THE world stands shocked by the horrific murder of Rebecca Cheptegei, the Ugandan athlete who so recently competed at the Olympics in Paris.
Like the rape and murder of trainee doctor Moumita Debnath in India last month, the barbarity of the crime — Cheptegei was doused in petrol and set alight by a former boyfriend as she returned from church with her two daughters — has made international headlines.
Both murders draw attention to the status of women in their societies: in Kenya, where Cheptegei was killed, 34 per cent of women report having suffered violence from men. India has been rated the most dangerous country on Earth for women, and campaigners led by the formidable All India Democratic Women’s Association relentlessly expose officialdom’s efforts to protect men who rape and kill women.
But it would be patronising to see these crimes as characteristic of supposedly backward “third world” countries. Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is not only a global problem, it is getting worse — including in Britain, where police recorded a 37 per cent increase in such crimes from 2018-23.
Last year, these amounted to a fifth of all recorded crimes with over a million VAWG-related offences.
And while the left has, rightly, sounded the alarm over the rise of violent racism in the wake of August’s far-right riots, we should recognise that the appalling crime that fascists sought, dishonestly, to blame on innocent Muslims and asylum-seekers was itself a murderous attack on girls that should be seen in the context of epidemic violence against women.
Labour declares it will treat violence against women as a national emergency.
It aims to halve such crimes within a decade. Positive plans include placing domestic abuse experts in 999 control rooms and improving police training on misogynistic violence.
The latter is essential: killer policeman Wayne Couzens was nicknamed “The Rapist” by colleagues, showing that too many officers see sexual violence as a joke, while just this week a former Met Police officer from the same unit as Couzens and serial rapist David Carrick — Mark Tyrrell — was charged with multiple counts of rape and sexual assault.
Labour has also promised to look at education. Schooling in respect for women and relationships is logical, given the huge rise in sexual harassment in school reported by teaching unions.
But we should not underestimate the social revolution required. Violence against women is the sharpest end of a patriarchal system in which women and girls are still often seen as property: like Cheptegei, 60 per cent of women killed by men in Britain over the last decade were killed by a current or former partner.
The rapid rise in sexual violence is, as the all-party parliamentary group on commercial sexual exploitation warned last year, inextricably tied to the huge consumption of online pornography.
England’s children’s commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza points to the prevalence of violent sexual acts in online porn, which condition consumers’ attitudes to sex; and the MPs noted that an exclusive focus on policing the ages of porn viewers, encouraged by the term “adult entertainment,” underrates evidence that porn also influences adult men’s behaviour towards women.
“We cannot end the epidemic of male violence against women and girls without confronting and combating the contributory role that pornography plays in fuelling sexual objectification and sexual violence,” they concluded.
That requires a holistic approach: you can’t fight the objectification of women’s bodies while normalising the commercialisation of sex.
Nor can you root out violence against women while maintaining a “hostile environment” that drives refugees into the shadows, when thousands of asylum-seeking women and girls disappear into the sex trade across Europe each year.
If the left is to be a force for women’s liberation, it must confront the oppression of women as a sex, revoking the privilege accorded to men’s proprietorial attitudes and sexual appetites, however profitable they may be.
