The German state-owned international broadcaster Deutsche Welle recently published several articles about violence against women. Here are two extracts:
“A survey commissioned by Plan International Germany found that 33% of male respondents thought violence against women was acceptable. Some said that violence was used to ‘instil respect’.”
“Every two-and-a-half days in Germany, a woman dies at the hands of her partner or former partner, according to figures presented on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. [That’s about three women every week] In 2020, 139 women were killed.”
Grim headlines and appalling statistics. How profoundly ignorant do you have to be to hold the view that violence instils respect? Violence instils fear – not respect. You can’t instil respect. But you can inspire it – by being respectful.
A look at violence against women in the UK
Closer to home, we can recall the murder of Sarah Everard and the woeful handling of her vigil by the Metropolitan police. And there was Jo Cox of course, and so many, many more individual cases. As stated by the National Police Chiefs’ Council, “Domestic abuse makes up 18% of all recorded crime in England and Wales. In the year ending March 2022, there were 194,683 sexual offences, of which 70,330 were rape”.
It was just as shocking to find that misogyny, bullying, racism and sexual harassment against women were institutional in the Metropolitan police and the London fire brigade. The Femicide Census says:
“Serious crimes against women and children committed by serving police officers do not stop at femicide, they also include domestic violence and abuse, rape, voyeurism with hidden cameras.”
And from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) we have the following:
- Almost half (46%) of women killed between April 2019 and March 2020 were the victims of domestic homicide.
- Some 5,395 women and girls who attended their GP in the 12 months to March 2021 were found to have suffered female genital mutilation.
- An estimated 25% (about 5.1 million) of adult women had experienced abuse before the age of 16.
- A June 2021 ‘opinions and lifestyle’ 2021 survey found that 32% of women had experienced some form of harassment in the previous 12 months.
- Of women who were victims of rape or assault by penetration since the age of 16, an estimated 63% reported mental or emotional problems and 10% reported that they had tried to kill themselves as a result. In addition, 21% reported taking time off work and 5% reported losing their job or giving up work.
- Finally, 35% of the women whom St Mungo’s Trust worked with were homeless because of domestic violence.
A snapshot view of historic misogyny
The maltreatment of women and girls is centuries old. Patriarchal structures have played a major role in this and the church – in its various forms – was a prime mover as the single most influential organisation that governed people’s lives 24/7. Any ecclesiastical decree issued had to be followed. The stigmatisation of Mary Magdalen at the Council of Nicaea in 325CE as a penitent prostitute was a clumsy but effective attempt to ‘criminalise’ women … although stigmatising prostitutes at all is pretty hypocritical and ironic, considering where the demand for prostitution comes from.
Much later, around 1,000CE the church ‘fathers’ excluded women from church ritual and blamed women for the evils of the world, using Eve’s mythological betrayal of God in the Garden of Eden as a convenient spark to inflame misogyny across European cultures.
Notwithstanding selective interpretation of scripture, the appalling witch hunts of the 17th century produced yet another opportunity to find something ‘wrong with women’, persecuting the ‘sage-femmes’ or wise women who used herbs to heal people, and then extracting confessions from them through torture.
Back to the present
Thanks to the women’s rights movement and the waves of late 20th century feminism, things have changed. Now we have more women assuming what were traditionally male roles. And we have more women in parliament, although many still have to contend with the patronising behaviour of some male MPs; witness former prime minister David Cameron trying to take the heat out of a particularly prickly exchange with Angela Eagle MP, by pompously exhorting her to “Calm down, dear”.
According to the ONS findings, and the experiences of Jess Phillips, MP, as related in her searingly critical book EveryWoman, those archaic values are still firmly entrenched in some parts.
Violence against women by men is not caused by, or incited by, women. The ‘problem’ isn’t the women, it’s a subsection of men; the ‘33 percenters’ mentioned at the start of this article, their attitudes and their refusal to take responsibility for those attitudes and the actions that stem from those attitudes. When challenged, all kinds of justification rise to the surface. It seems to come in three forms:
- The ‘it has always been this way’ (tradition) brigade.
- The ‘instil respect’ (do-as-you’re-told) authoritarian types.
- The deniers ‘she started it, I was just defending myself’.
You begin to wonder if some of us ever left the primary school playground. To lay the blame at somebody else’s door for something that is clearly your responsibility is the sort of thing we try and teach children not to do, because it isn’t honest – it just isn’t right. But we aren’t talking about children – we are talking about adults – adults who seem to need to feel ‘powerful’.
There’s power – and there’s real power
We all need to feel a healthy sense of agency or power in our lives but psychologically this is derived in varying forms. One is a pathologically authoritarian power over others, particularly against their consent, history will attest that this is a fundamentally flawed concept. The less well-known aspect of power is power over oneself – the ‘sovereign power’ that the poet Alfred Tennyson refers to in his very long poem ‘Aenone’:
“Self-reverence, Self-knowledge, Self-control
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.
Yet not for power (power of herself
Would come uncalled for) but to live by law,
Acting the law we live by without fear;
And because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.”
That kind of power is a lot harder to learn and requires self examination.
Men speaking out
There are several organisations out there that were specifically formed with the aim of engaging men and boys to end violence against women, including White Ribbon UK. In addition, many men speak out against it, both privately and publicly.
The Guardian is a strong supporter of the movement and published a podcast episode dedicated to this in 2021, after the death of Sarah Everard and featuring Dr Jackson Katz, co-founder of one of the longest-running gender violence, sexual harassment and bullying prevention programmes in the world. With more publicity, hopefully these voices will attract more men to their cause.
On International Women’s Day in 1999, Kofi Anan, then secretary general of the United Nations, issued this uncompromising declaration:
“Violence against women is perhaps the most shameful human rights violation, and it is perhaps the most pervasive. It knows no boundaries of geography, culture or wealth. As long as it continues, we cannot claim to be making real progress towards equality, development and peace.”
It’s now almost 25 years later. Have we made any progress yet?
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