Red Heart: Mapping femicide in Australia

Content warning: This article discusses femicide, child death and gender-based violence. It may be distressing for many readers, particularly survivors of abuse, violence or trauma. If you need to talk to someone, please access the support resources below.

There are more than 3,000 women and children marked on Sherele Moody’s map of Australia – each one represented by a red heart, each one a story that didn’t end the way it should have. Tragically, it’s a number that keeps growing, in real time.  

In 2025, 79 women and 27 girls were killed by femicide in Australia. You can access the latest stats for 2026 on the Red Heart Database.

Femicide is the intentional killing of women or girls by men, because of their gender. It’s often driven by misogyny, power imbalances or traditional gender roles, and 95% of perpetrators are partners, family members or someone known to the victim. It’s a global human rights crisis, but its specific gender-related motivation makes it distinct from general homicide – but incredibly, Australian law does not recognise femicide as a crime. 

Sherele’s life work is to tell the stories of these lives – not of their deaths, but of who they were and why they mattered. And the map didn’t begin with data. It began with something devastatingly personal.  

“36 years ago, when I was 19, my stepfather abducted, raped and murdered a little girl. She was nine years old. Her name is Stacey Ann Tracy.   

“Four days later, he was charged by police, and that’s when I found out he had already spent 22 years in jail for abducting, raping and murdering another little girl. She was five  years old, and her name is Sandra Dorothy Bacon.”   

Another family had been forced to endure a lifetime of grief and trauma, because a child killer had been freed.   

“He didn’t just end Stacey Ann’s life and Sandra’s life, he changed the path for their families forever,” Sherele says.

And he changed hers, too: "I have carried both Stacey and Sandra in my heart since that day.”  

Sherele attended Stacey’s funeral, met her family and saw that Stacey wasn’t just a name, or just a crime victim. She was a young girl at the centre of her family. Stacey had been the first grandchild; “her granddad died of a broken heart”. Her little sister, five at the time, has lived with fear and trauma since that day in 1990.   

Sherele says she herself experienced a lot of complex feelings around what her stepfather did and the lives he destroyed: anger, trauma, pain, sadness, guilt.   

“Carrying the weight of it was really hard,” Sherele says. But she pushed herself forward. Seeing how poorly the press reported Stacey’s death, she trained as a journalist and developed skills she could use to make a difference. “I had to find an emotional outlet; I had to find a way of doing something for them,” she explains.   

Understanding that violence doesn’t end with one life but ripples outwards across families and decades, Sherele also wanted to share the stories that stop these deaths becoming mere statistics or news clippings, and instead honour their lives and who they were. Stories that have been inconsistently told, poorly recorded, or not counted at all.  

So she took her feelings of anger and guilt, and she started counting. “I set the Red Heart campaign up,” she says. Over time the campaign became a movement, documenting the killing of women and girls in Australia, and expanding its purpose from there.  

What began as a Facebook page has become the Australian Femicide and Child Death Map – a database, a memorial, and a form of accountability all at once. It documents women and children killed by violence across the country, tracking cases in a way that no official system currently does. 

It’s a map of Australia covered in red hearts. There’s more than 3,000 hearts there so far.

Each heart holds a name, a context, a story. It allows families to see their loved ones remembered not as headlines or statistics, but as people. 

“The database is searchable,” Sherele says. You can search by victim’s name, type of perpetrator, cause of death or location, because these statistics aren’t recorded elsewhere – but “most people just come on to read their person's story.”

Right now, in Australia, there is no single, real-time, government-run system tracking femicide in a way that reflects the full scope of what’s happening. Sherele’s work – as an individual campaigner – fills that gap. 

This should be the work of a fully resourced, national effort. But it isn’t. Sherele says it's the only database of its kind in the world, and it continues to grow. 

“When a woman or child is killed, I add her… When I find out about a woman or child killed in the past, I add her, too.” Sherele has started adding records going back to the beginning of white settlement, to preserve the stories of those who were silenced long ago. 

Mapping femicides matters because when deaths are recorded by the authorities they can be fragmented across systems, delayed, or reduced to incomplete datasets – patterns disappear. And so does urgency. 

Violence against women is often framed as unpredictable – something that happens suddenly, without warning. But the reality Sherele sees, case after case, is very different. These deaths follow patterns. Too often, there are warning signs that are ignored. 

Through her work and her She Matters podcast, she traces those patterns in detail, examining not just what happened, but what happened before, and what failed along the way. “If you listen to every [podcast] episode back-to-back, you see the patterns. Every episode, we talk about the failures in her death - before she died, after her death.”

Australia's femicide statistics.

Sometimes those failures are chillingly clear. Women report threats. They seek help, only to be told to come back later. Sherele recalls one example where “a woman went to police saying, ‘I think he's going to kill me,’ only to be told to return ‘when it gets physical.’” She never got that chance. 

Sherele highlights that families are let down, too. “Alicia Little’s killer was originally charged with her murder. He deliberately drove his car into her, then tried to frame it as suicide,” Sherele explains. 

“On the eve of his trial, the prosecution gave him an offer without speaking to her family. The offer was death by dangerous driving, which is a big step down from murder. The family found out about it at the plea hearing, and they heard him get less than three years in jail. On that offence, he also doesn’t go into an offender database. So the system failed Alicia, it failed her family and it fails his potential future victims.” 

These are not isolated failures, but systemic ones. 

This is why framing matters. When these deaths are treated as isolated incidents – individual tragedies, disconnected from each other – the system never has to answer for the bigger picture. 

“Until we start getting politicians and mainstream media to start really focusing on this, we're not going to see changes that will ultimately save women's lives,” Sherele says. 

“I can’t change the outcome for Stacey Ann and Sandra. I can’t change the outcome for their families. But their stories can change the outcome for other women and girls. Sharing their stories means we have a chance to influence the systems that allow this to happen again and again. Every death I document is an opportunity to change outcomes.”

Right now, this work is being done by one woman – but that’s not how it should be. Besides sharing victims’ stories and preventing them from becoming just another awful statistic, Sherele is collecting accurate, visible, human-centred data. Without that, there is no accountability. No urgency. No pressure to change the systems that allow this to continue.  

Femicide doesn’t have to be inevitable, and it shouldn’t fall to one person to be the keeper of these stats and these stories. Until Australia starts counting it properly – and treating it as the systemic issue it is – we will keep reacting too late. 

Behind every red heart is a family navigating grief, media attention, legal systems and survival – often without enough support. 

• In Part 2, we look at what happens after the headlines – and how Sherele is stepping in where the system falls short.

If this story matters to you, don’t scroll past it. 

• Explore the Red Heart Database and read the stories behind the statistics  

• Follow Sherele’s work @sherelemoodyfemicidewatch / AustralianFemicideWatch.org  

• Listen to the She Matters podcast, supported by Verve Super  

• Share this article to help shift awareness — because silence protects systems, not women  

If this article has raised concerns or you need support, you’re not alone: 

1800RESPECT - 1800 737 732 or 1800respect.org.au 
Lifeline - 13 11 14 or lifeline.org.au 
Full Stop Australia - 1800 385 578 

If you are in immediate danger, call 000. 

 
Verve Super has previously supported Sherele Moody’s She Matters podcast. This article is not affiliated with that partnership.