Julie Bindel: Women shouldn’t have to be always vigilant. Male violence is for men to fix

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Julie Bindel11 March 2021
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The disappearance and suspected murder of Sarah Everard has highlighted how women and girls’ lives are curtailed by the fear and reality of male violence. Deadly violence against females is as regular as it is horrific. Every three days in England and Wales a woman is killed by a former or current partner as a result of domestic violence, and we currently live in a society awash with misogyny and male entitlement, where hard-core pornography is seen as “entertainment” and teenage girls are bombarded with propaganda about the joys of being choked during sex.

Being snatched from the street is relatively rare, but despite this women remain in a state of constant anxiety about male violence . It’s no wonder — most of us are raised to feel responsible for our own safety. We live in a culture of victim blaming, with more of a focus on how we dress and how much we drink than there is on why men carry out such heinous crimes against us.

Men are the major perpetrators of violent crime and are also the major victims of violent crime, but by other men. This fact is often used against feminists when we speak of the scale and prevalence of sexual and domestic abuse, but femicide, the killing of a female because she is female, is fuelled by men’s hatred of women.

Fear of rape and deadly violence is something that every female on the planet experiences. There is nowhere we feel totally safe. The home is the most dangerous place for women as it is where most violence takes place, but because it happens behind closed doors it can often be considered to be nobody else’s business, let alone a matter for intervention by the state. The numbers of rapes and sexual assaults committed on a daily basis is staggering, and yet the vast majority go unreported and unpunished. Currently less than 1 per cent of rapes reported to the police end in a conviction.

A survey commissioned by the End Violence against Women Coalition in December 2018 found more than a third of over-65s do not consider forced marital sex rape, along with 16 per cent of people aged 16 to 24.

With attitudes like these, the odds are stacked against women, who are all-too-often judged for “getting themselves raped” in part because the men who commit these crimes are hardly ever brought to justice. Indeed, more effort appears to be put into excusing rape than condemning the rapists.

Male violence has become so normalised that we come to almost accept it. Whether it’s a report of a rapist prowling the streets, yet another body of a woman discovered at her home, or a sexual predator targeting girls online, it is clear that male violence is a global pandemic.

I have been told that feminists, not men, create fear in women by imagining men permanently crouched in alleyways waiting to commit acts of rape and murder. Feminists, therefore, are the ones who curtail women’s lives and prevent them from living as free and equal citizens. Rapists and murderers apparently play no part in that.

God forbid we curtail the freedom of men, so instead we close the limited public space available to women who are told to “exercise caution”. Why should we run home at night carrying our house keys between our fingers? How unjust is it that women are the ones to be ever-vigilant? I find myself factoring in how to reduce the risk of attack when deciding how to travel home after a night out. Should I really go alone in a cab if I have been drinking, for example?

There are things men can do if they care about women living in fear. For example, as Stuart Edwards, who lives close to the area from which Everard disappeared, tweeted: “Aside from giving as much space as possible on quieter streets and keeping face visible, is there anything else men can reasonably do to reduce the anxiety/spook factor?”

The tweet has, as I write, been liked 16,000 times and retweeted 2,000. Edwards’s simple question made such an impression because, I am guessing, it is so rare for men to concern themselves with women’s well-founded fears.

Male violence is a problem for men to fix. Women are not harmed because we walk home alone at night, or because of any of our behaviour or choices. It happens because men choose to commit these crimes against us. And it is high time the focus was shifted firmly on to the perpetrators.

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