Killing sharpens focus on women’s safety
The killing of British woman Sarah Everard has prompted calls for action to make prevention of violence against women a national priority.
A serving Metropolitan Police officer has been charged with kidnapping and murdering Everard, 33, after abducting her from a main street in south London on March 3.
Members of Parliament said the death has brought more focus on the scale of violence against women, which has already been exacerbated by the COVID-19 lockdowns.
On social media, thousands of women have been sharing their experiences of violence and sexual assaults perpetrated by men.
New data from the World Health Organization shows violence against women remains “devastatingly pervasive” and “starts alarmingly young”.
Across their lifetime, one in three women globally — around 736 million — have been subjected to physical or sexual violence, according to analysis by the WHO published last week.
A debate on the BBC Radio 4 program Positive Thinking earlier this month featured the ideas of United States-based author, educator and social theorist Jackson Katz, who believes abuse perpetrated by men against women can be prevented and ended forever.
His solution involves the so-called bystander approach, in which men make misogynist beliefs completely unacceptable. He believes his idea, if adopted on large scale, could end domestic abuse and prevent it ever happening in the future.
For over two decades, Katz has run educational and gender violence prevention programs in schools and colleges, in sports culture, in the corporate sphere, and in the military. The programs look at issues such as how masculinity contributes to men’s violence, both against women and against other men and against themselves.
His theory is built on changing how the problem is addressed.
“Violence against women is in fact a men’s issue,” he said. “The very act of calling rape or domestic violence a women’s issue, shifts the focus of accountability and responsibility off of men and puts it onto women — which I consider a subtle form of victim blaming.”
Shift in consciousness
He calls for a shift in consciousness to allow people to feel they have permission to speak out.
“There are powerful policing mechanisms that operate in male peer culture that keep men silent,” Katz said. “These are unconscious but real pressures. So the strategy is to bring it to the surface, to have honest conversations.”
The WHO has called for countries to make more investment in services to help vulnerable women.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said violence against women was “endemic in every country and culture”, and had been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.
In a WHO news release, study writer Claudia Garcia-Moreno said: “To address violence against women, there’s an urgent need to reduce stigma around this issue, train health professionals to interview survivors with compassion, and dismantle the foundations of gender inequality.
“Interventions with adolescents and young people to foster gender equality and gender-equitable attitudes are also vital.”
Labour Party member of Parliament Jess Phillips told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday that misogyny should be included as a hate crime in the UK.
Earlier, in a debate on International Women’s Day in Parliament, Phillips listed the names of all 118 women killed in the UK over the past year in cases that resulted in a man being convicted or charged.