Have you ever thought about how many women take their own lives due to domestic abuse suffered for years? It is a drama that, everywhere, is and has been hidden for too long, with numbers that do not tell the reality of a tragedy that has remained silent for too long.
For this reason, a disconcerting study conducted in the United Kingdom by Domestic Homicide Projecta program led by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), revealed that as many as 98 suspected suicides following domestic violence were recorded in 2024, which is only part of the problem, compared to the 80 homicides by intimate partners.
But there’s more: another research has highlighted an even more shocking reality. If these numbers were reflected on a national scale, there could be up to 1,500 women who take their own lives every year due to violence, a figure which is up to 15 times higher than what we know. Behind every number there is a broken life, a pain that we can no longer ignore.
This is a reality that, unfortunately, does not always translate into legal action. As The Guardian explains, in Great Britain, only one case of conviction for manslaughter relating to the suicide of a woman due to domestic violence has been recorded. Authorities have often been content to label deaths as suicides without proper investigation, ruling out the possibility that they were murders disguised as suicides.
Now, the victims’ families are calling for all suicides with suspected domestic abuse to be treated as homicides from the start, to ensure that the best possible evidence is gathered and that concrete action is taken to protect victims before it is too late.
And in Italy? A similar investigation has never been conducted yet, but it would be essential to launch a study that would allow us to fully understand the extent of the phenomenon of female suicides linked to domestic violence. The absence of official data that fully explores the link between abuse and suicide is a lack that makes it difficult to implement effective prevention policies, while adopting a similar approach to that of the United Kingdom, treating suicides linked to domestic abuse as cases of potential homicide, would be a decisive step in tackling a scourge that is still too often ignored.
Violence has no borders, and as in the United Kingdom, the number of victims in Italy could be much higher than we think. Why don’t we intervene, then, before it is too late, not only to stop the abuse, but to prevent too many women from losing their lives without the cause ever being adequately understood and addressed? Every woman deserves justice. And he deserves to live without fear.
