The Hidden Femicides That Don't Look Like Murder

When most people hear the word femicide, they imagine a murder that is impossible to misinterpret.

When a woman is stabbed by her husband, or a former boyfriend shoots his ex-partner, the body is discovered, a suspect is identified, and an arrest is made. The crime enters the statistics as homicide and it’s counted, classified and recognized for what it is.

But what if the woman dies by suicide after years of coercive control and domestic abuse? What if she repeatedly told friends she was terrified, isolated, financially trapped and unable to escape? What if her abuser spent years convincing her she was worthless, threatening her, controlling her movements, cutting her off from support and making her believe there was no way out?

And what if another woman falls from a balcony after an argument with a violent partner? Or she hangs herself under circumstances that make her family deeply suspicious? Or maybe dies in a way that is immediately categorized as suicide before investigators seriously examine alternative explanations?

Those deaths rarely enter femicide statistics. And this is just one type of hidden femicide that statistics are conveniently leaving out. But campaigners, researchers and bereaved families are increasingly asking why these deaths should be excluded from femicide counts.

Because some women disappear twice: the first time when they die and the second time when the circumstances of their deaths are recorded in ways that erase the role of male violence.

When Abuse Kills Without Pulling the Trigger

For a long time, our legal and cultural understanding of homicide has relied on a fairly straightforward distinction.

If someone kills another person, it’s homicide, but if someone kills themselves, it’s suicide.

The problem is that real life is often more complicated than the current categories we have for classifying deaths.

Domestic abuse researchers have spent years documenting how coercive control can systematically dismantle a victim’s ability to live freely. Victims may be isolated from family and friends, their finances may be controlled and their movements monitored. Their confidence is gradually destroyed. They are threatened, degraded, stalked or subjected to relentless psychological abuse. Eventually, some begin to see death as the only remaining escape route.

The death certificate may say suicide but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

This issue has become impossible to ignore in Britain. In 2024, the UK government formally renamed Domestic Homicide Reviews as Domestic Abuse Related Death Reviews in order to better recognize victims whose deaths result from domestic-abuse-related suicide. The change was prompted by growing recognition that abuse-driven suicides were disappearing from public understanding because they did not fit traditional definitions of homicide.

The numbers are striking. According to the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, suicide has remained the leading cause of death among people experiencing domestic abuse in England and Wales for three consecutive years. More than 340 domestic-abuse-related deaths were recorded in a recent year, with suicide accounting for the largest share.

The public conversation about domestic violence lethality and femicides overwhelmingly focuses on murder. But among domestic-abuse-related deaths, suicide is claiming even more victims without the statistics for femicide accurately reflecting that.

One recent case from Scotland illustrates the same pattern. In 2026, Lee Milne became the first person in Scottish legal history to be convicted of culpable homicide after years of abuse culminated in the suicide of his wife, Kimberley Milne. Prosecutors proved that he had subjected her to sustained physical, emotional and financial abuse. Kimberley ultimately jumped from a bridge after what the court concluded was a prolonged campaign of violence and coercion.

The court recognized something that many victims’ advocates have argued for years: abuse can be lethal even when the abuser never physically delivers the fatal blow.

Coroners and domestic-abuse experts are increasingly acknowledging what victims' advocates have argued for years: coercive control often becomes a causal factor in suicide, even when traditional legal categories struggle to capture that reality

Kimberley’s case is historically significant not just because of the conviction, but because it exposes the limitations of how we think about responsibility. We understand that a man who strangles his partner has caused her death, but it seems that we struggle more with the idea that a man who systematically destroys a woman’s life until death appears to be her only escape is also responsible for her death.

From the victim’s perspective, the distinction is blurred. As it should be. Coercive controllers and abusers of any ilk are the moral authors of their victims’ suicides even when they didn’t pull the trigger themselves.

For the UK, there is also a petition to make coercive control leading to suicide a recognizable offense, and you can sign it HERE.

The Women Who Allegedly Jumped

The second category of hidden femicides is even more disturbing.

These are not deaths where abuse may have contributed to suicide, but deaths where the official explanation itself may be questionable. These are murders passed off as suicide, and the authorities are buying this explanation because patriarchal culture loves to portray women as emotional, irrational and quick to jump to ‘dramatic’ gestures like suicide.

The Hidden Femicides in Turkey.

The most memorable example comes from Turkey, where women’s rights organizations have spent many years documenting what they call ‘suspicious deaths’. It seems that men in Turkey have learned that other ways of murdering someone leaves traces impossible to deny, so pushing women from high places is a convenient way to kill them.

The pattern is unsettling: women keep falling from balconies and windows. Women are found dead after supposedly throwing themselves from high places. In many cases there is a husband, boyfriend or male relative in the picture that was close by. Also, in many cases families dispute the official conclusions and insist that it couldn’t have been a suicide, only to be ignored by the police. In many cases, the campaigners argue that investigations were inadequate or prematurely accepted suicide as the explanation.

The Guardian reported on the growing concern among Turkish activists that some of these deaths may in fact be femicides that have disappeared into suicide statistics. Women’s organizations in Turkey now track suspicious deaths separately from officially recognized femicides because they believe many cases are never properly investigated.

The existence of th