Thank you for this. What was said in the Commons earlier was so true. Nothing ever gets said about the number of dead women, it is just accepted.Hopefully this latest outrage might help continue awareness and dialogue to the point where it becomes constantly and loudly unacceptable.
You quoted something I said and I just wanted to make clear that of course you should be able to walk without fear, but some do not make it to their destination and the thing is to keep people safe as much as possible. Cressida Dick said that abduction was rare, not when you look at the numbers.
IF you are near Clapham
Women feared this was coming. They waited, messaging each other in WhatsApp groups and on social media. They talked about their own attempts to stay safe, discussed their near misses.
When the news came on Wednesday evening – that police investigating the disappearance of Sarah Everard had found the remains of a body – a wave of grief crashed over them, followed quickly by anger.
“I have never known such an outpouring of rage and fear,” said the feminist author and campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez. “She was just walking home, something that we have all done, and which we have all experienced fear doing.”
This week has shown us how far feminism still has to go
Gaby Hinsliff
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Public anger, women’s anger, is rising. A Reclaim These Streets vigil is planned for Saturday evening on Clapham Common, London, and at least nine others are planned in towns and cities such as Cambridge, Cardiff, Liverpool and St Andrews.
“We are having a #MeToo moment right now,” said the writer Mary Morgan, one of the vigil’s organisers. “Women are sharing their stories, they are showing the world the realities of gender-based violence, and how deep and widespread of an issue it is. We need urgent societal change.”
The facts are stark: a woman dies at the hands of a man every three days, according to the Femicide Census carried out by Karen Ingala Smith and Clarrie O’Callaghan. According to their grim calculation 1,425 women and girls were killed in the UK between 2009 and 2018.
Those deaths are just the tip of a deep, profound and intractable iceberg, said Andrea Simon, the director of End Violence Against Women (Evaw). “Violence against women and girls is an epidemic, and it has reached endemic proportions,” she said.
The last year saw a global and national increase in domestic violence, and an increase in rape reports even as the number of prosecutions has collapsed. This week a UN Women UK survey revealed that almost all young women have experienced sexual harassment in public places.
Evaw’s most recent report from January reels off a battery of horrifying statistics: almost one in three women will experience domestic abuse, two women a week in England and Wales are killed by a current or former partner, more than half a million women are raped or sexually assaulted each year.
Simon pointed out that it is rare for a woman to be killed, rarer still by a stranger. According to 2018 ONS data, 33% of female homicide victims were killed by partners or ex-partners, compared with 1% of male victims.
But the total number of women killed in the year ending March 2019 increased by 10% from 220 to 241, the second consecutive annual increase and the highest number since 2006.
Women’s anxiety about walking streets at night is not irrational, but informed by knowledge of the violence women face on a daily basis, from micro-aggressions to murder, said Simon.
“We all know that fear. Every woman knows that fear of what might happen, if they just go about their everyday lives without thinking and planning and making decisions about where they can go, what they should wear, where they should sit,” she said.
A major part of the problem is the criminal justice system’s repeated failure, she said. Rape convictions, dropping since 2017, fell to a record low this year – only 1.4% of cases reported to the police resulted in a charge by the CPS. At least 1,000 fewer men accused of rape are currently being prosecuted than two years ago.
“There needs to be a consequence, and the criminal justice system is not delivering that,” said Simon. “Whether it’s sexual harassment, or the most serious sexual assault, there isn’t really a penalty being meted out to the vast majority of offenders – so where’s the deterrent?”
The past 12 months has also been particularly bleak for those working in tackling domestic abuse. During the first national lockdown the National Domestic Abuse Helpline saw an 80% increase in calls; Karma Nirvana, which supports victims of so-called “honour-based” abuse and forced marriage reported a 162% average increase in caseloads.
The government’s promise of £165m for domestic abuse support service falls far short of the £393m that Women’s Aid estimates is needed for domestic abuse alone. And the last three months of 2019 saw domestic abuse prosecutions fall by almost a quarter.
No one at government level is joining up the dots, said Farah Nazeer, chief executive of Women’s Aid.
With 92% of defendants in domestic abuse-related prosecutions in the year ending March 2020 recorded as male, and 77% female victims – the crime is heavily gendered.
“There is a blindness about what causes violence against women,” she said. “The abuse, harassment and murder of women is a reflection of systemic misogyny and sexism within society.”
06:32
Jess Phillips reads out names of women killed in Britain in the last year – video
The domestic abuse bill, reaching its final stages, is progress, she said. It will create a new domestic abuse tsar, recognise abuse can be emotional and economic, and end the defence of “rough sex”. Local authorities will have to provide safe accommodation to victims and their children, who are recognised as victims in their own right.
But, said Nazeer, it fails to reference the need and provision for “women’s refuges”, which she fears opens the door to generic provision becoming more common in the sector.
According to Imkaan research, 50% of specialist refuges have been forced to close or have been taken over in the last decade.
Further losses would be terrible news for black women and minoritised women, who are not only at greater risk, but are also more likely to be sidelined and ignored, said Pragna Patel, from Southall Black Sisters.
And while she welcomed the domestic abuse bill, it could not be divorced from a wider conversation about how patriarchy is embedded in state structures, she said.
“We need to explicitly acknowledge that violence against women and girls as a cause and consequence of gender inequality.”
The Guardian view on violence against women: without safety, there can be no equality
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New compulsory relationships and sexuality education in England was a step forward, but undermined by parents’ ability to opt out until the age of 15, she added.
The bill could also help shift the dial on the way violence against women is measured and treated, if an amendment to make all police forces to record misogyny as a hate crime is adopted, said Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow. “I urge every woman who has walked with keys in her hands at night, been abused or attacked online or offline to come forward and be heard,” she said.
“This is our moment for change – women should be equally able to live free from fear of assault or harm simply for who they are.”
But the law can only go so far, said Harriet Wistrich, the director of the Centre for Women’s Justice. “Laws are only worth the paper they are written on if they are implemented and combined with informed understanding about the way that women are targeted by male violence,” she said.
After a devastating week, women working to end violence against women and girls were tired, she added. “But we have to remember that it’s a battle,” she said. “That isn’t a reason to give up, it’s a reason to keep fighting.”
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“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
- Margaret Atwood
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Jesus Christ there are s lot of broken men out there.
Can I just rebutt some of the thinga misquoted here.
I never said wolf whistles et al aren’t an issue - I said they weren’t the issue here "ie why this poor girl was murdered.
Nature v nurture - I know that the majority of people aren’t born evil - but then the majority of people don’t go out and murder people, which is kinda my point.
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Not to trivialise this with a cultural reference, but the IDLES have a bit in their song Mother which summarises a lot of this.
Sexual violence doesn’t start and end with rape
It starts in our books and behind our school gates
Men are scared women will laugh in their face
Whereas women are scared it’s their lives men will take
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Thought this sums it up well.
Laura Bates Every Day Sexism is a thread to read as are her books for anyone who wants to understand what we experience.
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The subject was the first item discussed on Question Time last night. Obviously everyone is struggling for answers, but education and the change in men’s attitude towards women were seen as being key. Hopefully the momentum will grow and this will no longer be something that we accept as just one of those things in the too difficult to deal with box. Women are right. It is not women’s problem. It is something that men do and men need to address. And that includes wolf whistling.
I live about 5 miles from the golf course where the remains were found. A statement from Kent Police has just appeared on my news feed saying that the local enquiries will be continuing but also there will be a greater police presence on the streets. At last, but for how long? You rarely see the police around here and they don’t even bother to come out for “minor” crimes. Still, if it means a change of policy it is a start, not that it will help the previous victims of street crime.
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Let’s not get complacent with this and think that the small(ish) percentage of misogynistic males improving their attitude towards women is going to drastically alter the number of murders and rapes that take place.
This is not like an entry drug, where a 22 year old builder on a site wolf whistles and tells some girl to get her norks out, and then a year later follows some girl, rapes her, caves her head in with a rock and then dumps her body 50 miles from the site of the murder.
I think there is a dangerous confusion being made here, and that’s women “feeling” safe at night, and women “being” safe at night.
The first is to do with attitudes towards women. The second is to do with reducing the number of psychopaths on the street.
This is dangerous, because IMO we are conflating the two issues, and looking in the wrong place for the solution which could lead to no difference and incidents like this continuing ad infinitum.
There was a Labour MP on the panel last night (whose name escapes me) who said he was genuinely shocked by the amount of harassment and abuse that women face on a daily basis. He must have been living in a box because this has been going on forever. Whenever it comes up in conversation, every female in the group that I can recall has had experience of this. My wife was the victim of an attempted sexual assault on a train in broad daylight when she was a teenager. When I asked her if she reported it she said no because she didn’t think that anyone would believe her and she just wanted to forget about it. A girlfriend back in the 70’s told me that she had been raped at a musical festival in her tent. She went to report it to the police and the officer said to her “I’m not surprised dressed like that”. She didn’t report him sadly but felt that if she had of done nothing would have been done about it. These are old stories but this shit still goes on. Trying to get a rape case through court is still a nightmare. The alleged defendant used to claim it didn’t happen and unless the victim was covered in bruises it was difficult to prove. Now with the advances in forensics it is easier to proved there was physical contact, but consent is now the defence which is difficult to prove/disprove. There is still that underlying thing that if a woman is dressed provocatively or is drunk, then she is asking for it. This leads on to basic attitudes towards woman by men. The wolf whistles, the cat calls, the comments about their looks and sexual banter are all part and parcel of the problem. Of course not everyone who engages in this type of behaviour goes on the be a rapist or a murdered but it displays the basic lack of respect for women and display of power over women that is seen at the other end of the behavisl system. You only have to listen to and read the comments made in the last few days to understand what a problem this is for women.
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He does live in a box.
It’s called Parliament. Eighty-odd thou minimum, few questions asked on expenses.
Earns three times more the average national salary.
Got more in common with the other adult boarding school attendees on the other side of the house than they do with reality.
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Interesting, I sort of agree with Davina but then she has led a coseted life so may not be fully aware…
The replies are more interesting, there are actually some reasonable debates in there…
Fear mongering isn’t helpful I agree, but the threat from men should not be underplayed as shown by the number of harassment and sexual assaults committed every day. Over 600 women killed by men in the last year is not rare. She may well be lucky enough not to have experienced any problems with men in her life. A great many of her gender have not been so lucky.
Not sure a broken home and alcoholic mother puts you in the cosseted camp
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Is this UK? Where did you get that number from?
ONS states 188 women killed by men between April 2019 and March 2020 in England and Wales. The Femicide census states 1425 in the 10 years between 2009 and 2018.
The need to do something positive to safeguard our children has been with us for decades.
Back in the latter half of the 90s, I had three daughters in the 20 to 25 age range, and insisted on knowing:
Where they were going
Who they were going with
And
What time they would be home.
They moaned a lot and complained about why I needed all this information, and I just said read the papers and see how many young women are attacked, and worse, when they have been out. Back then it seemed the stories were coming in every day.
If you are worrying about your daughters, and talking to them about your worries and why, you are already doing as much as you can.
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