By Negar Dadashloo
Two women have been killed, another has been injured, and the family’s 18-year-old son has been identified as the suspected gunman. Yet one of the first expressions used to explain what happened was the familiar phrase “family dispute”. It seems to offer an explanation, but sometimes it obscures the violence more than it clarifies the facts.
On the evening of Sunday, 4 October 2026, corresponding to 12 Mehr 1405 in the Iranian calendar, Fatemeh Lotfi, 46, and her daughter Zahra Shahbazi, 26, were shot dead in a house in the Pardis neighbourhood of Kermanshah. Another daughter was injured. Published reports identify the family’s 18-year-old son as the main suspect and say he fled the scene after the shooting. In its report of 5 October, the Hana Human Rights Organization stated that no official, verifiable information about his arrest had been published by that time.
One report described “escalating family disputes” as the background to the shooting. Another referred to a disagreement over an inheritance as a possible line of inquiry, while stressing that the police and judicial authorities had not announced a confirmed motive at the time of publication.
The information provided by these reports is therefore limited: two women have been killed, another has been injured, and a member of their family is suspected of carrying out the violence. The reports do not establish what happened before the shooting, whether there had been previous threats or violence, or what role a possible inheritance dispute may have played. These questions should be answered through an independent investigation and judicial proceedings, not through speculation about the victims’ private lives.
Even with this limited information, however, a broader question can be asked: when a killing takes place within a family, why does news coverage so often reach for “family dispute” before naming the violence?
A “dispute” describes a relationship, not a killing
A dispute may arise between two or more people over money, inheritance, personal relationships or life decisions. Those involved may argue, stop speaking to one another or go to court to resolve their disagreement. But shooting family members is not the natural continuation of a dispute. The move from disagreement to violence is a choice and an act by the person who commits it.
That is why the phrase “family dispute” cannot, on its own, explain a killing. It describes the relationship between people while pushing the perpetrator of the violence to the margins. Saying that an incident happened “following a family dispute” may inadvertently suggest a confrontation between two equal sides, as though everyone involved had been in an equivalent position and violence had been the inevitable outcome of an escalating argument.
There is no such symmetry in this case: two women are dead, another is injured, and a person is suspected of carrying out the shooting. A dispute, if there was one, is only part of the context. The killing is a separate act, whose perpetrator, responsibility and circumstances must be established.
This distinction is more than a matter of words. Language determines what the audience sees at the centre of an event. “Family dispute” directs attention to the relationship between the victims and the suspect; “armed violence within the family” directs it to the act itself and responsibility for it.
The family: a private sphere or a public responsibility?
The family is often understood as a private sphere, a place where others should not interfere. That understanding can lead even signs of violence to be treated as “a matter for the family” until irreparable harm has been done.
Privacy in family life is essential to autonomy and personal freedom. But it cannot mean that violence is private too. Threats, coercion, control, physical assault and killing are matters of social responsibility, protection and justice, whether they happen in the street or behind closed doors.
The United Nations definition of violence against women, cited by the World Health Organization, is not limited to physical harm. It also includes sexual and psychological harm, threats, coercion and arbitrary deprivation of liberty. In intimate relationships, violence may also take the form of physical aggression, psychological abuse, sexual coercion or controlling behaviour.
This does not mean that all these forms of violence were present in the Kermanshah case: the published information does not support that conclusion. The definition matters for a different reason. If protection systems intervene only when someone is killed or seriously injured, much of the opportunity for prevention has already been lost. Lethal violence may appear sudden, but prevention must begin long before the final shot.
Women killed within families are not isolated exceptions
Every case has its own circumstances, and global statistics cannot explain the motive for a particular killing. International data nevertheless show that women being killed by those closest to them is neither a marginal nor a rare phenomenon.
According to the joint estimate by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and UN Women, nearly 50,000 women and girls worldwide were killed by an intimate partner or a family member in 2024. This represented around 60 per cent of the 83,000 women and girls intentionally killed that year. On average, 137 women and girls lost their lives each day at the hands of a partner or a family member.
These are global estimates and should not be applied directly to Iran or to the Kermanshah case. They do, however, reveal a reality: contrary to a common assumption, home is not necessarily the safest place for many women.
Understanding the scale of the problem in Iran requires regular publication of data that can be scrutinised. How many women are killed each year? What is the perpetrator’s relationship to the victim? In how many cases had threats been reported or previous violence recorded? Which institution had the victim approached before the killing, and what response had she received? How many cases lead to a conviction and the enforcement of a sentence?
Without such information, each killing is presented as an isolated event: a tragic news story that draws attention for a few days and is then forgotten. What remains hidden is a pattern that can only become visible through recording, comparing and following up on cases.
Prevention cannot be left to the victim
Many reports on violence end by advising women to seek help or leave an unsafe environment if they feel at risk. That advice may sound reasonable, but it leaves a fundamental question unanswered: if a woman asks for help, what practical support is available to her?
Leaving an abusive situation is not always a simple decision or something that can be done immediately. Financial dependence, concerns about children, family pressure, fear of escalating violence, the lack of a safe place to go and distrust of the authorities’ response can all make leaving difficult. Responsibility for prevention cannot fall solely on the person who is herself at risk.
The United Nations Essential Services Package for Women and Girls Subject to Violence stresses coordination between health services, social services, the police and the justice system. Risk assessment, safety planning, confidentiality and access to specialist support should be connected parts of a single system, rather than scattered services that someone facing violence must find on her own.
Asking for help matters only if an institution responds. Reporting a threat can save a life only if that threat is taken seriously. And advising someone to leave home is responsible only when there is access to a safe place, financial support, legal advice and effective protection.
The media’s responsibility begins with the first word
The media are not responsible for deciding who is guilty or establishing a motive before an investigation is complete. They must distinguish between confirmed facts, claims made by sources and possibilities still under investigation. But professional caution does not mean retreating into phrases that obscure the violence.
A “family dispute” may be part of a case’s background, but it cannot replace an accurate account of what happened. In Kermanshah, two women were shot dead and another was injured. That reality must come before any explanation involving inheritance, arguments or the victims’ private relationships.
Even the choice between “killings of women” and “femicide” requires care. We can say that two women were killed within their family. But determining whether these killings meet the precise definition of femicide requires more information about the motive, any history of violence and the power relations within this family. Feminist analysis gains credibility when it does not substitute assumptions for investigation.
The victims’ names must not disappear behind the label given to the incident. Fatemeh Lotfi and Zahra Shahbazi are not merely two figures in the statistics of violence. They were two people whose lives were ended by gunfire. Respecting them means neither inventing stories about their private lives nor minimising their deaths with a vague phrase. It also means continuing to ask about responsibility and prevention after the initial news coverage has faded.
“Family dispute” must not be the final explanation for a killing. If it refers to a real part of the context, it is only the beginning of the questions: how did a disagreement become lethal violence? Were there warning signs beforehand? What opportunities for intervention existed, and who should be held accountable?
Preventing such killings cannot be reduced to telling women to take better care of themselves. Safety requires a system that listens to threats, takes danger seriously, provides accessible support and does not allow responsibility for violence to disappear behind vague language.
