Until women have a life free of violence, a safe life, we will continue fighting.
We believe in memory and justice,
and that can only happen if we keep naming the victims.
The moment we stop saying their names, they will be forgotten.
They keep killing women, and it just isn't fair.
Because we also need to live.
Femicide - the killing of women and girls because of their gender - is a global problem.
Every 11 minutes, a woman was killed by her partner or family member in 2020.
But the real numbers are much higher,
because many countries don’t keep a record of the number of femicides.
So some women are carrying out their own detective work to get justice for victims.
I am Gülsüm Kav,
I represent the We Will Stop Femicide platform.
Our platform was founded in 2010 after Münevver Karabulut was murdered.
After the murder we made a call to women and women's organisations to form a platform.
The suspect was a rich family’s son, and he was not arrested for a long time.
The fact that the Karabulut family was looking for justice on their own,
was important and we wanted to go and support them. It was a natural instinct.
Our well known slogan: 'You will never walk alone', was created like this.
'You’re not alone, we are together.'
This was the first step in our search for justice along with families.
In our country's criminal code there is no term for it [femicide].
A murder is a murder.
We thought there would be data for gender-related murders, data on how they were killed.
And we asked for this femicide data.
We found out that there were no official statistics about femicides.
This was a scandal.
Then we started to document the realities about femicide ourselves.
We published them monthly and yearly.
Soon, Gülsüm and her team found themselves taking on the role of investigators.
The first letter was about Esin Güneş's, a young teacher,
found in Siirt province, near a rocky area.
Her husband said it was a suicide, then the case was closed.
Her family wrote to us in a letter that they didn't believe it was suicide,
and that her husband was violent and she was killed by him.
I cannot forget our meeting when we read that letter.
Because our responsibility reached a new height.
Finally when the forensics failed [to find anything]
we got a report from the ODTU university
analysing the fall according to laws of physics and they proved that Esin’s chance of falling
without interference was zero.
Then the suspect was arrested.
For the first time, the prosecutor considered it as a murder.
Across the years, we’ve had around 30 suspicious death cases.
We revealed the truth in some of them, there was no progress in others.
Now we are dealing with at least ten suspicious death cases.
We Will Stop Femicide is run by a group of volunteers.
The most recent of the team’s cases to conclude was Yağmur Önüt,
a university student who was shot in the neck in 2016.
Seeing that you still did not forget about me,
that you did not forget about Yağmur,
it makes me happy.
You didn’t give up, we didn't give up.
In the history of our platform, this has been a record in terms of resistance.
Six years, this was the longest case.
But really we did it together.
Yağmur's boyfriend claimed her death was an accident,
but her mother, Sevgi, believed her daughter had been murdered.
She contacted We Will Stop Femicide for help.
The court first said it was a joke and she died as a result of playing with the gun.
When you look at Yağmur's past you see that she is not a young woman
who would play with guns.
You should examine all of this.
But we had to struggle for six years to prove it.
It wasn't until January this year that her then boyfriend, Egemàn Vàrdash
was finally convicted of 'killing with eventual intent'
and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
The Supreme Court is now going to consider appeals.
The prosecution argues that he should have been convicted of a more serious offense.
The defendant maintains it was an accident.
When you work on a case, you also work closely with families.
You have to explain the steps you have taken in the case, and understand their pains.
They are experiencing trauma and you know that you have to walk with them for a while.
Yağmur was my friend.
I got married very early, I became a mother at an early age.
My marriage didn't last long.
That's why with Yağmur we grew up together.
They don’t just kill your daughter; they also kill you.
But you don’t have the luxury to die, to lay in bed for days,
to cry, to mourn, to detach from life.
For this person to be punished, you have to fight yourself.
If 'We Will Stop Femicide' didn’t exist, he would be free now.
This fight is not going to end.
When you see such good people exist, you say goodness will win one day.
The Turkish authorities have begun releasing data
on the number of women murdered in the country.
But Gülsüm says the official figure is always lower than her organisation's.
We are not doing a heroic job. We only say do a proper investigation,
so that we don’t need to do this.
We Will Stop Femicide has been critical of President Erdoğan's decision in 2021
to withdraw Turkey from the Istanbul Convention - an international treaty
designed to protect women.
In April 2022, the Istanbul Public Prosecutor's Office opened a lawsuit
to shut down the platform for "Acting against morality"
and "the family structure".
Gülsüm and her team are now preparing to challenge these allegations in court.
Meanwhile, they continue their work.
In the last decade, the Americas have seen a 9% increase in gender-related killings
of women and girls by an intimate partner or family member.
Eighteen countries, across Latin America and the Caribbean,
recognise femicide as a crime - separate to homicide.
Ecuador is one of them, after changing the law in 2014.
But, just as in Turkey, women's rights groups say
government figures are far lower than the reality.
I am Geraldina Guerra, I am 46 years old.
I have been an activist and a women's human rights advocate
since I was 15 years old.
I am now the president of the Aldea Foundation.
Before us, in 2016, it was a group of women from 'Movement for Women's Justice'
who started a manual mapping of cases throughout the country.
We got together with them in 2017 to make this registry in a better way,
in a more systematic way,
so that we could fight with the State’s statistics.
Because the State said that there were no femicides
because there were no sentences for femicides.
In our foundation, we are linked via chat with 150 women working in all the provinces
and that allows us to be informed immediately when a femicide happens.
The group then begins to investigate
tracing the woman's last movements
and establishing whether she had previously been a victim of domestic violence
so as to to include her in their femicide statistics.
The Aldea Foundation created online maps
to compare the number of women killed in different regions.
We wanted to build a tool that would allow us to say it differently
and that, above all, would allow us to tell the general population
like the lady working in the shop, or a work colleague,
to show them what is happening in the place where they live.
These data maps are now being used to improve state records.
The group then decided to take the idea a step further.
The year 2021 was the most violent year on record, with 197 femicides in the country.
In Cuenca, we developed an initiative – here and in the Portoviejo area
through which we transitioned from data maps
to what we call a ‘cartography of memory’ of the victims.
It is not only mapping the numbers
but mapping the living memories of the victims.
This is the map of Cuenca and we can see the case of Maribel Pinto.
Maribel Pinto was killed in November 2020.
She was an afro-activist and a sex worker.
One of her clients was a 25-year old mechanic called Byron Guarango.
He stabbed her 113 times.
Maribel died after the 10th stab wound.
But the map allows us to see not just her death but her life,
it allows us to hear from her sons and daughters,
learn what Maribel was like when she was alive,
how they feel now that their mum is no longer with them.
She had five children.
My name is Miriam Mercado.
The relationship with my mum was great.
We got on really well.
We were always together.
I looked like her little doll.
One night she left and she never came back.
On top of that, I was alone and I had to tell
my dad, my brothers and sisters, and I didn't know how.
It was very hard.
Miriam helped create the life map for her mother.
Hello!
How are you?
I am good.
Is this where Maribel used to live?
Yes.
The 9 de Octubre market is important because we would always go there,
meet our friends and talk to everyone.
We would go there to buy groceries for lunch and dinner.
This map for me means that where we went, she will stay.
I know that I will remember her every time I walk by these places,
I will say I was there with my mum, we talked, we laughed.
Maribel’s case was initially treated as murder and not specifically femicide.
But this was overturned, and her death was labelled a femicide in November last year.
Why was it femicide? It is obvious, because there were 113 stab wounds.
That means misogyny, that means a power relation,
that means that she was subdued.
That is the definition of femicide.
Her killer was given a 34-year sentence.
And ruling it as a femicide means Maribel’s children
are eligible for financial support from the government.
Maribel's case became an emblematic case in Ecuador.
But, what about all the other cases?
We believe that listening to the audios,
looking at the photos,
reading what Maribel Pinto's youngest son narrates,
seeing the paintings that he made for the map,
can help to shake up people's consciences
and get people to talk about the subject.
It is not that someone is paying us and financing us.
We are doing it simply voluntarily, in the face of the wave of femicides
that occurred in Ecuador in 2017.
This has to stop.
They keep killing women, and it just isn't fair.
Because we also need to live.
We have people to live for: our children, our family.
Over the course of this film,
at least one woman will have been killed by her partner or a family member.
Each year, there will be thousands more.
The true scale of the problem continues to be uncovered
by women like Gülsüm and Geraldina around the world.
Violence endures in silence
and femicide will continue as long as we remain silent.
We won’t be satisfied until the day women live with equal rights, in freedom.