When men keep killing women where do we find hope?
It's so difficult to hold onto hope when the reasons for it exist in the women we never see and the names we never hear. Maybe we need to take more time to think about those women.
There was another cluster of murders this week. Four women and girls allegedly killed by men and boys they know. The spike leads to media reports that are so predictable I can almost recite them before I read them: Happy photos and loving tributes of the murdered women at the top, to remind readers that women are people, in case they forgot. That’s followed by a quote from a polite but frustrated senior DFSV worker who says something about “losing too many women to domestic violence”, as though women are car keys and domestic violence is the sagging couch cushions where coins, keys and other pocket detritus disappear. The article might finish with a statement about not enough funding and if the news outlet is really conscientious, a list of helplines for women to call if they’re being “affected by domestic violence”.
I’m not disparaging the journalists who write these articles. The reason the articles are so formulaic is because they’ve been written so many times that it’s almost impossible to come up with new ways to write the same thing. Again. At least those journos are doing what they can to shake the apathy that mutes much of the response to men who murder women and girls.
I even understand the apathy. Hundreds of women and girls have been killed by men in the last ten years, and it feels like nothing ever changes. More inquiries and inquests and commissions produce more reports and recommendations. Governments make flashy announcements and wildly exaggerated claims about funding increases. But men keep killing women and every time it feels like it could have been prevented if only someone had taken that woman more seriously or done something more powerful to stop the man who killed her.
With every murder, it’s far too easy to feel hopeless. Anger and grief burn themselves out after a while, until all you’re left with is exhaustion and despair. All the work and effort and advocacy and money, why has yet another man killed another woman and why was nothing done to stop him?
The reality of each new murder, so real, so present, darkens the past and the future. It can feel impossible to see where change has or could happen.
The cold factual response is that we have seen change – real chance. It feels callous to say this in week where four women and girls have been killed (perhaps because it is) but all the effort in response and prevention has worked. There are women and children alive today who would have been killed by a man without all that work over the last few decades.
The Australian National Homicide Monitoring Program collects data on all people murdered in Australia – although it doesn’t include the missing women or the women who died by suicide after years of abuse.
Their data on women murdered (almost all of them by men, usually a man who once said he loved her) shows how much has changed in the last 35 years. The homicide rate for women in Australia has more than halved since 1990.
If the women’s homicide rate had remained unchanged since 1990 an additional one hundred women (at least) would have been killed by men this year. Another one hundred lives and futures would have been torn out of the world by men who thought they were entitled to kill a woman who threatened to be happy without them.
It’s not much of an antidote to despair, the faces we never see and the lives we never know about, not when the faces of the women and girls killed by men are so real and so constant. But sometimes it can help to think about all those women who would have become a data point on that graph - but didn’t.
We’ve become so much better at making murdered women visible. But every woman who wasn’t murdered is invisible. Hopefully her name never becomes a headline, and her pseudonym is never at the top of any article about crime. If her photo appears online, it’s because she’s having another birthday, celebrating another promotion, watching kid’s excitement at a game or a theatre production, or just feeling good about herself and her life and wants to share that feeling with the world.
I have to keep reminding myself that most of the women missing from the graph are not there because they were able to get the support they needed to safely leave the man who would otherwise have killed them. That he was made to believe he would be held accountable if he continued hurting her or stalking her and finally left her alone to find joy, purpose and fulfilment on her own terms.
Those women are alive now, in large part due to the work done by the people (most of them women) working in violence crisis response and prevention. All those women who answer crisis calls and staff domestic violence refuges and provide legal aid and court support and financial advice and childcare and a clear voice that says, “it was not your fault, and you will recover from what he did to you”.
It doesn’t lessen the horror of the women who are on that graph and shouldn’t be. Nothing can. But maybe it helps stave off hopelessness to remember that the collective work we do (even if it is just to write another article about the abhorrent murder of more women) contributes to keeping those one hundred women off that graph.
There is only one direction to go if we want to keep the next hundred women alive – forward.
AI declaration: I do not use AI in any of my work. Not for writing, structure or research (although I do use ChatGPT occasionally to find research papers - the academic databases search engines are rubbish). Mostly I stay away because the few times I tried it the results were so incomplete and unreliable that it ended up being faster and better to do it myself. I’m told AI has improved significantly since then, but I’ve chosen to not explore this because I don’t want to be tempted away from the complex imperfection of my own thoughts, voice and analysis.
I have sometimes used AI to create images, and they are all labelled as such. Graphs and data are all my own work from spreadsheets I create myself and data I download from reliable sources such as the ABS.
11 years since I feared he'd kill us if we left, but knew he'd kill us if we stayed. Every time a woman or child is killed I am both overwhelmed by horror and utterly grateful for my life. I know what it feels like to think I might not get away this time, that I might not regain consciousness, that I may not survive. I'm so grateful to be here, and so angry and sad that others are not.
Much needed reminder, sis. It can be so difficult to focus on the saved when we're only seeing those we failed to save. Thank you.