Karen Ingala Smith

Karen Ingala Smith is the CEO of nia (niaendingviolence.org.uk), a domestic and sexual violence charity working to end violence against women and girls, based in London, UK.

Quotes

• We've made Freedom of Information requests going back to 2009 about men's fatal violence against women. From this we've identified that 62% of women killed by men are killed by a partner or ex-partner, and that at least a third of these women were in the process of leaving, or had left him; that teenage girls, as well as women in their 80s or 90s, can be killed by men who were supposed to love them; that 92% of women who are killed by men are killed by someone they know. One in 12 is a woman who is killed by her son.
  • "The 81 women killed in 28 weeks", The Guardian (2 October 2021)
  • The article title refers to the period of time following 3 March 2021, the presumed date of the murder of Sarah Everard by a (male) Metropolitan Police constable, and the number of women killed, where the main suspect is male, since then. For some years from 2012, Smith ran a blog entitled Counting Dead Women.

• All women are controlled by men's violence. Whether or not they are the ones on the receiving end, it affects every one of us.
• Young, professional, conventionally attractive, white women who are killed by strangers get the most attention but we must stop perpetuating this hierarchy of victims.
  • "Why I have spent a decade counting murdered women", The Times (3 October 2021)

• The figure of eight per cent of women killed by men in the UK being killed by a stranger is consistent with the average since our records began in 2009. So ask me whether anything has changed since Sarah's murder, and my answer is no.
  • As cited by Amy-Clare Martin in "At least 350 women killed by men since murder of Sarah Everard", The Independent (2 March 2024)