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Surviving Life's Toughest Seasons · The World Knowledge

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Well, good evening, listeners. Thank you again, as always. I'm
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: so grateful for all you guys who have built this
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: podcast up, who listen, who watch. And I've just been,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: you know, falling across so many different stories this year,
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: and they're so different. But I came across Dawn Wilcox,
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: who's on the screen, and then for those listening, you'll
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: hear her voice. And she is a registered nurse for
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: a public school in Texas. But what's really cool is
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  Speaker 1: that basically she has two jobs. She does that full-time.
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  Speaker 1: And then the other full-time job that she has is
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  Speaker 1: this nonprofit that she started that is totally volunteer. And
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  Speaker 1: it's Women Count USA. And she documents femicide in the U.S.
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  Speaker 1: And I believe she started this 10 years ago, about
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  Speaker 1: 10 years ago, and has been documenting femicide cases that
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: have started since 1950s. Right?
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah. That's correct. Yeah.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: And she just has this passion for it. And she
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  Speaker 1: has this website, which I will link below. And there's
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  Speaker 1: an email address. And people have just sent her numerous
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  Speaker 1: photos and stories of women in their lives or friends
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  Speaker 1: or relatives that have been killed. And she's just documented
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  Speaker 1: all of them. And it's just incredible work that she's done.
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  Speaker 1: And so I wanted to have her on the podcast
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  Speaker 1: just to talk about why she does this and her
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  Speaker 1: heart behind it, what it looks like for her. But yeah,
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  Speaker 1: so Dawn, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you for having me. And I'm really happy
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  Speaker 2: that you came across my work. So I'm very grateful
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  Speaker 2: to be here. It's something that I'm very passionate about.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: And I appreciate any opportunity to share what I do.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I, you know, I came across your story through,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: I think an article that was done on you by
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: this obscure, I mean, it was obscure to me magazine
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: that was done, but maybe it wasn't, but it was,
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: they did really like narrative stories and now I can't
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  Speaker 1: remember the name of it, but your name popped up
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: and I was reading it and I was like, this
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  Speaker 1: is fascinating that somebody would want to do this full
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  Speaker 1: time and has a heart for that. So just to
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  Speaker 1: kind of start out for people listening, Why do you
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  Speaker 1: do this work? What was kind of, how did it
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  Speaker 1: start for you? Was it your own personal experiences? Was
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  Speaker 1: it a passion that you had to be a voice
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  Speaker 1: for the voiceless? How did that kind of come up
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  Speaker 1: that you wanted to start working on something so intense
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  Speaker 1: and document it for so long?
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: Well, kind of all of those things. And I want
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: to shout out Krista Hillstrom is the journalist who wrote
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  Speaker 2: article for The Atavist, and The Atavist is a magazine
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  Speaker 2: that does one long-form story a month, and she did
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: a story about my work called 14,455 and Counting. Yeah,
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: I mean, I sort of approached this work as, you know,
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  Speaker 2: a domestic violence survivor, Um, and also because I became
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  Speaker 2: very interested in, in sort of finding out like how
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  Speaker 2: many women were actually being murdered by men per year
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  Speaker 2: in the United States. And what I discovered is, um,
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  Speaker 2: it's very fragmented information. It's not readily available. It is
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  Speaker 2: often de-identified where you can't really, uh, sort of dig
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  Speaker 2: into what the relationships were between the perpetrator and the victim.
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  Speaker 2: And I found that like all of those kinds of
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: things are very important because they inform what happened. And
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: I think part of my approach to this work comes
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: from my nursing background, you know, and I do consider
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  Speaker 2: this a public health crisis, but if you were looking
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  Speaker 2: at a disease, you would want to know, you know,
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  Speaker 2: where it's happening to whom, you know, how often, and,
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  Speaker 2: and if you can't answer those questions, then you can't
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  Speaker 2: hope to cure the disease, you know, and, and that's
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  Speaker 2: part of my goal with this work is to gather
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  Speaker 2: information that can be used by criminologists, by people who
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  Speaker 2: are interested in this issue, you know, where they could
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  Speaker 2: kind of dig down into the data and, and maybe
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  Speaker 2: see some patterns or, you know, some, areas where there
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  Speaker 2: could possibly be, uh, earlier intervention or, um, you know,
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  Speaker 2: where it kind of could inform some more deep study about,
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  Speaker 2: about the issue. So the information I'm collecting is not
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  Speaker 2: as rigorous as like, you know, for an academic study,
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  Speaker 2: but I do collect large amounts of quantitative and qualitative
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  Speaker 2: data about women's murders. Um, things that I find important. Like,
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  Speaker 2: was there a history of domestic violence, of strangulation? And
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  Speaker 2: I'm not only documenting, you know, intimate partner homicide, but also,
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  Speaker 2: you know, serial sexual homicide. And so it's everything from,
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  Speaker 2: you know, your partner or current or former partner who
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  Speaker 2: you're most likely to be killed by to complete strangers
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  Speaker 2: and And when I tried to look for that information,
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  Speaker 2: I found that not only do we not do a
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  Speaker 2: very good job of tracking and documenting femicide, but we're
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  Speaker 2: not tracking and documenting homicide very well either. I was
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: pretty shocked to find that law enforcement agencies are supposed
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  Speaker 2: to kind of report their homicides to the federal level,
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  Speaker 2: to what used to be called the uniform crime report
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  Speaker 2: or the UCR, which is now the NIBRS, that that's
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  Speaker 2: like not compulsory. That's completely, you know, if you want to.
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  Speaker 2: And so the limited background I have in research and statistics,
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  Speaker 2: I'm thinking, so when we're hearing pronouncements about homicide rates
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  Speaker 2: and whether they've gone up or down, you know, how
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  Speaker 2: do we know that? You know, is, is this extrapolation? Um,
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  Speaker 2: They've got to be taking a little bit of data
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  Speaker 2: that they have and kind of making pronouncements about it
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  Speaker 2: based on that. And along the way, just discovered there
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  Speaker 2: were some other groups. There's like the Murder Accountability Project
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  Speaker 2: that's really looked into this issue. And even the FBI
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  Speaker 2: was not reporting to their own federal reporting system. And
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  Speaker 2: I understand the reasons why that happens. A lot of
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  Speaker 2: police departments are very understaffed. Gathering data, as I know,
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  Speaker 2: is very tedious. It's very time consuming. And sometimes the
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: value of gathering data may not be very clear.