How many of us read the W in the question as the first letter in the word white?
Could the W stand for women’s, as in Women’s Lives Matter? All Lives Matter (ALM), of course, but in a world where asymmetrical forces set women in the lower of the scales of justice, WLM is a corrective statement, not part of a question. Recent events in South London, where Sarah Everard, walking home from a friend’s house through a park, was abducted and killed, brought the truth of the statement, as experienced in the negative by women across the world, into sharp focus.
The violence of abduction and murder perpetrated on a woman brought the ubiquitous and ferocious male violence against women and girls (MVAWG) into a glare of public and media attention. Such incidents are occurring all over the world on a daily basis and do not excite the interest of the Western media in the way this horror did, because it happened to a white woman in London.
Such violence is the tip of the iceberg of the indirect violence of contempt and discrimination, which underlays the direct violence in domestic, work and social settings. It is always there, lurking in the shadows of family life and the recesses of working and social spaces. When it emerges out of the gloom, as in the murder of Sarah Everard, anger and disgust are widespread.
Recently, women protested across Australia against sexual violence and gender inequality, hitting the streets as outrage grew over rape allegations that have convulsed the conservative government. An estimated 10,000 joined the protest in Melbourne, with thousands more in other major cities including Canberra, Sydney and Perth. It was a painful reminder to women that it can happen anywhere, including in Parliament House. They are still fighting the old fight against an evil that thrives in silence and complicity. If behaviour is unnamed and ignored, it is validated.
The murder of women in public spaces is one strand of male violence against women and girls. Most of the violence happens behind closed doors, perpetrated by men already known to the police. It has been greatly intensified by the COVID crisis.
The World Health Organisation reports that one in four women and girls around the world have been physically or sexually assaulted by their partners. The U.N. has called the rise in domestic violence, in parallel with the drop in rape prosecutions during the coronavirus pandemic, a “shadow pandemic”.
UN Women Executive Director, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, called men’s violence against women a pandemic, pre-dating the COVID. It needs a global response, with enforceable protocols. It is an educational and cultural challenge for the present and the future. In a patriarchal world, where gender imbalances are systemic, the experience of women and girls, and the evident impunity of male perpetrators of violence and abuse against them, adds weight to the continuing urgency to address the imbalance and correct the scales.
I have two children, and, with their mother, I did my best to keep them safe, particularly in their late teenage years, when they were out socialising with friends in pubs and clubs. I tried to be consistent and just, offering the same advice and support to both of them about staying with their friends, making clear arrangements for getting home and being wary of the use of alcohol and drugs. I spoke to both of them about safety and respect for others. I spoke to both of them about violence. It was a period in our city when young men were being assaulted outside the after-pub takeaways.
I tried to be even-handed, but when the time came for my daughter to join in the young adult life of pubs, street and house parties, night-clubs and concerts, I felt more anxious than when I did when my son first stepped out.
Why? Because, as a man, I knew the context in which male violence against women flourishes. I heard the disparaging remarks, demeaning women for their looks, their dress and their abilities. I grew up with films and television programmes where women occupied prescribed, often secondary, roles: the hero’s mother, the hero’s lover, the hero’s servant, the hero’s whore. I breathed the air which normalised this indirect violence and validated the direct violence that went with it. It was simply the way things were.
A recent YouGov poll in the U.K. showed that things are not improving. It found that 97% of women aged between 18 and 24 had been sexually harassed. It is an experience so widespread that simply being a woman makes you vulnerable to sexual violence.
The statistics are harrowing and behind each one is an individual and her family. Statistics alone are not sufficient. It is notable that, statistically, more men than women are abducted and killed violently, but that does not invalidate the fact that male violence, indirect and direct, is at pandemic levels across the world.
What are women to do? In London and in other cities women are advised to: stay on well-lit main roads; make a knuckle-duster froma set of keys and try to mark an attacker’s face, to aid recognition later; let someone know you are coming and are on your way; tell a friend when you have reached home; wear shoes you can run in easily; walk close to a kerb; be alert to any alleyways or hiding places on your route; avoid wearing headphones or looking at mobile phones. Stay alert.
What kind of society is it that advises half the population to take such precautions when moving around?
What kind of society gives a new arrival at a university a rape alarm?
It is no surprise that women take to the streets to protest, as they did following the murderof Sarah Everard. When the state fails its citizens by not guaranteeing them safety, protest is the last resort. But protest is also the locale at which state violence appears in public. Images from the protests in South London, with women being kettled into small areas by police, then individually pinned down and arrested, revealed this graphically. Many young women will be confirmed in the view that whatever they do, they will not be supported. Confidence in police and criminal justice systems is already at a low ebb across the world.
Men know how not to murder women. It isn’t that, in the heat of the moment, some of them choose to override this knowledge. It is that they do so in the confidence that the machinery of the state underwrites their violence. Legal systems are designed to legitimise and uphold systems of oppression – including those of gender, race and class – that individuals enact.
We need to change the way that we raise boys and young men. Where are the constructive conversations with boys about respectful relationships with women, combating the toxic stereotypes of masculinity centred around aggression and domination? Where is the Men and Boys’ Strategy to reduce male violence? If we fail boys today, we fail women tomorrow.
If it is a Women’s Lives Matter (WLM) moment, then it is a moment for the ambition for change to create the opportunity for change, knowing change will be resisted, and then to deliver the change desired. While gestures are important, they are just one strand of a fabric of change to be woven from these times. Gestures run out of steam, if actions do not follow. The doorstep hand-clapping for health workers, the athletes ‘taking the knee’ and the candlelit vigils are important but do no more than acknowledge the people involved.
My local radio station broadcasts a Thought for the Day each morning. The message usually resolves into an exhortation to embrace a religious message. It is often delivered by a cleric. Cheryl Meban, a Presbyterian minister and a chaplain at the University of Ulster, spoke forcefully and emotionally in the immediate aftermath of the abduction and murder of Sarah Everard. She said she was “sickened by the murder of Sarah Everard and heartbroken for her devastated family and friends.” She felt that the story was currently in the news cycle, but that it would go away and that the world would carry on as before. As I write, reports from Newtownabbey carry accounts of the murder of two women by a man known to them. He later took his own life.
Time for WLM? Would it provide an opportunity for interrupting that carrying-on, to push back against MVAWG and to re-set the balance?
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