I write this as I sit on the train to meet my friend at a police station to support her in giving her statement about being assaulted. This is my reality.
Last week, I watched every single news outlet report on the horrifying rape case of a French woman named Gisèle (although she has waived her right to anonymity, I won’t be using her surname as it is that of her abuser) whose husband abused her and enlisted local men to do so too for over a decade. A law I helped create was what caught him. He was found upskirting women and when the police searched his devices they found tens of thousands of videos of his wife allegedly being raped by other men. According to prosecutors, more than 70 men chose to abuse Gisèle when she was unconscious (many of them deny this, saying her then-husband had manipulated them or that they believed she was consenting). That amount of men is terrifying women all over the world: if her husband was able to find that many local men that felt comfortable abusing an unconscious woman when offered, what does it mean?
All week people have been contacting me thanking me for my work creating the Voyeurism Act in 2019 – or making upskirting a specific sexual offence – but I feel no pride. Not only because my opinions on criminalisation as a solution to violence have changed, but also because I don’t gain any pleasure from finding out a woman has been victimised, even if their perpetrator was caught using a law I helped create. I just feel really sad. Deeply, deeply sad.
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There are layers to this sadness and rage, because as a gender equality activist who has worked across law and policy change – with UNWomen UK and for our country's leading gender equality charities – there is hopelessness in seeing how much our media discourages society not to connect the dots between stories about gendered violence, and to look away from what causes it.
Of late, the news has been overrun with painful outcomes of male violence including the heartbreaking death of Olympian Rebecca Cheptegei who was reportedly set on fire by her ex-partner. But what enraged people in the sector I work in was how passive the headlines about these stories were, and how so many of them reinforced misogyny: Gisèle was called 'vengeful' for holding her husband accountable in one headline. Why shape our perceptions of rape survivors as malicious and distract from the violence inflicted on them in doing so? Media style-guides have so much to answer for. Weeks ago, headlines about the alleged murder of Suffolk local, Anita Rose, were written so passively that social media users thought she’d been attacked by a dog. No perpetrator was mentioned even though a murder investigation has been launched and Suffolk police are appealing for information about two men. The headline 'woman dies after attack while walking dog' encourages us to think of male violence as some random abstract force.
And yet, the reality is that 98% of all adult arrests for sexual offences in England and Wales are men. When trying to figure out why, we can point at obvious symptoms of misogyny: porn culture, misogynistic streamers, social media, gender – and the socialisation of it. Misogyny is a defining indicator that runs through all of these atrocities and yet as a society we are absolutely unprepared to admit or examine that.
Those of us who work in gender equality are well-versed in the decades of work by feminists and radical thinkers who exposed that the socialisation of the gender binary was a colonial invention that was harming us all; yes even men with power. Traditional gender roles, introduced by colonial powers, socialise people into ideas about who they must be and how they must act. Masculinity is about being strong and independent; men are told that the only acceptable emotions to show are happiness or anger, and they must procure women in order to be seen as masculine. They are socialised to be an island, unwilling to be vulnerable or ask for help, not expected to be emotionally intelligent. They must be competent and hold down the role of the dominant one in their relationships, families and wider society, with violence being an acceptable way to handle problems or fears. When you spell it out like this it’s pretty clear how this gender stereotype leads to violence. Comparatively, when you look at how femininity is socialised (Submissive! Quiet! Existing in proximity to men!) you can see a problem in how men are conditioned to view women.
Culture is changing and conversations about gender have permeated the zeitgeist, but actual literacy around the socialisation of masculinity and misogyny remains low. We need to change this urgently, so that more people can start to understand how gender shapes our sense of self and behaviours and how misogyny is a system not just individual behaviours or comments; they are a symptom. Without understanding how this system shapes us and how we are all part of upholding it, we can’t start to move the dial on this.
When we read about the horrors of what women like Gisèle, Anita or Rebecca were put through, we are rightly horrified but we read them as isolated incidents. We never consider how we are connected to it. We never ask What are the ways in which I uphold a culture that leads to this? nor do we look at how we uphold gender stereotypes in our own lives and what that allows for. We don’t consider how the jokes and comments we make (and turn a blind eye to) give a green light to others that misogyny, racism and homophobia – all of which lead to violence – are normal. We don’t look at how shying away from conversations about gender, sexuality, accountability and more with our children keeps things the way it is.
We don’t look at our part. But we are all responsible, because a society is made up of people and we are those people.
The man who procured at least 72 men, allegedly to rape his unconscious wife is linked to
The man who set his girlfriend on fire, who is linked to
The man who filmed a woman being raped in Pradesh, who is linked to
The millions that watched it, who are linked to
The man who proposed to his daughter on TikTok with a purity ring, who is linked to
The man who makes sexist jokes to his mates after beers, who is linked to
The kid who follows misogyny influencers, who is linked to
The mother who says 'boys will be boys', who is linked to
The teacher who brushes off the boys’ homophobic teasing, who is linked to
You, reading this, thinking this is nothing to do with you because you don’t commit violence and you’re sure you’ve got no internalised misogyny.
All of it’s connected; too many of us just don’t understand how. And only until we do, does this start to change. Start now.
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