Oh thank you, makes perfect sense and this is really powerful stuff. Written so well I would like to pin this on SM*This is a little OT, and I want to make it clear that I am not referring to any particular incident. However, that Jay Rayner tweet - and so many others like it, which mention women being scared but not what we're scared of - really pissed me off. Feel free to skip over this if you like (my point is neither gentle nor nuanced, sorry).
If I could encourage you all to make one change in the way you discuss violence against women and girls, it would be this: use the active, rather than passive, voice. Women are killed makes it seem like some unseen force is killing us, or that it is our unlucky destiny to be killed. Men are killing women gives a far clearer idea of what the problem is.
This may seem like semantics, but it really isn't. A few reasons why:
1) When we use the passive voice, we allow room for misinterpretation. There was a huge news story here two years ago: in the Spanish state, we have a specific category of crime called gender violence, and we reached the point where 1000 men killed their partners since that category was created. Literally every news outlet reported this as 1000 women killed by their partners. I actually had a huge argument with a friend about this manner of reporting; he insisted that I was wrong, because oooh, maybe some of those partners were lesbians? None were, but by removing men from the story, the issue is obfuscated.
2) It encourages victim blaming. Language is powerful, and when we say "a woman has been raped" we are centering her in a way that is inappropriate. "A man has raped a woman" reminds us of what has actually happened.
3) Related to this: when we focus on the perpetrators, we can make progress toward a solution. Read this article to see what I mean - it neatly disspells the myth of men snapping and killing their partners out of the blue in a fit of rage. Patterns like the one highlighted here can only be identified when we look at the perpetrator, not the victim.
4) It removes vagueness. We see something very similar with racism. Last year, during the BLM protests, there was a lot of hand-wringing but not a lot of progress. That's because saying "black lives matter" or "racism is everywhere" is comfortably vague; saying "the police are racist, here's why, and here's how we can move forward" is less so. Hell, I know a guy who is a member of the Spanish fascist party whose Insta feed went from a selfie at a fascist rally to a Blackout Tuesday square - because he could happily enjoy the cognitive dissonance between the two.
Exactly the same applies to male violence. I see a lot of people saying "oh what a pity women are scared" in exactly the same way they said "racism is such a big problem" last year. Address the real issue. Take practical steps. Clearly identify the problem, and we can work towards a solution.
*but shan't as I don't grift and it would
both of us.)
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