The failure of men to speak out about male violence against women and girls renders us all complicit. Male violence is a pandemic: 117,568 men were prosecuted for offences against women in Britain in 2015-16, a surge of almost 10% over the course of a year. These figures are alarming enough, but they represent only a sliver of the actual violence, abuse and harassment women are subjected to: most crimes are not reported.
It was estimated that 1.4 million women suffered domestic violence in England and Wales in 2014. Around 400,000 women are sexually assaulted each year; approximately 85,000 women are raped. Convictions represent a tiny proportion. Putting it bluntly, the men who commit violence think they are likely to get away with it – and, devastatingly, they are right.
There are two potential objections to men speaking out about this tidal wave of violence. One is that it would be nothing more than so-called “virtue-signalling” – that is, men who self-identify as left-wing demonstrating how “right on” they are for political brownie points. And yes, there are such men who exist, dubbing themselves a “feminist” on their Twitter profile, like teenagers who put badges of bands on their schoolbags.
The other more compelling argument is that we live in a society where men dominate every pillar of power, from parliament to the economy to the media. Men crowd out the voices of women systematically, including on issues that directly affect women. No wonder women end up disproportionately affected by policies such as cuts to social security. It would be perverse if women did not take the lead in campaigning on violence overwhelmingly committed against them by men.
So how do men fit in? Jill Robinson is a volunteer with the White Ribbon Campaign, which focuses on encouraging men to campaign against male violence. When she was growing up in rural Devon in the 1960s, she would barricade herself in her bedroom along with her mother to escape the alcohol-fuelled rage of her father. He didn’t believe that women should be educated, so she would flee to the fields to study. There were no helplines or local refuges when she was young.
When she did manage to complete her A-levels and get a place at university, her father was so enraged he told the local community that the real reason his daughter had left was to get an abortion. “I was just a naive teenager,” she recalls tearfully. “Why is he doing this? It’s not how fathers should behave.” She believes men have a responsibility to speak out. “It’s tremendously important that everybody speaks up, whoever they are,” she says. “Men should be taking a lead on it.”
The White Ribbon campaign was set up 10 years ago “because of the huge problem of the massive prevalence of violence by men towards women, and what was so striking was the silence of men in relation to that,” says David Bartlett, the campaign’s director. “It was as though all these men were committing violence, and all these other men were pretending it wasn’t going on, or it was no concern of theirs.”
Men are conditioned from an early age to feel a sense of superiority over women, and to objectify women. Violence against women is the most extreme conclusion of a belief – nurtured over thousands of years – that women are subservient and exist to satisfy men. Rape, assault and murder exist on a continuum that begins with degrading jokes and comments; cat-calling in the street; images that objectify women; the shouting down of women for daring to have an opinion, often involving insults about their physical appearance on social media.
“We have a very misogynistic culture in the UK,” says Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society. “We tolerate the casualisation of violence and objectification.” An atmosphere is produced that makes violence culturally acceptable – and men have a responsibility to challenge it.
Although Bartlett emphasises that male perpetrators of violence must take responsibility for their actions, “boys around the world grow up being taught it’s acceptable ... They also feel in some ways that it’s part of what it is to be a man.”
Society’s reinforcement of what it is to be a man from such a young age damages men too. “The stereotype assumptions that create violence against women create very narrow expectations of what men should be like,” says Rachel Krys, co-director of the End Violence Against Women coalition. Gay, bisexual and transgender men – or simply men who do not conform to an unreconstructed form of masculinity – can also experience violence.
There are so many practical demands that men should support. In a country in which one to two women are killed each week by a current or former partner, 17% of refuges have been shut since the Tories re-entered government six years ago. Cuts that threaten women’s lives must be reversed. The Fawcett Society is calling for male violence against women to be treated as a hate crime – an approach now adopted by Nottinghamshire police. Misogynistic hate also intersects with other forms of bigotry: take the targeting of Muslim women on the streets by white men.
Men have to be sensitive about their role, of course. As Bartlett puts it, the approach cannot be “as though women haven’t been talking about it for decades, or as though men have something new to say”. Smethers argues it should be “in alliance with women, and on women’s terms”.
It is easy for men to turn away: “I don’t commit this violence, I’m not a perpetrator, so why should it concern me? Why impose collective guilt for the crimes of a minority?” But it doesn’t take much self-reflection to accept that the culture of men – into which we are socialised from the day we are born – fosters a sense of superiority and dominance. We did not invent it, but we did inherit it. And unless that culture is overcome in favour of a more inclusive form of masculinity, male violence against women will continue to be legitimised.
Feminists and LGBT activists have helped to redefine masculinity in a way that is more accepting and less about dominance. But there is still so far to go – and if male violence is to be overcome, men have a duty to listen to women and to speak out.