With only ten days left of 2020, we’ve just gone over the threshold of averaging more than one woman killed each week in Australia.
According to Destroy the Joint’s Counting Dead Women project, the 52nd woman, Zoe Antill was killed in QLD last week. Two days ago, Rosemary Bodak was killed in Sydney, becoming the 53rd woman (that we know of) killed in 2020.
Most of the killings have not yet been through the courts. Justice is slow, especially in homicide where no one wants to take a chance on rushed or incomplete investigations.
What we do know about 2020’s dead women, however, is a litany of familiar stories.
A man known to the woman was taken into custody. The woman’s former partner was arrested at the scene. Police are questioning the woman’s husband about her death. The woman’s partner was charged with murder. A man has been refused bail after being charged with murder.
Not every story, but most of them, follow a horribly familiar pattern. A man killed a woman he once claimed to love because murder is the ultimate form of control. Dead women can’t leave. They can’t argue or have thoughts and feelings of their own. They can’t make choices and they can’t move on. Their life is over because a man chose to end it.
We can take some comfort, maybe, from the declining numbers of women killed. Counting Dead Women recorded 71 women killed in 2018 and 63 in 2019. The Australian Bureau of Statistics data on homicide and related offences reports higher numbers because it includes attempted murder, but it also shows decreasing rates of homicide.
While this might be good news from the bird’s eye perspective, I doubt it’s of any consolation for all the people grieving for women who were killed this year. Nor is it likely to help the hundreds of thousands of women who live in fear of the violent men still living in their homes and families.
This was an exhausting and frightening year. The bushfires. The grinding lockdown in Melbourne. The imminent threats of climate change, Trumpism and China’s bellicosity. And now the possibility of another wave of COVID in Sydney. It’s a weight none of us are ready to deal with, just as we were hoping for end of year respite in the company of friends or family.
It’s entirely understandable that we might want to turn our faces away, if only for a little while, and concentrate on the things that give us peace. Staring into the horror of intimate murder is painful and it is asking too much of an exhausted populace to do anything more than take time to regroup, breathe and hope for some solid ground to stand on while we rebuild our strength.
Let’s hope we are given that time.
But it’s almost certain that at least one more woman will be killed while the rest of us take our well-earned break. And when we come back there will be another one. And another one. And another one.
The work of understanding how and why this keeps happening, and what we can do to prevent it, must continue. We need to know why the murder rate has declined and how we can strengthen the techniques that worked and discard the ones that didn’t.
Jess Hill recently wrote an insightful essay on the policing of domestic abuse. It outlines practical and achievable changes we could make to the enforcement side of keeping women and children safe from violent men. Other projects have shown how youth participation in education can make genuine change in younger people’s understanding and response to abuse. Men’s behaviour change groups, while they are by no means a silver bullet, have had successes. A better understanding of the factors that contribute to success (or failure) of those groups is crucial if the resources we’re giving them are to prove worthwhile.
More can and should be done on providing refuge for women who need it and improving the justice system response to violent men, but we should also recognise change that has occurred – and worked. Support people for victims of crime who testify at trial. Information services to explain the slow and complex court processes to traumatised people. Much needed training for judges, magistrates and police. All these things make a difference.
That we are implementing all these projects, or at least giving them genuine consideration, is reason to hope. It may be that the combination of these things and the work by volunteers and professionals in health, justice, education and political systems is the reason murder rates are going down. If that’s true, it’s cause for hope but it is not an excuse to slow down. If anything, it tells us to go further, harder and stronger.
Maybe, if we do, this time next year we will be saying that for the first time on record, it wasn’t a year where, on average, more than one woman was killed every week.
Jane Gilmore was the founding editor of The King’s Tribune. She is now a freelance journalist and author, with a particular interest in feminism, media and data journalism and has written for The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Daily Telegraph, The Saturday Paper and Meanjin, among many others. Jane has a Master of Journalism from the University of Melbourne, and her book FixedIt: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media was published by Penguin Random House in 2019.
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