“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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My apologies, fat finger syndrome! Meant to be 100 not 600!
OK, here are my, jumbled, thoughts on the matter…
- as Davina said, abduction and murder of women is rare, yes lots of women are killed by men but this is generally due to domestic abuse, not that that makes it any better.
- You are not going to stop the rare abductions and murders that happen you can do something about the domestic abuse killings but this will need women to be “braver” and to get out of abusive relationships, hard I know, as the male partner has probably become like this due to their family history, which cannot be educated out of them.
- Suggesting a curfew for men is branding ALL men as rapists/murderers etc. etc. and should not even be considered.
- Educating men on how to behave around women is THE answer, I think that the younger generation are more switched on to this than the older generation.
- Proper detterents for rapists/domestic abusers need to be introduced, proper jail terms in hard jails. Our jails have, over the last 20 years or so, become too soft, our sentencing is frankly ridiculous, get sentenced to 10 years you only have to do half of it? Why?
- Educating people how to behave should start earlier in the school system.
Feel free to rip me apart on this, these are just random thoughts…
Don’t like the headline on this article, doesn’t feel right…
Good post! Totally agree with the curfew thing but think it was worth bringing up just to show how seriously we need to think about what is happening. Education is so important. I went to a boys school going through puberty so girls to us were strange and mysterious and from another planet. How stupid is that? We should have been integrated all along so that we could naturally interact. Youngs boys not only need to learn about sex, consent and respect, but how to deal with anger management. There is a reason the army like to sign up young men - testosterone. We need to explain to kids why they get out of control and angry and how to deal with it better.
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As I’ve mentioned before, the current crop of pornography readily available online can’t be having anything but a massively detrimental effect on this, imho. And I have no idea what could be done about it.
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I do not agree with her on this one. As I said above there will be other women who do not agree with me. I probably can live with that.
It is not fearmongering when we are telling men that we feel scared and that at times men scare us because of their behaviour towards us. It is reality.
Men’s mental health is an issue, more men commit suicide more. That we are told often. However the stats I’ve seen women (1 in 5) have more MH issues than men (! in 8). However, this isn’t a competition or one should override the other. There is a thread around mental health and I whole heartedly recommend talking about our mental health issues.
If there is more empathy and less conflict, less machismo, etc that will surely help men’s mental health?
My partner has quite frankly been a little unaware of this topic all this week (the royal stuff took up much more of his head space). He’s had me in his ear (just think of the guy’s mental health!) about this topic and when I mentioned that people are now commenting that men may be impacted because we are talking about this he was a little curious as to why that would be.
On of the response to Davina (you are live, please don’t swear) .
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