Now The Circus Has Left Town...

Yesterday, after a trial which was initially supposed to last three weeks but instead went on for almost seven months, former Paralympic golden boy Oscar Pistorius was sentenced to five years in jail for the culpable homicide of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, on Valentine’s Day 2013. The media circus surrounding the trial means you’re probably aware of this fact already; after all, unless you’ve been living on, say, Pluto for the past year or so, you really won’t need me to go into the whys and wherefores of the case. It was everywhere. The coverage was in a sense unprecedented: here was someone who had overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to reach near-dizzying heights of fame and success…before having her life brutally and terrifyingly snatched away in the early hours of the morning by the man who professed to love her; who had also overcome life-altering challenges and become possibly the most famous sportsman on the planet. His ‘fall from grace’ was documented in excruciating detail as the trial was broadcast live across the world, consuming yards of newspaper pages and sending social media into a flurry of excitable opinion and judgement.

Now, of course, the trial is over. Oscar Pistorius is starting his time behind bars while the family and friends of Reeva Steenkamp, who have been in attendance every day throughout this very public ordeal, must now somehow find a way to go on with their lives. The circus has left town and the courtroom stands empty, awaiting its next, no doubt far less public, usage. And yet between the day Reeva Steenkamp was killed and the day the man responsible started his prison sentence – 596 days – approximately 255 women and girls over the age of 14 in the UK were killed by men. That works out at one woman having her life ended by male violence every 2.21 days. It is a statistic so horrible I can barely believe it, so I’m going to say it again.

One female aged over 14 living in the UK is murdered every 2.21 days.

This is appalling.

More than that, it is frightening.

These women were someone’s daughter, someone’s mother. They could be your daughter or your mother. They could be your sister, your cousin, your aunt, your grandmother; your child’s teacher; the woman who lives next door or the woman you see at the bus stop every morning. More importantly, they mattered; maybe not to you or me, but to someone.

They mattered.

And yet, whether by shooting, stabbing, strangulation, decapitation/beheading or blunt force trauma (or, in one case, by the deliberate crashing of the car in which she was a passenger), every single one had their life ended as a result of male violence. In all but a handful of these cases the man responsible was known to the woman he killed: a husband or boyfriend, an ex-partner, a son or grandson.

All brutal acts.

All violent deaths.

Most perpetuated by intimate partners or family members.

255 women!

This doesn’t just make me angry – furious, in fact – it also makes me unbearably sad. Most of you by now could quote the “2 women a week are murdered by their partner or ex-partner” statistic; it is the one the Home Office uses when discussing domestic abuse homicides or intimate partner violence; it is the one we all know and can all recite. But how often do we actually sit back and think about what that actually means?

We don’t.

And hey, I’m as guilty as anyone of blithely parroting the “2 women a week” stats at people, and I have a background in working with survivors of domestic abuse! I’ve seen firsthand the trauma inflicted on women and children and yet still I barely give that line a moment’s thought. Two women a week…that’s, what, 104 a year, right?

And yet here we are in October – not even the end of 2014 – and already 126 women have been the victims of male violence, violence which led to their deaths. Some of them were young, barely out of childhood with their whole lives ahead of them; others were pensioners, and yet every single one of them has become nothing more than a statistic. We know nothing of who they were or what they did, save in a very few cases which made the national press (and even those were mostly quickly forgotten); the spotlight which shone on the tragic loss of Reeva Steenkamp was not turned to the equally tragic loss of 255 other women who shared her fate; they are numbers, facts, crime statistics for the Home Office to bandy about when patting itself on the back for the overall reduction in crime.

And yet…and yet…

And yet they were people; human beings the same as you or I, who must have shared similar terror in those last moments of their lives and whose families join the Steenkamps in mourning a beloved relative. They were – are – more than just a statistic.

This is why I thank whatever remarkable Cosmic Force you wish to believe in for the existence of two absolutely extraordinary women, Jean Calder and Karen Ingala Smith. Karen is the Director of London-based domestic abuse and sexual violence charity nia, and the founder of the “Counting Dead Women” campaign; Jean is Director and founder of “For Our Daughters”, a website which aims to end sexist homicide and violence against women and girls. What Karen and Jean both have in common, besides excellent campaigning backgrounds relating to domestic abuse and sexual violence, is a shared commitment to identifying the individuals behind the murder statistics.

In a week where Oscar Pistorius and Ched Evans have dominated the headlines and social media; in a month where the Home Office can reveal that overall crime is falling but reported rapes and violent crimes are up (http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/oct/16/crime-england-wales-falls-ons-survey; in a year when it was revealed 90% of all domestic violence reports never make it further than  actually being reported (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/10/domestic-violence-police-referrals-numbers) two things have become crystal clear to me:

1. We don’t connect the dots.
2. It’s never about the victim.

My reasons? Well, how many times do we hear, even fleetingly, of cases where a woman is murdered by her partner or ex-partner; that a schoolgirl has been killed on her way home; that a woman has been raped? Watch the news, read your local paper – it happens more than you’d think. And that’s not including actual incidents of domestic abuse, which are rarely reported either to the police or in the press unless there has been a death as a result. Male violence, male aggression, with women as the victims. (And yes I know men are victims of rape, violent crime and domestic abuse as well as women, I’m not a complete fool, but the statistics show women are far more likely to be hurt by intimate partners or die at their hands than men are. Sorry to all those anti-feminists and the like, but a fact is a fact is a fact no matter which way you cut it.  I also know that not all men are violent, sexist morons; many of them are lovely, kind, rational human beings; some are even feminists themselves.  Again, that isn't the point). And yet each case is treated as a tragic, isolated incident. Why aren’t we, the Government, the media – anyone – connecting the dots and spotting the patterns? Connections are not being made; these are not ‘isolated’ incidents, not really. They are part of a pattern of systemic aggression and violence towards women perpetrated by men; a status-quo where men feel free to catcall women in the streets (thank you Laura Bates and the Everyday Sexism project for helping me feel less alone), or use raising awareness of breast cancer as a valid excuse for keeping antiquated soft porn in a newspaper (well done, the Sun). Every time a woman is murdered at the hands of her partner or ex-partner, it is yet another example of the reinforcement of this bizarre sense of entitlement. There’s a reason feminism wants to “smash the patriarchy” and it’s not because we think we’re better than men; it’s because we’d quite like to be able to go on living and so need to jump and down to raise awareness of this systemic aggression. We live in a world where rape is a punchline, where casual sexism is seen as part of the system, where kids are getting their sex education from pornos. And I say enough is enough.

The second thing, of course, is perhaps more important as it may help us somewhat solve the first issue. Kat Lister, writing for the Huffington Post, points out that the vast majority of the coverage of the Oscar Pistorius trial was all about him. (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/kat-lister/reeva-steenkamp-simon-jenkins_b_6021076.html?utm_hp_ref=tw) “His jail sentence, his crime, his life, his guilt,” she says, discussing an article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian which, in 439 words, never mentioned Reeva Steenkamp by name, casually dismissing her in the opening stages when he says of Pistorius “he killed his girlfriend.” Wow. WOW. No mention of Reeva by name; nothing about how she broke her back and had to learn to walk again; how she was bright as well as beautiful; how she graduated from university and worked as a paralegal while applying for the bar, hoping to become a fully-fledged legal advocate before she was 30. Nothing.

The same thing happened with the Ched Evans case. While the victim cannot be named as she, still in the land of the living, has every right to her privacy despite what some morons on Twitter might think (yes, lets publish her name and address and hound her out of her own home; she hasn’t suffered enough, after all), every single scrap of coverage has been about her rapist. His suffering. His innocence. His, his, his – the male narrative dominates everything. Where are the women in this? Where are the victims; their suffering, their ‘innocence’? Which, by the way, is equally bullshit. “Another innocent victim” screamed the headlines when Reeva Steenkamp died. As opposed to what, might I ask? A guilty victim, somehow complicit in her own murder?

So. We live in a world where the male narrative dominates, where female victims are obscured or forgotten, and where casual male sexism and aggression rules. This is why I celebrate Jean Calder and Karen Ingala Smith and the phenomenal work they do. Karen’s brilliant blog (http://kareningalasmith.com/) is full of righteous indignation and home to the “Counting Dead Women” project, where since 2012 she has done her best to record the names of women who have been killed through male violence. Domestic homicides, sons killing mothers…Karen does what she can to identify and name these women so they don’t become lost in the quagmire of “homicide statistics”. Jean Calder and the “For Our Daughters” team (http://forourdaughters.co.uk/) also commemorate women and girls who have lost their lives at the hands of violent men – and also the names of the children who have died with them.

I urge you to go to the websites and read some of the names. It is truly gut wrenching to realise just how many victims there are, and For Our Daughters in particular does its best to bring the women to life. It isn’t easy reading. It shouldn’t be.

Jean and Karen aren’t the only people trying to raise awareness, of course. There are plenty of organisations and individuals who actively lobby Government; who lurk in the corners of the internet defending women’s rights against the mindless trolls who dismiss rape victims as “sluts”; who shout from their soapboxes about how appalling the whole thing is and who want to help change the world. But in naming the women who have been killed in such a violent manner they are doing something remarkable: reclaiming the individual person and making the rest of us sit up and take notice. There are many women and girls on these lists whose deaths passed me by, cases I had never even heard of, and that both saddens and shames me.  Surely the violent, brutal death of anyone should be something which makes the news?  Have we become so desensitized to violence against women that their deaths no longer register with us, don't raise even a flicker of emotion?

Reeva Steenkamp wasn’t the first woman to be killed by her partner. She won’t be the last either. But you can be damned sure that, for as long as there are people like Karen and Jean out there, they will not go unnoticed...