Melbourne, Australia – Lee Little recalls the phone call with her daughter in December 2017; it was just minutes before Alicia was killed.

“I spoke to her 15 minutes before she died,” Little told Al Jazeera.

“I asked her, was she OK? Did you want us to come up to pick you up? And she said, ‘No, I’ve got my car. I’m right, Mum, everything’s packed.’”

Alicia Little was on the verge of finally leaving an abusive four-and-a-half-year relationship.

Not only had Alicia rung her mother, but she had also called the police emergency hotline for assistance, as her fiance Charles Evans fell into a drunken rage.

Alicia knew what to expect from her partner: extreme violence.

Evans had a history of abuse towards Alicia, with her mother recounting to Al Jazeera the first time it occurred.

“The first time he actually bashed her, she was on the phone to me. And the next minute, I heard him come across and try to grab her phone,” Little said.

“I heard her say, ‘Get your hands off my throat. I can’t breathe.’ And the next minute, you hear him say, ‘You’re better off dead.’”

Little told how she had taken photos of her daughter’s terrible injuries.

“She had broken ribs. She had a broken cheekbone, broken jaw, black eyes, and where he’d had her around the throat, you could see his finger marks. It was a bruise, and where he’d give her a kick, and right down the side, you could see his foot marks.”

Like many abusive relationships, a pattern would emerge, whereby Alicia would leave temporarily, only to return after Evans promised to change his behaviour.

“This went on and off for the four and a half years,” Little said.

“He’d bash her, she’d come home, and then she’d say to me, ‘Mum, he’s told me that he’s gone and got help.’”

Yet the violence only escalated.

On the night Alicia decided to leave for good, Evans drove his four-wheel-drive at her, pinning her between the front of the vehicle and a water tank.

Alicia Little, aged 41 and a mother of two boys, died within minutes before the police she had called could arrive.

As she lay drawing her final breaths, security camera footage would later show her killer drinking beer at the local pub, where he drove to after running Alicia down.

Evans was arrested, and after initially being charged with murder, had his charges downgraded to dangerous driving causing death and failing to render assistance after a motor vehicle accident.

He would walk free from jail after only two years and eight months.

The statistics

Alicia Little is just one of the many women in Australia killed every year, in what activists such as The Red Heart Campaign’s Sherele Moody are saying is so prevalent that it amounts to a “femicide”: the targeted killing of women by men.

According to government data, one woman was killed in Australia every eight days on average between 2023-2024.

Moody, who documents the killings, contests those statistics, telling Al Jazeera they do not represent the true scale of deadly attacks on women in the country.

Government data records “domestic homicide”; women killed resulting in a conviction of murder or manslaughter.

As in the case of Alicia Little, the lesser charges her killer was convicted on related to motoring offences and do not amount to a domestic homicide under government reporting and are not reflected in the statistics.

“One of the key weapons that perpetrators use against women in Australia is vehicles,” Moody told Al Jazeera.

“They almost always get charged with dangerous driving, causing death. That is not a homicide charge. It doesn’t get counted despite it being a domestic violence act, an act of domestic violence perpetrated by a partner,” Moody said.

“The government underrepresents the epidemic of violence. And in the end, the numbers that they’re using influence their policy. It influences their funding decisions. It influences how they speak to us as a community about violence against women,” she said.

Moody said that between January 2024 and June this year, she had documented 136 killings of women; many – like Alicia Little – by their partners. “Ninety-six percent of the deaths I record are perpetrated by men.”

“Around 60 percent of the deaths are the result of domestic and family violence,” she said.

While much focus is on women’s safety in public spaces – for example, walking home alone at night – Moody said the least safe place for a woman is actually in her own home.

“The reality is that if you’re going to be killed, whether you’re a man or woman or a child, you’re going to be killed by someone you know,” she said.

Data shows that only about 10 percent of female victims are killed by strangers, deaths often sensationally covered by the media and prompting public debate about women’s safety.

“Yes, stranger killings do happen, and when they do, they get a lot of focus and a lot of attention, and it lulls people into a false sense of security about who is perpetrating the violence,” Moody said.

Male violence in Australia

Patty Kinnersly, CEO of Our Watch, a national task force to prevent violence against women, said attacks on women are the “most extreme outcome of broader patterns of gendered violence and inequality”.

“When we refer to the gendered drivers of violence, we are talking about the social conditions and power imbalances that create the environment where this violence occurs,” Kinnersly said.

“These include condoning or excusing violence against women, men’s control of decision-making, rigid gender stereotypes and dominant forms of masculinity, and male peer relations that promote aggression and disrespect towards women,” she said.

“Addressing the gendered drivers is vital because violence against women is not random; it reflects deeply entrenched inequalities and norms in society. If we do not address these root causes, we cannot achieve long-term prevention,” she added.

Patterns of male violence are deeply rooted in Australia’s colonial history, in which men are told they need to be physically and mentally tough, normalising male aggression, write authors Alana Piper and Ana Stevenson.

“For much of the 19th century, men far outnumbered women within the European population of the Australian colonies. This produced a culture that prized hyper-masculinity as a national ideal,” they write.

Colonial male aggression also resulted in extreme violence perpetrated on Indigenous women during the frontier times, through rape and massacres.

Misogyny and racism were also promoted in Australia’s parliament during the 20th century, as legislators crafted assimilationist laws aimed at controlling the lives of Indigenous women and removing their children as part of what has become known as the “Stolen Generations”.

Up to a third of Indigenous children were removed from their families as part of a suite of government policies between 1910 and 1970, resulting in widespread cultural genocide and intergenerational social, economic and health disparities.

This legacy of colonial racism and discrimination continues to play out in vast socioeconomic inequalities experienced by Indigenous people in the present day, including violence against women, activists say.

Recent government data shows that Indigenous women are 34 times more likely to be hospitalised due to violence than non-Indigenous women in Australia and six times more likely to die as a result of family violence.

“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are among the most at-risk groups for family violence and intimate partner homicide in Australia,” First Nations Advocates Against Family Violence (FNAAFV) Chief Executive Officer Kerry Staines told Al Jazeera.

“These disproportionately high rates are the result of historical injustice and ongoing systemic failure,” Staines said, including forced displacement of Indigenous communities, child removals and the breakdown of family structures.

“Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have been affected by multigenerational trauma caused by institutional abuse, incarceration and marginalisation. When trauma is left unaddressed, and support services are inadequate or culturally unsafe, the risk of violence, including within relationships, increases,” she said.

Indigenous women are also the fastest-growing prison cohort in Australia.

On any given night, four out of 10 women in prison are Indigenous women, despite making up only 2.5 per cent of the adult female population.

Staines said there is a nexus between domestic violence and incarceration.

“There is a clear and well-documented relationship between the hyper-incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the high rates of family violence experienced in our communities,” she said.

“The removal of parents and caregivers from families due to imprisonment increases the likelihood of child protection involvement, housing instability and intergenerational trauma, all of which are risk factors for both perpetration and victimisation of family violence.”

‘Toxic culture’

While Australia was one of the first Western countries to grant women voting rights, deeply rooted inequalities persisted through much of the 20th century, with women being excluded from much of public and civic life, including employment in the government sector and the ability to sit on juries, until the 1970s.

This exclusion from positions of authority – including the judicial system – allowed a culture of “victim blaming” to develop, particularly in instances of domestic abuse and sexual assault, activists say.

Rather than holding male perpetrators to account and addressing violence, focus remained on the actions of female victims: what they may have been wearing, where they had been, and prior sexual histories as a basis for apportioning blame to those who had suffered the consequences of gender-based violence.

Such was the case with Isla Bell, a 19-year-old woman from Melbourne, who police allege was beaten to death in October 2024.

Media reporting on Isla’s death focused largely on her personal life and provided graphic details about her death, while little attention was given to the two men who were charged with Isla’s alleged murder.

Isla’s mother, Justine Spokes, said the reporting “felt really abusive”.

“The way in which my daughter’s murder was reported on just highlights the pervasive toxic culture that is systemic in Australia,” said Spokes, describing a “victim-blaming narrative” around the killing of her daughter.

“It was written in a really biased way that felt really disrespectful, devaluing and dehumanising,” she said, adding that society had become desensitised to male violence against women in Australia.

“It’s just become so normalised, which I think is actually a sign of trauma, that we’re numb to it. It’s been pervasive for that long. If that’s the mainstream psyche in Australia, it’s just so dangerous,” she said.

“I really think that this pervasive, toxic, misogynistic culture, it’s definitely written into our law. It’s very colonial,” she added.

The Australian government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has committed to the ambitious task of tackling violence against women within a generation.

A spokesperson from the Department of Social Services told Al Jazeera the government has invested 4 billion Australian dollars ($2.59bn) to deliver on the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children 2022-2032.

“The Australian Government acknowledges the significant levels of violence against women and children including intimate partner homicides,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

“Ending gender-based violence remains a national priority for the Australian Government. Our efforts to end gender based violence in one generation are not set-and-forget – we are rigorously tracking, measuring and assessing our efforts, and making change where we must,” the spokesperson added.

Yet for Lee Little, mother of Alicia Little who was killed in 2017, not enough is being done, and she does not feel justice was served in the case of her daughter, describing the killer’s light sentence as “gut-wrenching”.

Little is now petitioning for a national domestic violence database in a bid to hold perpetrators accountable and allow women to gain access to information regarding prior convictions.

“Our family would love a national database, because perpetrators, at this moment, anywhere in Australia, can do a crime in one state and move to another, and they’re not recognised” as offenders in their new location, she said.

Little said public transparency around prior convictions would protect women from entering into potentially abusive relationships in the first place.

Yet the Australian federal government has yet to implement such a database, in part due to the complexities of state jurisdictions.

The federal attorney-general’s office told Al Jazeera that “primary responsibility for family violence and criminal matters rests with the states and territories, with each managing their own law enforcement and justice systems”.

“Creation of a publicly accessible national register of perpetrators of family violence could only be implemented with the support of state and territory governments, who manage the requisite data and legislation.”

Despite the apparent intransigence in law, Little remains committed to calling out violence against women wherever she sees it.

“I’ve been to supermarkets where there’s been abuse in front of me, and I’ve stepped in,” she said.

“I will be a voice for Alicia and for a national database till my last breath,” she added.

The US says it will deny or revoke visas for Palestinian officials wishing to travel to New York next month to attend the UN General Assembly session.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio blamed them for undermining peace efforts and for seeking “the unilateral recognition of a conjectural Palestinian state”.

The decision is unusual – the US, as host country, is expected to facilitate travel for officials of all countries wishing to visit the UN headquarters.

The ban comes as France spearheads international efforts to recognise a state of Palestine at the GA session. Donald Trump’s administration has fully backed Israel in voicing opposition to such a move.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has constantly rejected the idea of a two-state solution – the long-time international formula to resolve the decades-old Israel-Palestinian conflict. It envisages an independent Palestinian state being created alongside Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Netanyahu says recognition of a Palestinian state would amount to rewarding “Hamas’s monstrous terrorism”.

The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

More than 63,000 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Hamas has been running the Gaza Strip for years, with its rival Fatah in charge in the West Bank.

Both are supposed to be governed by the Palestinian Authority (PA) led by President Mahmoud Abbas.

Abbas is also in charge of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) – the umbrella organisation which represents Palestinians at international fora. The PLO has had observer status at the UN since 1974. It can participate in meetings but not vote on resolutions.

In his announcement on Friday, Rubio said: “Before the PLO and PA can be considered partners for peace, they must consistently repudiate terrorism – including the October 7 massacre – and end incitement to terrorism in education, as required by U.S. law and as promised by the PLO.”

He said they must also end efforts to bypass negotiations by pursuing legal cases against Israel at international courts.

Rubio said Palestinian representatives at the UN mission in New York could attend the meetings in accordance with the UN Headquarters Agreement – the document that regulates issued regarding the operations of the UN in the US.

It is unclear, however, if the US move to deny or revoke visas complies with that document, which outlines that foreign officials’ attendance in New York shall not be impeded by the US “irrespective of the relations” between their respective governments and the US.

In its reaction, the office of the PA president said the decision “stands in clear contradiction to international law and the UN Headquarters Agreement, particularly since the State of Palestine is an observer member of the United Nations”.

It urged the US to reverse the move.

UN spokesman Stephanne Dujarric also said the UN would discuss with the US State Department and hoped the issue would be resolved.

“It is important that all member states, permanent observers, be able to be represented, especially I think in this case with the, as we know, the upcoming two-state solution meeting that France and Saudi Arabia will host at the beginning of the GA,” Mr Dujarric said.

Apart from France, the UK, Canada and Australia have also announced plans to recognise a Palestinian state at the GA meeting next month.

The state of Palestine is currently recognised by 147 of the UN’s 193 member states.

But with no recognised borders, Israeli settlers controlling large parts of the West Bank – illegal under international law – and calls to do the same in Gaza, any recognition of a Palestinian state would not change much on the ground.

No place in Syria was more feared than Sednaya prison during the Assad family’s decades-long, iron-fisted rule.

Situated on a barren hilltop on the outskirts of Damascus, the capital, Sednaya was at the heart of the Assads’ extensive system of torture prisons and arbitrary arrests used to crush all dissent.

By the end of the nearly 14-year civil war that culminated in December with the fall of President Bashar al-Assad, it had become a haunting symbol of the dictator’s ruthlessness.

Over the years, the regime’s security apparatus swallowed up hundreds of thousands of activists, journalists, students and dissidents from all over Syria — many never to be heard from again.

Most prisoners did not expect to make it out of Sednaya alive. They watched as men detained with them withered away or simply lost the will to live. Tens of thousands of others were executed, according to rights groups.

David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Ehab Mouma from Damascus was imprisoned in 2018 after joining the rebel uprising against the Assad government.

David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Fares al-Diq, who joined the rebel movement, was taken at a checkpoint in central Syria in July 2019.

David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Mohammad al-Abdallah from Homs, in western Syria, was arrested in March 2020, within months of his brothers Akram and Khalid al-Abdallah.

Munzer al-Uthman from Homs was arrested in 2020 after defecting from mandatory military service.

The New York Times visited Sednaya several times, including the day after the regime fell. We interviewed 16 former prisoners and two former prison officials, and built a comprehensive 3-D model of the prison using more than 130 videos filmed on site by journalists for The Times who surveyed the vast complex.

We also spoke with prisoners’ relatives and a prisoner advocacy group to corroborate the details surrounding their arrests.

Former prisoners told The Times that they were tortured, beaten and deprived of food, water and medicine. Some of them saw prisoners or were themselves beaten by doctors responsible for treating them, leaving them swollen and often bleeding until they died.

Some of the former prisoners’ accounts included descriptions of violence that could not be independently verified, but that were largely consistent with one another and with rights groups’ reports on Sednaya.

Our reporting uncovered new details of the systemic torture and inhumane conditions the Assad government used to break anyone who dared to speak up against it.

Sednaya was so feared that few in Syria dared to utter its name. After rebels ousted Mr. al-Assad, the prison was suddenly open to the public for the first time.

The prison complex was constructed in 1987 and included a Y-shaped main building, which rose four stories above the ground.

Over the course of the civil war, more than 30,000 prisoners died at Sednaya, many executed in mass hangings, according to rights groups. Amnesty International described it as a “human slaughterhouse.” The true death toll from Sednaya remains unknown.

Former prisoners who had been imprisoned in the past few years told us that every few weeks, guards rounded up dozens of prisoners to execute them.

“Every day we asked ourselves, ‘Will they execute us now?,’” said Mr. al-Diq, the former rebel. “‘What will they do with us today?’”

From Cage to Dungeon

The prisoners typically arrived at the Sednaya complex bundled in cargo trucks, blindfolded and with their wrists shackled, former prisoners told us.

When the back door of the truck swung open, guards corralled them into an intake area at the main prison building, barking at them to keep their heads down and beating them with batons.

Then, prisoners were forced to squat with their heads between their legs as guards registered their names.

The inmates were told to strip naked and forced into metal cages that lined the walls.

When peaceful protests against the regime in 2011 turned into a civil war, Mohammad al-Buraidi, 32, a musician from the southern city of Daraa, was training on the oud — a pear-shaped string instrument.

He joined the rebel movement to defend his hometown from government forces. After a crackdown on the rebels, he laid down his arms, and in 2022, complied with a government mandate to join its military. Within months of doing so, he was arrested and accused of continuing to support the rebels, charges he denied.

By the time Mr. al-Buraidi arrived at Sednaya, he, like most former prisoners The Times talked to, had already endured months of torture in filthy dungeons and detention facilities across the country. Mr. al-Buraidi said he spent a month in prison in Damascus hanging from the ceiling by his hands for multiple hours a day before he was transferred to Sednaya.

The guards instructed the men that their lives now revolved around three rules, according to former prisoners. Do not ask for food or water. Do not touch the cell door or ask for help. If a cellmate dies, leave his body there.

The prisoners were given a few small pieces of bread.

Some men resorted to licking sewage water off the floor. They slept sitting up, Mr. al-Buraidi said, so their bodies would not be covered in feces.

Mr. al-Uthman, 30, spent eight days in an underground cell after he was arrested in 2020. It was summer and the cell was suffocating, he said.

“It’s so hot and stuffy down in the underground cell that after a couple of days, you start begging — not for your freedom, but to at least be taken up to the group cells,” he said.

When one of his cellmates collapsed and lost consciousness, Mr. al-Uthman and the other inmates panicked.

A cellmate yelled out for help. The guards yanked open the door and dragged the collapsed man into the hallway, beating him with batons and pulverizing his hands and legs.

Then they tossed him back into the cell. For days, Mr. al-Uthman tried to revive the man, collecting his own urine in his cupped hands to try to get him to drink.

The man regained consciousness but died two months later, Mr. al-Uthman said.

Where Death Was Always Near

After a week or so in underground cells, prisoners were moved to group cells spread across three wings on the top three floors of the building.

Mr. Mouma, 33, who was arrested in 2018, spent six years in Sednaya. He moved to a new cell every few months, he said, as waves of cholera and tuberculosis seized the prison.

The days began around 6 a.m., when prisoners woke up to the sound of metal clanking, as guards did their daily rounds. Guards often ordered the prisoners to kneel at the back of the cell, facing away from the door, according to two former prisoners.

Then they asked if anyone had died.

“We had to tell the officers that we have a ‘carcass’ — not a ‘martyr’ or ‘someone who had died,’” Mr. Mouma said. “We couldn’t even say the word ‘body,’ otherwise they would kill you.”

A doctor accompanied the guards. The most notorious one was known to prisoners only as “The Butcher.” During rounds, his gruff voice bellowed across the prison, sending chills up Mr. Mouma’s spine.

If a prisoner asked for medical help, the Butcher typically yanked him out of his cell and beat him unconscious, Mr. Mouma and other prisoners said. The Butcher threatened to kill anyone who looked him in the face.

Prisoners received minimal food. A single bowl of yogurt to share among 20 people. Sometimes a bit of bread or some cheese. If they were lucky, they would get a few eggs.

The guards often taunted the prisoners, stepping on their food or purposely spilling it on the prisoners’ blankets as they delivered it.

“I can’t even describe the meals they’d bring us,” Mr. Mouma said. “Not even a dog would be willing to eat this.”

With every passing month in Sednaya, Mr. Mouma grew more gaunt, his skin pale and fragile, draped across protruding bones. He prayed he would not be beaten. He prayed he would live one more day.

Those who managed to survive the conditions still faced the prospect of death by execution after being sentenced in sham trials.

Every two weeks, guards banged on the iron gates of each wing and read out a list of names of those being summoned for executions, according to eight former prisoners.

In desperation, some who heard their names ran to the bathroom in their cells to hide. Others reluctantly stepped out, knowing their fate was sealed.

At the start of the civil war, prisoners were taken from the main building to a small room in the basement of another building 500 feet away.

There they were hanged in the presence of several people, including the prison director, according to two prison officials. The prison officials spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

An Unlikely Reunion

The only contact some prisoners had with the outside world came once every couple months when family members were allowed to visit for a few minutes.

In the visitation hall, the prisoners and their loved ones were kept several feet apart and separated by floor-to-ceiling bars. A corridor patrolled by a guard separated the prisoners from their visitors.

For some prisoners, the visits brought a different kind of pain. Mr. al-Uthman — the Homs native arrested in 2020 — recalled how his cellmate’s visit with his wife and newborn daughter for the first time since he was arrested was too much.

In the weeks that came after, his cellmate stopped eating and drinking. He sat in the corner of their cell, refusing to speak with anyone except a hallucination of his wife. Months later, he died, Mr. al-Uthman said.

Other prisoners found a glimpse of hope in the visits.

Sitting in the visitation room nearly two years into his incarceration, Mr. al-Abdallah, 27, heard the guards shout a name he recognized: Akram al-Abdallah, his younger brother.

Years earlier, Mohammad and Akram had given up their dreams of becoming doctors to join the rebels in their neighborhood in Homs, the brothers said.

In the waiting room, Mohammad looked up and saw Akram — gaunt, tired, a shell of the brother he knew. Mohammad could recognize him only by his voice.

“It was like I had died, and suddenly my soul came back to me,” Mohammad said. Until that moment, Mohammad had not realized that Akram was also in Sednaya.

The two later learned that Khalid, their youngest brother, had also been held there for years, only to die while incarcerated.

Around six months before the regime fell, Akram ended up being transferred to the cell next to Mohammad, the brothers said. Akram had fallen sick and was weaker than ever.

Every night, the two brothers would talk to each other through small openings in between their cells — the sound of their voices a rare comfort.

Freedom for Those Still Alive

Most of the prisoners could not imagine ever leaving Sednaya.

Then, on Dec. 8, 2024, the unfathomable happened.

In the middle of the night, the prisoners suddenly heard a commotion and the prison staff yelling. A little while later, they could hear the whop-whop of a helicopter landing on the roof. Then gunshots, the rattling of iron bars and screams of “Allahu akbar,” “God is great.”

With little access to the outside world, most prisoners were unaware of the rebels’ lightning advance — and confusion and terror filled their cells.

Mr. al-Diq, who was grabbed at a checkpoint in 2019, thought that prisoners were rioting and flattened himself on the ground, too terrified to move.

Mr. al-Buraidi and his cellmates ran to the bathroom of their cell, as men forced open the door to their wing with the butt of a rifle. When they shot open his cell door, the men shouted: “Go, go wherever you want in Syria,” Mr. al-Buraidi recalled. “You are free now!”

When Mohammad and his brother Akram made it out of their cells, they embraced, Akram collapsing in Mohammad’s arms.

Mr. al-Uthman began running down the road from the prison, convinced for miles that his newfound freedom was a farce and that guards would appear out of nowhere to throw him back in Sednaya.

Mr. Mouma stumbled out of the prison complex in incredulity.

“We couldn’t believe it, and we had no idea what to do,” he said. “It was ecstasy beyond description.”