The days passed with no news of Owami Davies, the young Black student nurse who went missing from her home in Essex on July 4. Thank God she’s been found.
Over the last few days, nine-year-old girl Olivia Pratt-Korbel and Ashley Dale, 28, were slain in Liverpool. Karen Dempsey, a gran in her 50s, was stabbed to death in Kirkby, also in Merseyside. She was trying to stop a fight between two men.
In such anxious times, dark fears creep into the psyche. Females do not feel and are not safe.
Controlling and violent men have harmed my friends. One, an Englishwoman, a trained lawyer, has changed her identity and now does low-paid jobs. Another was murdered by her husband when they were on holiday in Pakistan.
Female equality has come a very long way. But the most confident and savvy females are keenly aware of dangers posed by brutal males. (Not all men obviously. But a significant number demean and hurt females.)
We don’t know how many women and girls are daily terrorised by partners, husbands, brothers, fathers and other male relatives. And, shockingly, until 2012, no official statistics recorded the number of female homicide victims. One woman changed all that.
In January 2012, Karen Ingala Smith, an academic and activist, began recording the names in a blog titled Counting Dead Women.
The first name was 20-year-old Kirsty Treloar, stabbed 29 times by her boyfriend Myles Williams, 19.
Smith told a Guardian journalist: “I became increasingly aware of the value of the data I was collecting but good data becomes almost meaningless if it isn’t a catalyst for change.”
That change is not happening. Because it’s still a man’s world.
Alongside Clarrie O’Callaghan, of the law firm Freshfields, Smith set up the Femicide Census. One woman is killed by a man every three days, some strangers, some they knew.
In 2019, 238 females were killed where a man was charged with the crime. So far this year, at least 62 females have been killed and the suspects were male.
The back stories reveal common themes – stalking, coercive control, the impact of pornography and rejection.
Imagine the reactions if this number of males were slain by females. Or if this many cats and dogs had their lives snuffed out by their owners.
New data shows that many police forces offer little or no training on how to deal with domestic violence. Only Lancashire Police has accredited courses attended by all officers and that has significantly improved practice.
Evidence also shows some officers are irredeemably sexist. In one WhatsApp group which included Sarah Everard’s killer Wayne Couzens, one PC joked that “DV victims love it”.
Now we learn that the Met initially issued the wrong pictures of Owami Davies, and that officers had talked to her and thought no more of it. This story ends well. Many don’t.
It’s as if female lives don’t matter even to the people paid to care and protect us.
As I said, it’s still a man’s world.
