Male Violence

8 minute read

On March 10th the UK was stunned by the discovery of a body in woodland near Ashford in Kent. Later confirmed as being that of Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old woman who vanished on her way home in Clapham, south London 7 nights earlier. A serving Metropolitan police officer has been arrested and charged with kidnap and murder.

This shocking story ignited a national conversation on “women’s safety” – but that was our first mistake.

The language we use is symptomatic of the culture and society that surrounds us. Using terms like “women’s safety” or “violence against women” is victim-blaming. They remove men from the conversation – and we need to be crystal clear here, this is not a “women’s issue” this is a problem with men.

This is a problem with men who are violent towards women. This is a problem with men who are violent towards children, to other men, to the LBGTQ+ community, to people of a different race, to anyone. This is a problem with the social environment we have created, and that we all perpetuate. An environment that raises young boys into becoming men that think it’s ok to use violence against women (or anyone) to exert some kind of deluded sense of authority or dominance.

Herein, to make sure we don’t forget this, I will only be referring to “violence by men against women” or “male violence” – I hope you will consider doing similar.

The statistic that the mainstream media latched on to when reporting on the conversation about male violence against women came from a YouGov survey published in a report by the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) for UN Women. It found that more than four-fifths of young women in the UK have experienced some form of sexual harassment and 96% of respondents did not report the incidents they suffered.

This statistic probably comes as a shock to roughly half of the people reading this – myself included. Thanks only to the chance privilege of being born with a Y chromosome, I don’t have to think about the route I walk home at night, or the shoes I’m wearing in case I need to run.

For the other half, this is what many of you might call “normal”. I am ashamed to have not been more cognisant of this sooner. I will not be so complacent or oblivious to this issue ever again. I will not be a bystander.

I would argue in fact that it is not even possible to be a bystander in this. It directly affects us all. When I first read the four-fifths stat, I looked at my 18-month-old daughter and it tore me apart to think that she is almost guaranteed to experience unwanted male attention or threat of (or actual) violence from a man in her life. It made me feel physically sick that probably out there somewhere right now is a man or boy who believes that he has the right to harass, threaten or hurt my family.

We aren’t just talking about our daughters; our wives and girlfriends; our mothers and sisters. Guess what – men who are violent against women are also more likely to be violent against other men and boys. They are also more likely to have experienced violence themselves when growing up. It could not be any more in everyone’s interests to break this vicious cycle.

Two related and important side notes:

1. The World Economic Forum has issued its 15th annual Global Gender Gap report. The unsurprising headline that the pandemic has widened gender inequalities and this is now being borne out in the data. The previous 14 years all saw gradual improvements, but the 2021 report now estimates that the gap grew by about one generation in the past 12 months – from 99.5 years to reach global parity in 2019 to 135.6 years in 2020.

The report suggests that much of this is down to labour market declines where industries such as retail and hospitality, which employ a large proportion of women, have been hit the hardest by global lockdowns. Also, worryingly the “jobs of the future”, in disruptive tech industries, such as cloud computing, are currently overwhelmingly male.

2. Another conversation has emerged in the wake of the Sarah Everard case, with calls that similar horrific incidents involving women of colour, such as the murder of sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, whose bodies were found in a North London park in June 2020, did not receive the same level of public outcry due to their race.

Shortly after the discovery of Ms. Everard’s body, the #notallmen brigade managed to completely miss the point (I’d hazard a guess that there is significant overlap between this egocentric group and the myopic #alllivesmatter bandwagon).

Horrific and brutal crimes like the one suffered by Sarah Everard don’t happen every day – research from the Femicide Census reported that 1,425 women were killed in the UK by men in the 10 years to 2018; that’s roughly one every three days… for a decade! The Office for National Statistics reported that 57% of women who were murdered in the year up to March 2020 knew their killer; most commonly this was a partner or ex-partner. This compares to 39% of men who knew their killer.

As for #notallmen, we must again think back to the four-fifths statistic. Either there are a small number of incredibly efficient sexual predators, who have managed to abuse, assault and intimidate 80%+ of women in the country OR there is a large number of men oblivious to the impact of their behaviour and actions have on women – I know which I think is more likely.

So what can you do? It’s not an easy problem to fix, if it were we would have done so years ago.

If you see a man hassling a women in the street, you could intervene if it is safe for you to do so. This doesn’t have to be confrontational. Engage the man in mundane conversation; ask for directions to somewhere, mistake him for an old friend, do anything you can to distract his attention from the women long enough for her to get away from the situation. You won’t be thanked, but your impact could be lifesaving. If you have misread the situation then you can joke that he looks just like this guy you know and nobody is any the wiser.

There are other small but sometimes very difficult things. Call out your friends and colleagues when they make sexist comments and jokes – it should make your skin crawl, just as (hopefully) a racist joke does. Sometimes challenging those closest to us is the hardest, especially if it makes you an outlier in a group (if this is the case though I seriously recommend you take a long hard look at the group!).

This is a leadership issue. It should not have to fall to boys and young men to challenge “macho guy culture”, but each time they do they are being a leader. Beyond this though, it is the responsibility of the leaders with real hard power (who guess what, are overwhelming men) to set this example and prioritise this issue. They are systematically failing to do so.

In response to the Sarah Everard case, Boris announced a £45m package for neighbourhood safety measures including improvements to street lighting and CCTV. A homoeopathic drop in the ocean (not to mention more victim-blaming). How about we focus our efforts on fixing the broken culture that turns young boys into men who behave like this and commit these acts?

We owe this to our daughters, but also to our sons.