Gender-based violence against women and its lethal consequence, femicide, are a serious problem worldwide. Official government data on gender-based violence and femicide are often absent, incomplete, infrequently updated, and contested. We draw on data feminism to situate femicide data as missing data. Drawing on qualitative interviews, this study analyzes the informatics work of ten activist and civil society organizations in six countries that combat data deprivation by producing counterdata. Activists practice alternative epistemological approaches to data science that prioritize care, memory, and justice. They also face significant information-related challenges, which increases the monitoring workload and adds emotional weight to reading about violent deaths. This work contributes to the literature on data activism and critical data studies by proposing femicide data collection practices as an important research topic. The empirical findings contribute to the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), suggesting ways in which this field can support and sustain activists’ counterdata production practices.
D’Ignazio, C., Cruxên, I., Suárez Val, H., Martinez Cuba, A., García-Montes, M., Fumega, S., Suresh, H., & So, W. (2022). Feminicide and counterdata production: Activist efforts to monitor and challenge gender-related violence. Patterns, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2022.100530