Three killings, one warning to government

The Malta Observatory on Femicide has urged the government to confront misogyny as a structural issue after three women were killed within two months, arguing that the deaths were not separate private tragedies but part of a pattern the state still treats too cautiously.

That is a political claim as much as a moral one. It says the problem is not only the men accused of killing women. It is also the way institutions frame risk, fund services and decide what counts as urgent.

The Observatory’s statement followed the killing of Charlotte Zammit, 44, who was shot dead in Żabbar on 15 August. Newsbook reported that her former partner, Roderick Azzopardi, is alleged to have killed her and had served a one-year jail term in 2017 after admitting to injuring her and threatening to kill her. Miriam Azzopardi, 47, was found strangled in a field in Marsa on 23 September. Isaac Asare, 34, has been charged with her femicide. Mary Grace Cassar, 72, was found stabbed to death with a screwdriver in her home in Mqabba on 15 October. Her son, John Cassar, 47, was arrested.

The Observatory’s central argument is that femicide sits at the end of a chain, not outside it. It described these killings as the most extreme expression of misogyny, male entitlement, power and control. The language matters because it rejects the safer official habit of discussing violence in gender-neutral terms, as if the social pattern were incidental.

Malta already has a femicide offence on the books. It was introduced in June 2022 after the murder of Paulina Dembska, alongside the removal of the “crime of passion” defence. Legal recognition changed the criminal code. The Observatory is arguing it did not, by itself, change protection.

That gap is visible in the Zammit case. According to Newsbook, Zammit had reported Azzopardi to police twice before her killing. He was prosecuted, jailed and released. Campaigners have long argued that domestic violence cases are too often processed as if prior threats were a matter of paperwork rather than lethality. The Malta Women’s Lobby has repeatedly criticised the use of bail in such cases, saying dangerous men are released while women are left carrying the risk.

The Observatory also pointed to GREVIO’s thematic report on Malta, published on 17 September. The Council of Europe monitoring body acknowledged progress but warned that Malta must strengthen prevention and confront the structural causes of violence against women, including patriarchal attitudes and unequal power relations. GREVIO also warned against gender-neutral policy approaches that blur the fact that this violence is rooted in gender inequality.

That is the part of the argument government cannot answer with sympathy alone. The Observatory is asking for choices: sustained funding for women’s organisations and specialised services, not funding that depends on short projects; meaningful engagement with women’s rights groups; and policy built around women’s safety and rights rather than abstract neutrality.

None of that is, yet, a government decision. It is a demand placed before one. But it is a demand sharpened by three deaths and by the documented record around at least one of them: prior violence, prior reporting, prior state contact. When institutions have already met the danger once, the claim that femicide arrives without warning becomes harder to defend.