Research Abstract
What do we know about the women being killed in the drug war when we read news reports and official accounts of their killings?
Women in the drug war are often depicted as left behind family members of predominantly male victims. Narratives of women overcoming grief to seek justice for their fallen family members have also been widely documented, not least because of their role in filing criminal charges against Former President Rodrigo Duterte in the International Criminal Court (ICC).
However, very little is written about the women and girls who are themselves being killed in the name of the war on drugs. Who were they? What was their alleged involvement in the drug trade, which eventually led to their deaths? Where were these killings concentrated?
This project hopes to resurface these invisible victims by providing a meticulous count of the women victims of the drug war during the administration of Duterte and the first three years of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. (2016-2025), building on data gathered by the UP Third World Studies Center (TWSC)’s Dahas Project. Online news reports will be the main source of information regarding reported drug-related killings. Both textual and visual data will be analyzed to learn the victims’ basic sociodemographic information, their involvement in the drug trade, where they were killed, and how they are classified as a drug-related killing. The analysis will be guided by the intersectionality-informed feminist approach and methods of casualty counting. In recognition of the limitations of the reported data, interviews with select journalists who have covered notable cases in select localities will also be conducted.
The data gathered shall be presented in a StoryMaps webpage. This platform allows for a geographic rendering of where these women were killed, highlighting the top hotspots in the two administrations. Other visual devices, such as charts, graphical representations, and photographs (publicly available or with written consent from the photographers), will be used to further illustrate the trends and narratives established through the data. With this, we task ourselves to bring forth a more nuanced elaboration of underrepresented victims of the still-ongoing drug war.
No matter how small of a number it may be in proportion to the overall count of drug-related killings, the stories of women and girls who have been killed deserve to be part of the conversation and scholarly literature surrounding the war on drugs, especially as it reaches its 10th year in 2026. With the war on drugs’ main proponent, former president Rodrigo Duterte, currently detained and facing trial at the ICC, it becomes all the more imperative to continue talking about its victims.
This study is a recipient of the UP Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (CWGS) Research Grant of 2026.