Thoughts on women...

One of the cleverest things society has managed to do is silence women on the subject of domestic abuse and violence. It has been orchestrated that women often somehow feel complicit in and shame for the abuse they have suffered. Over and over again we hear stories of the women who feel that they are to blame for their own abuse, by either causing it to happen through their own 'behaviour', or through staying with an abusive partner. Neither of these are true. The only person to blame is the perpetrator. A woman could cheat on her husband and still not deserve to be beaten. She may deserve the end of her marriage but never the end of her life. The fault lies with the abuser and the abuser alone. Women have been demonised for millennia to justify the atrocious acts of husbands over wives. Laws have been passed to keep women subjugated, some changing only as recently as the 1990s when in 1991 marital rape was finally recognised as a crime. Until then sex was considered the 'r...

This week I heard about the Red Chair project. The idea is that you place a red chair somewhere public and put a sign above it. It is intended to represent the women who are now missing from the world because they were murdered victims of domestic violence. Read more about the project here and download the resources you need to join in. This got me thinking about how many women and girls are not alive due to gender based violence and honestly looking at those numbers and related information is even more chilling than you'd imagine. Did you know that men's violence against women is one of the leading causes of premature death globally? In 2022, just under 89,000 women and girls were murdered due to their sex. The number of gender based murders is actually UP when the overall global murder rate is DOWN.  The Femicide Census is the only project independently collating this data. By looking at the data they can identify patterns and risk factors and this targeted information is abl...