Violence against women draws attention

Death of 33-year-old kidnap victim shines light on 'devastatingly pervasive' issue

The kidnapping and killing of a 33-year-old British woman has prompted calls to make prevention of violence against women a national priority.

A Metropolitan Police officer is suspected of killing Sarah Everard after abducting her on a main street in south London on March 3.

Members of Parliament said her death has brought more focus on the scale of violence against women, which has been exacerbated by COVID-19 lockdowns.

On social media, thousands of women have been sharing their experiences of violence and sexual assault perpetrated by men.

New reports from the World Health Organization show violence against women remains "devastatingly pervasive" and "starts alarmingly young", the agency said.

Globally, one in three women, around 736 million, have been subjected to physical or sexual violence, according to a WHO analysis published last week.

The report suggested that violence frequently starts at a young age, stating that "one in four women aged between 15 and 24 years will have already experienced violence by an intimate partner by the time they reach their mid-twenties".

A debate on the BBC Radio 4 program Positive Thinking this month featured author, educator and social theorist Jackson Katz of the United States, who said abuse perpetrated by men against women can be prevented.

His solution involves the so-called bystander approach, in which men make misogynist beliefs completely unacceptable. He says his idea, if adopted on a large scale, could end domestic abuse.

For over two decades, Katz has run educational and gender violence prevention programs in schools and colleges, in sports, in the corporate sphere and in the military. The programs look at issues such as how masculinity contributes to men's violence against both women and men.

"Violence against women is in fact a men's issue. 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."

Katz said the issue needs to be understood "not as pathological individuals acting out their pathologies" but as embedded in deeper social structures and gender norms.

He called 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. These are unconscious but real pressures. So the strategy is to bring it to the surface, to have honest conversations," he said.

The WHO has called for countries to invest more in services to help vulnerable women. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said violence against women is "endemic in every country and culture", and has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. "Unlike COVID-19, violence against women cannot be stopped with a vaccine," he said.

The WHO report said intimate-partner violence was found to be the most widespread form of abuse reported, with around 641 million women worldwide saying they had experienced it. However, 6 percent of women globally said they had been assaulted by someone other than their husband or partner.

"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," study author Claudia Garcia-Moreno said in a WHO news release. "Interventions with adolescents and young people to foster gender equality and gender-equitable attitudes are also vital."

In an interview with the BBC, Garcia-Moreno said: "Violence against women is a global public health problem of pandemic proportions, and it starts at an early age. The number could be much larger as fear of stigma could be a barrier to many women reporting sexual violence."

Jess Phillips, a member of Parliament from the Labour Party, said on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show on Sunday that misogyny should be a hate crime in the United Kingdom.

In an earlier debate in Parliament, Phillips listed the names of all 118 women killed in the UK over the past year in cases in which a man has been convicted or charged.

"Killed women are not vanishingly rare, killed women are common," she said, adding that there is no government research into the data, and that society has "just accepted" dead women as "one of those things".

In the debate, Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin said things would only change when there are greater societal changes and "more women in the room" in positions of authority.

"Despite everything that's been achieved for women's rights," he said the debate proved "this is not a job that has been done, it is still very much a job to do".