Carol. Hannah. Louise. Three women, killed in a chilling, apparently targeted murder in their home last week. A quotidian horror, remarkable only for the fact that this was a multiple homicide. Yet another atrocity that should, but never seems to, beg the question: when will Jess Phillips stand up in the House of Commons on International Women’s Day and state that she has no new names of dead women to read out, as none were killed by men in the previous 12 months?
Why does that seem such an impossible – even ludicrous – notion? While the country grieves for the Hunt family and struggles to process the terror this mother and daughters would have endured before dying, it is certain that another woman will be killed only a few days from now.
She is alive at this moment, looking after her kids, putting a wash on, driving to work, laughing with friends, walking the dog. But in hours she will be laid out on a mortuary slab. Her death will not make national headlines. Most people will never know her name. Nor that of the next woman to die, a few days after her. Or the next. And that is because women’s deaths at the hands of men – most often their partner or ex – have been normalised, so unremarkable that their deaths can only be construed as having been judged acceptable. As the Femicide Census has shown, the number of women killed by men is remarkably consistent: 1,920 over the past 14 years, or an average of 2.7 a week. Because the annual figure has stayed roughly the same despite successive governments being well aware of these killings, the rational conclusion is that women’s deaths have been, quite simply, costed in.
It is intolerable. It has to end. But women cannot stop men killing them. It is beyond the power of victims to change the behaviour of predators. The new prime minister must prioritise the hundreds of women who are yet to die, who could be saved. Because, while prisons stuffed to bursting are a dramatic and obvious crisis, far worse havoc is being wreaked upstream of the criminal justice system. Women do not want justice served after the crime has been committed nearly as much as they want not to be killed.
This will demand a national effort, driven by the government, over years. It will be grindingly hard and often thankless. But because women are dying today, and tomorrow, and the day after, it must begin now. Labour’s pledge to halve violence against women and girls is a start. But what does that say about the other 50%? How many dead, mutilated and petrified women is OK? Is a reasonable fear of being threatened, assaulted, injured, murdered, to be the lot of more than half of the population, for evermore?
Killing is the catastrophic pinnacle of a culture that, bluntly, regards women’s lives as expendable in the face of male rage. The abuse and violence that is rife throughout families and intimate relationships is estimated by the government to cost £66bn a year in England and Wales alone. There is little effective protection before it’s too late, and by the time someone is charged with a crime – rare as that is – the damage is done.
To tackle this devastation, the government must work across departments to address the more fundamental problem, which is a rampant misogyny that appears to be instilled throughout our institutions, workplaces and relationships – and in the way that boys are brought up and men are formed. This must be underpinned by the view of Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan police commissioner, that violence against women is a public health crisis and must be treated like terrorism. Only then will sufficient effort be sustained for long enough to make a difference.
The first responsibility of a government is security, of which women’s security must be a part. The proof of our national failure is in the bodies, and 1,920 of them since 2010 show that one sex is assaulting and killing the other, regularly and remorselessly. A minimum baseline in a decent society should be no dead women. Whatever resource, whatever effort it takes to reach that goal will be worth it.
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