YESTERDAY Westminster held its annual International Women’s Day (IWD) debate. Squeezed into three hours at the end of the parliamentary week after the budget debates it felt rather marginalised. Yet in a week which saw the abduction and suspected murder of a young woman on the streets of London, the discussion of the unique problems women face in our society could hardly have been more timely.
Every year, the Labour MP Jess Phillips reads out the names of the women killed by men across the UK since the last IWD debate.
This year she read out the name of Sarah Everard.
The statistics which Jess uses come from the work of English feminist Karen Ingala Smith and her Counting Dead Women project which records the lives of women murdered by men in the UK. This project has inspired the Femicide Census which is a unique source of information about women who have been killed by men in the UK and the men who have killed them.
READ MORE: Sarah Everard case prompts men and women to discuss attitudes on personal safety
Even though men’s violence against women is a leading cause of the premature death of women globally, research in the UK and Europe is limited and unconnected. The Femicide Census significantly improves upon currently available data by providing detailed comparable data about femicides in the UK since 2009, including demographic and social factors and the methods men used to kill women. It is unique in the UK in that it covers all women killed by men and not only domestic homicide.
Last November the Femicide Census produced its fifth and most comprehensive report to date. The 10-year, UK-wide report (2009-2018) examined 1425 cases of women killed by 1419 men in all forms of violence against women. It found that the number of women killed every year by men has stayed distressingly consistent at between 124 and 168 women each year, raising serious questions about the state’s response to men’s violence against women in the last decade.
The report concluded that the fact that a similar number of women are still being killed annually over a decade is a serious failing and indicates a lack of will to tackle root causes. It was very critical of not just the police but the whole response to violence against women and the criminal justice system. Several systemic problems were identified including lack of funding for, and cuts to, the specialist women’s sector and a failure to collate, store and make easily accessible transparent, disaggregated, searchable official data about violence against women.
At Holyrood on Wednesday during the debate on the Hate Crime Bill and Public Order Bill we heard mention of “communities which live in fear”. If ever there was a community in our society which lives in fear, then it is women.
Women live in fear of men’s violence both from men they know and men they don’t know. To acknowledge this is not to say that all men are violent. Of course, they aren’t. But women are uniquely vulnerable to men’s violence because men are so much stronger than us.
On Radio Scotland, Jane Dougall, a BBC sports presenter gave a brave and graphic account of being attacked by a man outside her own front door. She said all the advice about fighting back, “kicking him where it hurts”, came to nothing as she was terrified by how easily she was over-powered and put to the ground. The fact is that men are much stronger than women. That is down to our different biological make-up. Sex does matter.
After the event, the police advised Jane to be careful. But she was being careful. It wasn’t late at night. She was walking to her home at 7.30pm in the evening and she was attacked in her own driveway.
When the Metropolitan Police dished out the same advice in response to Sarah Everard’s disappearance earlier this week, they received a well-deserved social media backlash. Now that we know that the man charged is a police officer, their advice seems even more grimly inappropriate.
Women are sick to the back teeth of being told we must be careful, that we must take responsibility for the problem of male violence and that we must adjust our behaviour. It doesn’t even work. The one and only time in my life I have been hit by a man happened in broad daylight when I was walking towards my front door with a girlfriend back in the 80s. I can still feel the shock and pain of the blow. I didn’t go to the police because I didn’t think they would have been very sympathetic to a lesbophobic attack in those days. At least that is something that has changed.
Besides, where exactly are we supposed to go to stay safe? The Femicide Census report identified that 78% of the 1425 women killed by men in the UK between 2009 and 2018 were killed in the home. As for the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick, for whom I normally have a great deal of respect, her advice that abductions are “incredibly rare” is scant comfort to the millions of women across the UK afraid to walk home alone in the dark. Moreover, just how does that sit with her fellow officers’ advice to avoid going out alone?
AS the horror of what had happened to Sarah Everard sunk in, one woman took to Twitter to complain that: “Half my timeline is women being told they are responsible for keeping themselves safe from male violence. The other half is women being told they are bigots for insisting on retaining protections against male violence.” Her exasperation echoes that felt by many women.
It feels like our society is going backwards. Women who speak up for women’s rights are accused of bad behaviour while men who engage in abusive behaviour are shielded from the consequences of their actions.
READ MORE: Sarah Everard: Tory Shaun Bailey slammed over 'grotesque' tweet
Men are still largely in charge and many of the women who get to the top are too scared once they are there to challenge men who want to silence or control women.
So they invent a new kind of feminism. One that is so inclusive and so kind that it will not name the problems women face.
While nobody wants to pit women against men, we need to be able to name the problem of male violence against women.
We also need to be able to acknowledge that sex does matter without being labelled a bigot. Sex is a reality we cannot ignore and if we do ignore it, we distort reality in a way that will only make women more vulnerable.
As we went to bed on Wednesday evening news broke of the arrest of a policeman for the abduction and murder of Sarah Everard and the discovery of remains suspected to be hers. As one legal commentator put it on Twitter – it was quite the day for the Scottish Parliament to decide that sex is not an aggravating factor in hate crime.
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