Men’s violence against women
This blogpost is written by our marketing intern Heather Siu. She reflects on Sarah Everard’s murder, the Atlanta Spa Shooting and how we talk about men’s violence against women.
TW: sexual assault, murder and racism
It’s taken me a while to process the past month. Scrap that, I’m still trying to understand what happened and is still happening.
Earlier this month, Sarah Everard was walking home when she was kidnapped and murdered. A few days later, a police officer was charged with her abduction and murder. Following this, a peaceful vigil held in her memory in Clapham ended in disturbing scenes as police forces intervened. It ignited a global denouncement on violence against women. And like many other women, I was horrified. It was yet another reminder that we are not safe.
The following week, a man killed eight people in a mass shooting in Atlanta. Seven of the victims were women, and six of them were like me - Asian women. The suspect, a young white man, claimed that it was not a racist attack and blamed his "sex addiction". A police officer followed up the gunman's actions by saying he had "a really bad day." Again, I was distraught. A brutal attack brushed off with brutal indifference.
These violent attacks are intimately connected. They expose our society’s deep-rooted misogyny, which manifests through violence against women and through the public reaction to these violent crimes. But it goes deeper than that. For many of us, it's personal.
The murder of Sarah Everard proved that despite doing all the ‘right things’ - walking on brightly lit streets, not wearing headphones, carrying keys like a weapon - women are still not safe from men. The resurfacing of #NotAllMen on social media, and the policing that followed, underscores this stark reality. Women continue to be silenced.
Similarly, the mass shooting in Atlanta laid bare the deadly intersection between violence, race and gender. The reluctance to label these incidents as hate crimes denies the lived realities and real fears of marginalised peoples. This is part of the violence we experience: to be dismissed and silenced. Much like #NotAllMen invalidates and silences women, #AllLivesMatter is exactly in the same vein. To be blunt, it’s like being stabbed, told to shut up about it and stabbed again. Maybe at some other point in my life, I would’ve swallowed it like bitter medicine. But not anymore.
As someone who is ethnically Chinese but born in the UK (otherwise known as a British-born Chinese) I’ve had my fair share of racist encounters. So I learned to keep my head down and suppress my rage out of self-preservation. To speak up would be to draw attention to my Otherness. So I tried to prove them wrong. I learned how to minimise my Otherness; I made sure to speak loudly in my perfect British accent; I learnt to accept the mispronunciation of my name and laugh it off. Every. Single. Time. These survival tactics became second-nature. But I now know it’s not enough, and it never will be.
The same thing applies when it comes to being a woman. Women are taught that we are responsible for our own safety. We are told to be vigilant, to dress conservatively, and to accept catcalls as ‘compliments.’ So when men rape women, we blame the victim. When we talk about “violence against women”, we don’t focus on who carried out the violence. We shift the blame from men and label it a women’s issue. As summed up by Jackson Katz:
We talk about how many women were raped last year, not how many men raped women. We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls. We talk about how many teenage girls got pregnant…last year, rather than how many men and boys impregnated teenage girls.
From the language we use to who’s actually having the conversation, we need to change how we talk about men’s violence against women. Because it has nothing to do with women, it's about tackling a larger system where we hold men accountable. I’ve come to realise that it’s not my responsibility to minimise myself as an Asian person or as a woman, because it’s a societal problem. And to stay silent would mean to be complicit to my own oppression. Screw that.
So where does this leave us? Putting an end to men’s violence against women is easier said than done - especially when race is thrown into the mix. Sarah Everard’s death was undeniably tragic, but where was the same level of outcry for the seven women who died in the Atlanta shooting, especially the six Asian women? Where was the same outrage for the missing case of Bennylyn Burke, a Filipino mother, and her two-year old daughter in Dundee? They disappeared at the same time as Sarah Everard and it was later discovered that a man had murdered them both.
Sarah Everard was a white, attractive, middle-class woman with a respectable job who did ‘everything right’. Her murder case made the perfect media storm and the public gobbled it up. Her face flooded our Instagram feeds, we all grieved her death and it opened a conversation about violence against women. Meanwhile, members of the LGBTQ+ community, working class women, disabled women and women of colour - women who are statistically at a higher risk of gender-based violence - are continuously left in the dark. We showed up for Sarah, now we need white women to show up for us too.
We need the same level of outcry for every woman who faces violence. Not just when it happens in public, not just when it's widely reported, not just when she's done everything ‘right’ and especially not just when it happens to white women. We need to condemn men’s violence against all women. The conversations we have about sexual harassment and violence against women need to be intersectional.
We can’t afford to stay silent. Marginalised women can’t afford to keep shouting alone into the void - I would know, and I’m tired as hell.
Ways you can help
Start using active over passive language to categorise violence against marginalised groups
If you’re a man, this is your moment. We need men to talk to the other men in their lives about the roles, subconscious or otherwise, that they all play in this system.
Resources
Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
