he realises she is going. This is not opinion. It is one of the most consistent findings in the study of these deaths. The forensic evidence is stark: separation does not simply fail to guarantee safety — for a controlling man, it acts as a trigger.
The UK Femicide Census has found, consistently, that at least 40% of women killed by a current or former partner had already left him or were in the process of leaving. In one year’s detailed data, of the women killed after separation, around a third were killed within the first month, and 70% within the first year. A controlling man does not experience “she is leaving” as an ending — he experiences it as the ultimate loss of control, and for a dangerous minority, that is the point at which they choose to kill. This is why announcing your intention to your partner before you have a safety plan and specialist support can be the most dangerous thing you do.
So here is the hard, loving advice at the centre of this piece: do not lead with the word “divorce.” Do not announce your exit to the person you fear. Do not give an ultimatum across the kitchen table and hope for the best. Reach out to the people who do this every day — quietly, safely, first — and let them help you plan the leaving so that it is as safe as it can possibly be. Your safety is planned in silence and executed with support. It is not negotiated with the man you are escaping.
Who to Contact, in Confidence, First
These organisations exist for exactly this. They are confidential, many are free, and several are staffed by and for Black and minoritised women who understand our specific barriers — immigration status, community pressure, faith, family. You can call them before you have made any decision, just to talk and to understand your options. Contact them from a safe device — a friend’s phone, a library computer — and clear your history afterwards.
The Women Who Refuse to Let Them Be Forgotten
You asked me to point to those who count the dead, and I am glad to, because their work is how we know any of this is true. When a woman is killed, the danger is that she becomes a headline for a day and then a statistic, or worse, nothing at all. Two connected efforts in the UK refuse to allow that.
Counting Dead Women & the Femicide Census
Counting Dead Women was begun by campaigner Karen Ingala Smith, who set out to record every woman killed by a man in the UK — by name. Since 2016, MP Jess Phillips has read those names aloud in Parliament each International Women’s Day, drawn from this record, so that each woman is entered into Hansard, the official parliamentary record, and none is erased.
The Femicide Census, launched in 2015 by Karen Ingala Smith and Clarrie O’Callaghan — with support from Women’s Aid, Freshfields and Deloitte — goes further, building a detailed record of women killed by men in the UK since 2009: their ages, the relationships, the patterns, the methods. Its central finding is the one that should change how we act: these killings are not isolated incidents. They follow the same patterns, in the same relationships, with the same warning signs — and one woman is killed by a man in the UK every three days.
This is why silence is the enemy. The Census exists because the deaths were being treated as separate tragedies rather than a connected, preventable pattern. When we count, name and remember, we can begin to predict — and to prevent.
To the Woman Reading This in Fear
If you are reading this in a house where you are not safe, I am speaking to you directly now, and I want you to hear it plainly. You are not imagining it. You are not the cause of it. And you are not without help. What is happening to you has a name, it has a pattern, and it has an exit — and there are women, some of whom look like you and come from where you come from, whose entire life’s work is helping you reach it. You do not have to be sure. You do not have to have decided. You only have to make one quiet, safe call to begin to understand your options.
And to our communities, I say this without apology: a woman’s life is worth more than a family’s reputation, a marriage’s appearance, or a community’s comfort. The shame does not belong to the woman who leaves. It belongs to the man who made her have to. We must become the kind of diaspora where a frightened woman is met with a safe address and not a lecture, with a plan and not a proverb. That is how we honour the mother and daughters we have just lost — not with theories or blame games, but by making sure the woman next door lives.
To the family grieving now: we hold you in the dignity of your silence, and we will not disturb it. To every woman still in danger: reach out today, before you say a word to him. Leaving is the hardest and most dangerous thing — so do not do it alone, and do not do it unplanned. There is a door, and there are hands to help you through it. Vakadzi vane hupenyu hunokosha — women’s lives are precious. Pamberi nekuchengetedzwa kwevakadzi nevasikana — forward with the protection of our women and girls.
Leave a Reply