The death of Sarah Everard has underlined the depth of the femicide crisis in the UK and around the world.

On Friday (March 12), the Met Police confirmed that her body had been found in an area of woodland in Ashford, Kent on Wednesday.

A Met Police officer who was arrested on suspicion of Sarah’s murder remains in custody.

In response, a candle-light vigil has been called for Saturday in locations across the UK to mark her memory.

The vigil is being spearheaded by Reclaim These Streets, a group seemingly set up in response to the disappearance of Sarah, who went missing while she was on her way home from a friend's house in South London.

Your Local Guardian: Sarah Everard. Image: Met PoliceSarah Everard. Image: Met Police

They join a number of existing campaigns that challenge gender violence in the UK and around the world.

The group's call for swift action against gender violence and femicide in the UK looks similar with one of the most prominent campaigns against the femicide crisis to date that was born in Latin America in 2015.

Ni Una Menos began as a demonstration in Buenos Aires on June 3, 2015.

Hundreds of thousands of women and their supporters marched through the streets of the Argentine capital to protest gender violence, sparked on by the murder of pregnant 14-year-old girl named Chiara Páez.

It was the birth of a social movement that rapidly spread across Latin America and witnessed millions of women protest machista violence across a continent more seriously impacted by the crisis than any other region on Earth.

Gender violence and femicide remain endemic across Latin America and in Argentina today, where a woman is killed by a man every 30 hours on average.

Nevertheless, the group's forceful demonstrations have been widely credited with affecting change in a number of ways, from the building of a network of solidarity meetings and support groups for survivors of abuse to the recent legalization of abortion in Argentina.

Further, they have praised by the UN as being "ahead of the problem" of violence against women, and credited by feminist activists in the country with the heralding of a cultural change regarding the treatment of women in society.

"Women’s organizations like this are the most effective means...grassroots and self-managed projects are more effective.

"We have to demand that the state reacts to this situation and redirects funding to address these issues, to the care of women, in the fight against gender violence, and not just in the police, in war, in a punitive system that is not working," Activist Ximena Schinca told the Bubble digital media organization. 

While Reclaim These Streets was born amidst a global pandemic that throws the tactic of powerful mass demonstrations into doubt, its existence suggests a shift against gender violence in the UK ahead of what could become a more widespread challenge to the femicide crisis here.

The latest UK Femicide Census reported last year that 1,425 women were killed by men in the UK from 2009-2018.

"Ten years ago, men in the UK were killing a woman every three days, and a woman was killed by a man who was or had been an intimate partner every four days. Today, we see the same.

"The Femicide Census shows us that the numbers of women killed per year, the methods used, the contexts in which women are killed and their relationship with the men who kill them have changed little over the ten-year period," one passage in the report read.