'These women were failed by all of us': Dallas nurse builds database highlighting violence against women

In February 2017, a Dallas-based school nurse began keeping a list of all the women murdered by men. Roughly two years later, the database includes nearly 2,500 women from across the U.S.

Dawn Wilcox, RN, created a publicly available database called Women Count USA to present a picture of the hundreds of women who are killed by men each year. She told Kaiser Health News the idea for the project came after the public outrage over the shooting death of Harambe, a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo, in 2016 and the killing of Cecil the Lion, who was shot by a Minnesota dentist in 2015.

"I'm trying to get the message [across] that women matter, and that these women's lives mattered, and that this is not acceptable in the greatest country in the world," she said.

While the FBI releases crime data on the number of women killed by men, local police are not required to file reports with the federal agency, meaning data from some states is often unreliable. Rough estimates from the FBI indicate that between 1,613 and 2,129 women have been murdered by men each year since 1996. Data from 2017, the last year for which data is available, shows 1,733 women were killed, according to Kaiser Health News.

"I feel like these women were completely failed by all of us, really. A lot of these women did everything you're supposed to do to keep themselves safe. They told people, they went to the police, they got protective orders, and it still was not enough," Ms. Wilcox said.

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