It started with a crossbow. In July, Carol Hunt and her two daughters, Louise and Hannah, were killed in their family home in Hertfordshire. When Hannah was found, reports say she was still alive with a crossbow bolt in her chest. Louise’s ex-boyfriend, Kyle Clifford, has been arrested in connection with the killings but remains in hospital.
Three weeks later three young girls – Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice da Silva Aguiar – were stabbed to death in Southport. The children were doing yoga and dancing to Taylor Swift songs when they died. An 18-year-old man has been charged.
Then this month, care worker Alberta Obinim was killed in a knife attack in Greater Manchester. Her husband and 17-year-old daughter were left in a critical condition. Twenty-four hours earlier, Alberta had been dancing with friends at church. The man who has been arrested is said to have been “known” to the victims.
I would carry on naming other women and girls who have allegedly been killed by men in recent months, but there are too many to fit on the page. This has been Britain’s summer of male violence, in which headlines about women being killed have been as commonplace as news of the Olympics and the rain.
It is not simply the scale of the femicide that we have witnessed lately that makes it feel different, but the fact that we are aware of it at all. Perhaps it is because of the tragically young ages of some of the victims, but the horrors of this summer have broken through in a way that violence against women and girls rarely does.
When I read the Guardian’s report on the 50 women allegedly killed by men in the UK so far this year, I was struck not only by the devastation of lives cut short but by how few of them I had heard about before. These women met brutal ends, and most barely got a few paragraphs on their local paper’s website. In an age of breaking news banners, stories are more sensationalised yet we are more able to scroll by – a dead woman’s face next to the popup ads for online casinos.
A woman being killed by a man is effectively a “dog bites person” story. It is so common, so predictable, that it is widely seen as hardly worth mentioning. If it is reported, the men are often excused – those tragic instances of girlfriends stabbed in “crimes of passion”, or mothers suffocated by “loving sons”. The inference is clear: violence is somehow a natural part of masculinity, and there are certain things that women do that mean they are “asking for it”.
Even those rare deaths that did make national news in recent months have been quickly sidelined. In the days after the Southport killings, the government and media ended up spending their time talking, not about the slaying of three beautiful children, but about riots by the far right. Click on news of a murdered woman on social media nowadays, and the comments below the story are often the same – not concern for the victim, but “what race is the perpetrator”. This kind of response is clearly racist and rooted in white supremacist ideas of protecting “our women”, but it also works to distort and erase the threat of violent misogyny. The rape and killing of women is still somehow about men’s feelings.
When news of the fatal wounding of a woman breaks, police rush to ease tensions and reassure the public it is an “isolated incident”. But really, that is not quite true. Male violence – whether domestic abuse, a stranger attack, or terrorism – is not a case of a few bad apples or a rare lone event. It is systemic, a result of a thousand moments, big and small, that teach men to hate and women to be afraid.
The reason that the spate of killings this summer has resonated with many of us is that it feels at once shocking and deeply familiar. Women can join the dots between the day-to-day indignities and stresses we face – the wolf whistles, the park flashers, the public transport gropes – and the stuff of nightmares. This is not hysterical or an overreaction. Evidence shows that men who commit murder, including as an act of terrorism, often have a history of “lesser” offences, such as stalking or domestic abuse.
The rape and murder of Sarah Everard by Met police officer Wayne Couzens in 2021 was widely viewed as a watershed moment for addressing violence against women. Three years later, it is not so much that nothing has changed but that in some ways, we are going backwards. “Incel” culture and Andrew Tate-style misogyny appear to be radicalising young men online. Rape victims are waiting up to four years to go to court, with most still never seeing justice. Generation Z men and boys are more likely than boomers to think feminism is harmful, according to recent Ipsos polling.
That Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is said to be considering making misogyny a form of extremism is progress of sorts. But counter-terrorism strategies, which disproportionately target people of colour, are no magic bullet. Addressing the epidemic of male violence will require far-reaching societal change, from prioritising teaching boys about consent and warning them of online misogyny, and funding women’s refuges and services that are starved of cash, to radically improving policing and prosecution outcomes for rape, domestic abuse and stalking.
First, though, it will require fostering the belief that any of this matters. We long ago decided as a society that an average of two women being killed every week is inevitable. Just as we quietly agreed the onus was on women to alter their behaviour – to stop jogging in the dark, to share our locations with a friend when on a date – rather than on violent men to change theirs.
If women are plagued by nightmare scenarios, it is because we are all too aware that these are nightmares that other women have not woken up from. As summer draws to an end and the days get shorter, I cannot help but think of those final moments before life went dark for the victims. Little girls who should be going back to school next week are instead now in their graves. There is nothing natural about that.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
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• This article was amended on 29 August 2024 because an earlier version said that Kyle Clifford has been charged in connection with the killings of Carol Hunt and her daughters, Louise and Hannah. He has been arrested but has not been charged.
