Ending femicide means organised women's liberation
By Vala Francis. Illustration: Rory Robertson-Shaw
Recently, a friend commented how wonderful gender equality is in Britain. I thought of the 187 women and girls murdered here from March 2022 to March 2023. According to official records, that’s a low number. 214 femicides—murders of women and girls—were recorded the year prior. I thought of how 95% of charged suspects are male, close to half of the killers are former or current partners, and the majority of the rest are family members. How the home is the most dangerous place for women.
The Femicide Census hasn’t been updated for three years. Summer 2024 was marked by mass murders of women and children in England. On 9 July, Carol Hunt and her daughters Louise and Hannah were killed by a crossbow in their home by Louise’s ex-partner. On 29 July, three young girls—Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar and Bebe King—were murdered in the Southport mass stabbing, and 8 other children and 2 adults were seriously injured. On 19 August, Alberta Obinim was stabbed to death by her son. On 21 August, Bryonie Gawith and her three young children, Denisty, Oscar, and Aubree, aged from 22 months to 9 years old, were killed in an arson attack by an ex-partner of their guest.
Individual femicides trickle through the news every few days; sometimes, victims are publicly named for the first time more than a year later. We often never read their names.
Femicide is the culmination of deeply embedded misogyny. For every woman killed, thousands more suffer other forms of patriarchal violence. It’s estimated close to 800,000 women experience rape or sexual assault in Britain every year. Only a fraction are reported to the police. Last year, less than 3% of the 70,000 reported cases resulted in a charge.
Alexander McCartney was sentenced in October for extreme child sexual abuse “on an industrial scale”, utilising the internet to target around 3,500 children across several countries with such extreme cruelty that one young girl took her own life. McCartney’s neighbours described him as seeming a “pleasant and affable” young man, that “there is nothing extraordinary about him”.
Similarly ordinary are the 51 men in the internationally followed Mazan trial in France, currently on trial for raping Gisèle Pélicot while she was drugged unconscious by her ex-husband over the course of ten years. At least 30 other men have yet to be identified. French media has called it the “Mr. Everyman” trial for the lack of common profile. Some of the wives, girlfriends, and family members of the men on trial have testified in their defence. Pélicot said she, too, could never have imagined her husband as a rapist. “A rapist is not just someone you meet in a dark car park late at night,” she said. “He can also be found in the family, among friends.”
How can the objectification and dehumanisation of women be so normal and invisible in society? Angela Davis calls sexual violence “a global pandemic from which no country is exempt”, saying, “Intimate violence is not unconnected to state violence.”
This system is exemplified by influencers like Andrew Tate. For a moment, he was ubiquitous; a private capitalist empire built from undisguised sexual exploitation and trafficking of women, and a household name for boys everywhere. “Boys are born into this patriarchal system. They have a deep mistrust of the state. They want answers, they want an analysis, and they find that in conspiracy” says Jess, an educator in London. Tate currently has 10 million followers on X.
Women’s bodies are coveted as property under nationalism. The far-right rioted, supposedly in protest of Elsie, Alice, and Bebe’s murders in Southport, yet were silent for the triple murder of the Hunt women, and for Gawith and her three children. We know the far-right wholly supports patriarchy. Their rhetoric to “save our children” will never result in action against the very system that causes child exploitation. Their anti-immigrant propaganda for protecting white children and women’s ‘honour’ from the “invading” men of Asia and Africa echoes the criminalisation of Black men in Jim Crow U.S. and the manipulation of gender for white supremacy.
The Mazan trial is an example of a moment that can create a juncture in popular consciousness, with some feminists calling it a “watershed moment”. But we are facing dominance by liberal, conservative and far-right forces in the mainstream narrative. It also shows that the sense of ‘progress’ and ‘equality’ that we have arrived at, according to liberal feminism, is a smokescreen.
Patriarchy is not just a form of violence enacted by individual men, but a pervasive system of ordering relationships, allocating resources, and defining what’s possible. Imperialism, militarism, genocide and slavery are ordered and designed by human beings, but rely on the infrastructure of the state and capital. The engineering of military equipment is just one example.
To fight something so systemic, we must confront the system itself. Luckily, we’re not starting from zero. Audre Lorde said, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single issue-lives”. Women’s movements and anti-colonial struggles – such as slave rebellions, national liberation struggles, diaspora organisations, left-wing and grassroots feminist movements – have been articulating and resisting this for hundreds of years across the world.
We cannot believe the state’s integrity in its pledge for the Elimination of Violence Against Women while it justifies the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children; when culpability for the Transatlantic slave trade is refuted, while British landowners, politicians and businessmen still profit from the exploitation and death of millions of African women over hundreds of years.
This is why the feminism we must build – a militant feminism – must be both grassroots and internationalist. Our most local and personal realities are intertwined with those of the world. The state has never allowed concessions without huge pressure from below. Lobbying and demanding change is a part of struggle – as we have seen with the formation of the NHS, certain legal protections such as recognition of marital rape, women being able to open their own bank accounts, or the global demand to end arms sales to Israel. However, reforming the level of violence will not abolish it, or transform its foundations. Our capacity to be organised beyond the state will be the level of our collective self-defence.
Vala Francis is an organiser from England inspired by anti-colonial struggle and women's liberation.
