How Many Families Will Be Missing This Holiday Season? 10 Questions We Cannot Afford to Stop Asking (w/stats and sources)

I’m actually kind of tired of seeing more articles whining about women not being nicer to men from mainstream publications, as we see videos and articles of women and children being murdered by men. It’s as if there is a short between what is happening in the lives of women and children and what mainstream media is choosing to focus on when it comes to women. I’m all the way over it.

I saw a little girl holding a large gun on social media. The caption read something like, “Why does a little girl this age have a gun?” Normally people debate, and most of the comments are saying “what a shame” or “bad parenting.” Today?

Some of the people responded with some variation of, “She might need it in case her dad decides to shoot the entire family one day.”

Wow. This is where we are now. Certainly I despise seeing children with guns. But some people are growing weary of their disgust not being matched for men with guns and what they do to school children, the women in their lives, and hell…their own children. 

The holiday season is coming. I’ve already begun to consider my menus going forward.

Soon, other families will start talking about Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas gifts, travel plans, who is cooking, who is bringing dessert, which children have suddenly outgrown everything they own, and where everybody is going to sleep when the house fills up.

Some families who are alive together today will never make it to that table.

Sit with that reality long enough to understand the urgency.

In June 2026, The Washington Post reported something that should have commanded sustained national attention. Overall homicide in the United States has been falling, while domestic killings have remained stubbornly high. In the first two days of that month alone, authorities said three fathers killed the mothers of their children and their children. Thirteen people died. The youngest was three years old. Data reviewed by the newspaper showed more incidents involving four or more relatives killed during the first half of 2026 than during all of 2025. More than 3,000 people died in incidents involving multiple murdered relatives or intimate partners between 2017 and 2025.

There will always be breaking news. There should also be memory.

Women and children deserve enough public concern for somebody to keep asking questions after the police tape comes down.

1. Why Do We Have So Many Questions About Women’s Kindness and So Few About Women’s Safety?

Women have heard the questions.

Are women inclusive enough?

Are women compassionate enough?

Are women making other people feel welcome?

Are women using the right language?

Are women being judgmental?

Are women giving people a chance?

Are women being supportive enough?

Our culture has developed an impressive appetite for examining women’s obligations to other people. Every few months there seems to be another conversation about how women should speak, accommodate, welcome, understand, forgive, include, date, support, or make room.

Women have another set of questions.

Who is making sure women get home alive?

Why are domestic killings remaining high while homicide overall falls?

What happens when a woman says she is afraid?

What happens when she reports stalking?

What happens when she leaves?

What happens when children are living inside that danger?

Who is studying the men who become violent?

Who is studying the men who refuse violence?

What are we learning from both?

Those questions deserve airtime because wherever you stand on women’s “kindness”, you can’t say that we are matching men and boys in violent acts against others. 

2. How Many Families Are We Going to Lose Before We Treat Family Annihilation as a National Concern?

There is something uniquely devastating about family annihilation because sometimes an entire branch of a family disappears at once.

In July, investigators in Michigan said a father fatally shot his wife and their six children, ages 5 through 15, before killing himself. Eight members of one household were gone.

Think beyond the crime-scene photograph.

There are grandparents who lose a daughter and grandchildren in the same telephone call. Schools can lose several siblings. Aunts lose nieces and nephews. Bedrooms become empty together.

Then November arrives.

The calendar keeps moving even when families cannot.

How many chairs will be empty this Thanksgiving because of domestic and family violence? How many children will have Christmas presents already hidden in closets that they will never open?

We count homicide victims because numbers help us understand scale. We should remember that sometimes one incident removes an entire family from the future.

3. Why Aren’t We Asking More Questions About Male Violence?

Sex patterns in violence are legitimate subjects of investigation.

Studying male violence does not require declaring every male dangerous. Most men will never annihilate their families. Most fathers will never murder their children. Millions of men endure divorce, unemployment, rejection, financial trouble, humiliation, grief, and terrible stress without killing anyone.

That gives researchers an extraordinary comparison group.

What keeps those men from becoming violent?

How do they process rage and rejection? What beliefs do they hold about women, children, ownership and authority? What allows one distressed man to seek help while another decides that other human beings will die with him?

We should also examine the men who do become violent: previous domestic abuse, coercive control, stalking, threats, suicidality, access to weapons, sexual violence, retaliation, entitlement, substance abuse and other evidence-supported factors.

Stress belongs in the investigation. Stress cannot carry the moral responsibility for homicide.

Everybody has stress…especially these days. The useful question is what separates distress from violence.

That knowledge could save somebody.

4. Why Do We Barely Have Time to Mourn One Woman Before We Meet Another?

There is another consequence of repeated violence that statistics have trouble capturing.

We barely learn one woman’s name before another woman’s photograph appears.

Another mother. Another daughter. Another child. Another family standing before microphones. Another vigil. Another set of flowers.

The repetition can exhaust our ability to respond. Familiarity begins settling over events that should remain unacceptable.

Frequency can makes what should be viewed as an emergency feel ordinary.

Survivors know something about this process. When harm happens repeatedly, human beings sometimes learn to absorb what should have caused alarm. That survival response can happen to communities too.

We cannot afford to become practiced at watching women and children die.

5. What Happens When a Black Woman Calls for Help?

It is interesting working to end violence against women while being a Black woman. A lot of people who are not a Black woman has an extremely strong and deeply embedded opinion on everything about us, including how we may handle toxic or abusive relationships. Especially on when and why we should “just call the police.”

Black women carry another history into this conversation. Women need protection from interpersonal violence while Black women also live with the knowledge that encounters with institutions charged with providing protection can carry danger of their own.

Sonya Massey called 911 in July 2024 because she believed someone might be prowling around her Illinois home. Former sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson shot and killed her inside that home. He was later convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 20 years. In August 2026, only months into that sentence, Grayson died in custody.

Sonya remains dead. Her children still lost their mother. Her family attorneys said after Grayson’s death that it did not bring Sonya back. Her family has spoken about the absence of closure.

Black women should not have to choose between being endangered in their homes and wondering what may happen when they summon authorities for protection.

Sonya’s name should lead us toward questions about training, hiring, accountability, crisis response, officer behavior and whether people asking for help are actually safer after help arrives.

6. And Now There Are Questions About What Happened to Asia Bennett

Asia Bennett was 22 years old when a Jacksonville police officer shot and killed her on August 11, 2026, during a domestic-disturbance response.

Police say Bennett had a knife, ignored commands, and advanced toward the officer. Her family disputes the police account and says Bennett was experiencing domestic violence. Their attorney has challenged the circumstances of the shooting and demanded greater transparency.

Those competing accounts are precisely why journalism exists.

Ask questions. Seek the records. Examine the timeline. Request the body-camera footage. Talk to witnesses. Talk to the family. Examine the domestic-violence history. Test official statements against available evidence. Correct mistakes when the evidence requires correction.

7. Where Are the “Families Matter” Shirts?

There is a reason this question keeps bothering me.

Where are the shirts?

Where are the ribbons?

Where is the sustained national campaign?

Where is the cultural insistence that children deserve to survive a parent’s crisis and women deserve to survive leaving relationships?

A shirt cannot prevent homicide. Public symbols tell us what a society has collectively decided deserves attention.

Families are being erased in single acts of violence, and many of us learn about them as isolated local tragedies.

We see the photographs. We shake our heads. We feel terrible.

Then another family dies.

A prevention culture requires more than sorrow. It requires memory, research, public education and sustained pressure.

8. Why Are Women Still Everywhere in the News While Violence Against Women Is Disappearing From the Conversation?

This is where something becomes deeply strange.

A global analysis examined 1.14 billion online news articles published between 2017 and 2025. Coverage containing terms associated with violence against women and misogynistic abuse fell to 1.3% of online news in 2025, its lowest point during the period studied. Coverage had reached 2.2% during the height of the #MeToo era in 2018.

Women have not disappeared from crime reporting.

We can see murdered women, missing women, sexually assaulted women, abused women and exploited girls constantly.

The connection between those stories can disappear.

One becomes celebrity news. Another becomes local crime. Another becomes a domestic dispute. Another becomes a murder-suicide. Another becomes courtroom coverage.

Readers receive tragedy after tragedy without necessarily receiving the framework that helps them recognize recurring patterns.

That costs us something.

Patterns are where prevention begins.

9. Why Aren’t We Learning Their Names?

The public should never turn murdered women and children into entertainment.

They deserve something far better than spectacle.

They deserve memory.

There should be a place between sensationalizing somebody’s worst day and forgetting that she ever lived.

Learn who she was.

Remember the children.

Follow the court case.

Ask what warning signs preceded the violence.

Find out whether she sought help and what we can improve upon.

Ask whether systems responded.

Return six months later and tell us what changed.

10. When Will Our Empathy Match What Is Actually Happening?

Compassion requires more than feeling terrible afterward.

It looks like curiosity before another death.

It looks like researchers examining why some men respond violently to circumstances millions of people survive without violence.

It looks like reporters connecting cases without turning victims into statistics.

It looks like governments funding prevention.

It looks like institutions listening when women say they are frightened.

It looks like studying the men who choose violence and the much larger population of men who choose restraint.

It looks like asking whether women and children are safe with at least as much urgency as we ask whether women are sufficiently accommodating to everybody else.

The holidays are coming.

Somewhere tonight a woman is trying to decide whether it is safe to leave. A child is listening to adults arguing in another room. A grandmother is worried about something her daughter told her. A man is furious that somebody he considers his has decided to go.

Those moments deserve our attention before they become headlines.

Women deserve journalism willing to investigate us as human beings whose lives are worth protecting. Children deserve adults willing to recognize patterns before another school desk sits empty. Survivors deserve reporting that gives them information they can use while they are still here to use it.

We have mourned enough women after the danger became undeniable.

We have printed enough beautiful photographs after families were destroyed.

Ask the questions while they can still save somebody.

Affirmations for Survivors

I am allowed to take patterns seriously when they concern my safety.

I do not owe access to anyone who frightens me.

I can respond to warning signs before other people agree that danger is present.

My compassion does not require me to surrender my judgment.

I can care about another person’s suffering without accepting responsibility for managing his anger.

I am allowed to leave situations that feel increasingly controlling, threatening or unsafe.

I deserve institutions that hear me when I ask for help.

My life is worthy of concern before an emergency.

I am more than a story about what happened to me.

I deserve to live long enough to tell my own story.

SOURCES

• Women are expected to be warm, communal and socially accommodating. Research on gender stereotypes has long found prescriptive expectations about how women should behave, not simply beliefs about how women behave. Rudman and colleagues describe a “backlash effect” when women violate gender expectations. 
  Read the Rudman backlash research on PubMed

• Assertiveness can carry an additional social cost for women. A meta-analysis of 63 studies found that explicit dominance harmed women’s likability relative to men’s, with downstream consequences including judgments about hireability. That gives empirical weight to your questions about women being judged as insufficiently agreeable or accommodating. 
  Read the meta-analysis on women’s dominance and backlash

• Women can be judged by different standards. A major review of double-standard research describes how gender and other status characteristics can lead evaluators to apply different standards when judging competence and other valued qualities. 
  Read the Annual Review of Sociology research on double standards

• Emotional caretaking has historically been disproportionately expected of women. Research on emotion work finds persistent gendered expectations that women maintain relationships, nurture others, manage feelings, and provide emotional support. One review notes that this labor can become so normalized that it is practically invisible. 
  Read the research on gendered emotional labor

• Race changes these expectations rather than erasing them. Sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield’s review specifically examines the racial dimensions of gendered emotional labor. That is useful for We Survive Abuse because we should not write as though every woman encounters femininity expectations in exactly the same way. 
  Read Wingfield’s review on race, gender and emotion work

• Read the Guardian report on the 1.14-billion-story study

NUMBERS WE OUGHT TO PAY ATTENTION TO

1. More than 1 in 3 U.S. women have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime. That represents nearly 43.5 million women.

2. Nearly 1 in 4 women have experienced physical violence by an intimate partner, while about 1 in 5 have experienced contact sexual violence by an intimate partner.

3. About 1 in 8 women have been stalked by an intimate partner. Stalking is particularly important for a safety-centered article because it can be treated culturally as annoying or obsessive behavior rather than a potential danger signal.

4. More than half of female homicide victims are killed by a current or former male intimate partner, according to U.S. crime-report data cited by the CDC. That belongs very close to the question, “Are women safe?”

5. About 16 million U.S. women report that their first experience of intimate-partner violence occurred before age 18. Women’s safety and children’s safety cannot be neatly separated. For millions of females, intimate-partner violence begins during girlhood.

6. At least 227 family annihilations were identified in the United States between January 2020 and April 2023. They killed 754 people. The Indianapolis Star investigation calculated an average of one family annihilation every five days.

7. The overwhelming majority of those family annihilators were male. The Indianapolis Star investigation reported that a male acting alone was the perpetrator in 94% of the cases it examined. This is precisely why asking serious questions about male violence is warranted. It isn’t an accusation against every man. It is following the pattern in the evidence.

8. There isn’t even a comprehensive public U.S. repository tracking family annihilation. Researchers also lack a universally accepted definition of the crime. Think about that alongside the “every five days” finding: we are discussing the destruction of entire families while still lacking a national system that comprehensively counts the phenomenon.

9. Black women and girls also face a documented danger from police violence. A 2024 study using the Fatal Encounters database identified 573 Black women and girls killed in encounters with law enforcement between 2000 and 2019. The researchers specifically concluded that Black women and girls face elevated risk of fatal police violence.

10. Another study found an especially striking disparity involving off-duty police-perpetrated killings. Black women had the highest proportion of off-duty killings relative to total police-perpetrated killings among the groups studied, with a rate 8.32 times that of white men.

11. And then there is the cultural expectation placed upon women themselves. Six preregistered studies involving 2,094 participants examined gendered expectations of women to be caring and understanding. Researchers found these communal expectations conflict more strongly with women’s autonomy than stereotypically masculine expectations of confidence and assertiveness conflict with men’s autonomy.

12. We also have decades of experimental evidence showing a female “niceness” penalty. Rudman and Glick found that assertive women could suffer hiring discrimination because they were perceived as insufficiently nice. Their conclusion was striking: women can be penalized unless they temper agency with niceness.

13. A newer 2026 study describes the same larger phenomenon: women are stereotypically expected to be warm, kind, caring and supportive, while women who violate communal expectations can face social and economic backlash.