Violence Against Women and Girls
Is killing women a part of British culture now?
I always love the suggestion of a good topic for me to write about on Substack. Even more flattering is when someone asks me where the next Ludology is.
Unlike many Substackers who charge for their writing (as they should) and who write regularly, I have not been able to get on to the regular bit. There is so much going on in the news cycle and chasing it is not my thing. Opinion is not to be dismissed, but you have to be careful that you do not become someone who makes money and notoriety by taking people down in punchy short articles.
Opinionated is also often a term used to put people down. People who are opinionated are called so as they are seen as uninformed. I am not affected by those who call me opinionated and neither should you if it happens, especially if you are a woman.
Raising three girls has given me good insight into how girls behave and how they are treated. And I think all forms of submission start with silencing them first, controlling how they speak, their volume, the content.
And speaking of women……..
WE ARE GULTY OF SELECTIVE FEMINISM
A few weeks ago, a British woman in the UK, not of migrant descent, sent me a journalistic piece from an Indian news outlet, about the recent clamping down on rights of women by the Taliban. Hmm I thought. It was not the first time women have sent me stuff like this.
Oh the irony, I thought, as the piece she sent me, ran in the same week that Indian women were taking to the streets to fight for their own rights. If you didn’t know, India suffered yet another sick sexual murder of a woman in the last few weeks. The victim was a woman doctor who was simply taking a nap in between shifts.
Did she intend for me to write about the Taliban? About the plight of Arab women and girls?
I have huge empathy and concern for what happens outside of British shores against women and girls. The marriage laws in Iran, now allowing men to marry nine year old girls and, needless to say, I am well versed on the topic of safety of women in India and family structures, arranged marriage and more. The murder of Olympic athlete Cheptegai which we heard of this week, only serves to prove that the world is not a safe place for women. She was set aflame and killed by her partner.
But you know what?
Firmly ensconced back to British life, I have been shocked and dismayed by what I see as the biggest threat to the safety of all families in the UK, namely the safety of women and girls.
BRITISH HORROR STORIES
I feel that I am continually reading about the horror of British women and girls being killed and harmed by UK men.
There was the killing of a woman at Notting Hill Carnival. Then there was the killing of three girls in the Southport stabbings in August, also involving other women and girls being stabbed. Additionally in August, a girl aged 11 was stabbed by a man in Leicester square eight times.
In July, there was a police chase of a man on the run, wanted in connection with the murder of a woman and her two adult daughters. The women had been attacked by a crossbow and the person who was connected to the killing was known to them. Also in July, a woman was found stabbed at a residential address in Walthamstow at about 3am. She had two children and was reported as being pregnant at the time of murder.
A teen girl was stabbed at a train station close to where I live earlier in January this year. Later in that month we heard the news of a woman who had acid thrown at her and her children. The perpetrator known as the Clapham Chemical Attacker was found drowned. In May, a man, again in Wales, stabbed a pregnant woman at least five times at around nine am.
And then there was a report this Summer by the British Transport Police on the rise in the number of incidents of violence on women and girls - an alarming number of violent crimes a day, against women and girls were reported in the year ending in March 2024.
The Guardian is running its own journalism on this, counting the number of women killed this year highlighting violence against women and girls.
And in case you are wondering, there are themes of random violence, mental illness, a lot of violence by men known to the female victims, and violence by all men of many ethnicities. I.e please do not sit in the comfort of thinking that this does not affect your culture.
And I wonder what we are doing about it?
Is it easier to focus on the plight of women overseas than heed the words of the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing, with Deputy Chief Constable Maggie Blyth describing the issue as a national emergency? Is it easier to rally and rave, and get so angry about transgender women using female loos, women in headscarves, than actually get to the core of why women are actually being killed?
If you take time to research the murders and attempted murders above, men harassing and stalking, killing, you name it, is becoming the culture we live in. And I have no answers to this culture.
Still need more evidence? At the time of writing, I am listening to a Sky news piece on the online abuse British women receive on gaming platforms. One in five women gamers say that the abuse impacts their mental health, one in ten say that the hatred and death threats and rape threats make them feel suicidal. When the reporter went online to game, as an experiment, she was called a “slag” within moments.
SOLUTIONS
So what do we do?
It is all too easy to say that we must teach boys to grow into responsible adults. It is indeed logical, but the whole focus on the son thing is a tricky one. It is an argument that suggests women are responsible for the misogyny of their boys. This could be true, but I do not like the idea that we blame women.
Conversely you could say that men must work harder to raise girls who stand up to men and make good choices in men and life. But sadly I have seen all too many cases where some men raise their daughters and spend time with them, are happy to raise their daughters, but do so for their daughters to be better than their wives, more educated, more accomplished, more successful.
You can raise your daughter to be bright and successful, but I am afraid it does not save your daughter from violence and abuse and violence from other men, if she is not versed in relationships, and the only one she can learn from is yours with your wife, which sounds pretty shitty if you are starting from the viewpoint that you want your daughter to be better than your wife!
It is all so complex.
I know the problem is not immigration as there are just far too many white and British women killed by their British partners. Stopping the boats won’t save a woman being killed by someone known to her, who did not come here on a boat.
I welcome all debates on oppression of women, but I wonder, are we so happy to focus on what we think is the oppression of living women, that we are ignoring the actual statistics of violence that is resulting in women being killed?
Perhaps answers lie in discussing this topic and challenging the structures immediately around us that lead to danger and submission for women and our girls? That involves looking at print media, social media, personal habits, cultural norms, our family lives, our family members, our friends, the examples we set, and above all what future we want for our daughters, and why.
And essentially the above suggests that answers could lie in “collectivism.”
Die hard followers of the patriarchy will always come up with ideas that women who are in this situation make the “individual choice.” They will say that women are raped because they chose to walk alone late at night for example, or they chose the wrong partner. These arguments are abhorrent as they ignore the collective structures that lead to women being vulnerable to violent males in the first place.
Individualism, individual choice, the individual - it is a tool many men use to break up collective problem solving and collective culpability.
The same day I received a text about the situation above for the oppressed women in the Middle East, I was walking my dog and saw a large white man, outside a house, screaming through the letterbox of a house swearing at his spouse. Was he violent, was he dangerous, or was he just a man with anger issues? It transpired that they were having a row. The woman was safe and all seemed fine later. I thought however that for any children, seeing a man behave that way on a Saturday morning would be incredibly damaging and confusing.
In the same week, on a day at a beach - our experience was marred by a white man, screaming at his ten to twelve year old son for not surfing properly. The boy was sworn at, called a “fucking dickhead” and forced to stay in the water, for a long time all the while being sworn at. Will the boy grow up to transfer his abuse to a woman?
I have no solutions and answers as to how we lower violence against women and girls, and how we lower anger and violence in men.
I know however, that it would be a grave mistake for British women if we let the media continue to frame this problem as a brown/black/ migrant male problem. It is not.
Did you know that there was a report on the sexual abuse and harassment of refugee women, by staff of the accommodation that they live in when they arrive here in the UK?! Abused in their own country only to be abused in ours, by British men!
Are we so naive to let our minds think this is an overseas issue?
“Stop The Boats”, the term used by the very much now sunken Tory party, has very much stuck.
But will “Stop The Violence Against Women and Girls” gain momentum?
What do you think?
I hope this Substack informs your outlook.