End the epidemic: Why we need more than promises to stop violence against women and girls

14 August 2024, 08:45

• Andrea Simon is the Executive Director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW).

The last few weeks have seen multiple horrifying cases of violence against women and girls.

Yesterday’s horrific stabbing of an 11-year-old girl in Leicester Square happened just two weeks after the mass stabbings in Southport which resulted in the killing of three young girls, and two weeks prior to that, the killing of a mother and her two daughters with a cross-bow.

As this violence dominates the headlines, our thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones, as well as all who find the details of these terrible incidents difficult to process, triggering and re-traumatising. We also see political leaders repeating promises to do better, and to crack down on this violence. But if this grave human rights issue could be solved by policing and prisons alone, we would be seeing an end to the epidemic of male violence against women and girls. But clearly, we are not.

Too many women and girls have lost their lives to male violence, and the rest of us live our lives navigating the ever-present threat of it. We know this is preventable – tackling violence against women must be at the very top of the government’s agenda. But it must act urgently to prevent it rather than only responding after the harm is done.

A series of inquiries and reviews have called violence against women a national emergency. Last month’s National Police Chiefs’ report estimated that 1 in 20 people are perpetrators of violence against women each year, with the actual number thought to be significantly higher. However, the overall police and justice system response remains severely lacking, with a clear need for more effective early identification of perpetrators and the risk they pose to prevent harm to women and girls.

All of this reinforces that we have to look at addressing the root causes of male violence - shifting the attitudes that drive it by prioritising quality relationships and sex education in schools and launching public campaigns that challenge these behaviours and the views that trivialise, normalise and condone them.

It has been utterly appalling to see the far right inflict further violence and harm on a grieving community and unleash a campaign of violent thuggery across the UK targeting marginalised people and communities. This has also severely impacted services supporting victims of abuse. The far right’s weaponisation of the killing of the young girls in Southport is part of a pattern of distorting public concerns about violence against women and girls to spread their hateful agenda. It is not rooted in any concern for women and girls’ rights and freedoms – they are instead agents of patriarchal and white supremacist thinking that creates fertile ground for further violence against women and girls.

Our mainstream politics and media reporting also has a significant impact, with those in positions of influence reinforcing harmful myths about victims, whipping up fears, spreading misinformation and scapegoating marginalised communities. By promoting extreme far-right content for clicks and revenue, tech companies play a huge role in upholding the violence and abuse targeted at women and minority groups. We’ve seen how the racist disinformation and anti-migrant discourse pushed in the media and on social media have fuelled these latest violent riots, while boys and young men are being influenced by misogynist influencers like Andrew Tate after being served his content by profit-seeking algorithms. This cannot go on.

We welcome the new government’s mission to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, but this must not be just lip service. We also won’t get there by narrowly focusing attention on the police and criminal justice system. If political leaders are serious about this mission, they need a roadmap that takes a whole-society approach; one that centres preventing violence, funds specialist women’s support services, addresses the inequalities that victims face, and delivers the vital sex and relationships education our young people need.

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