International Women’s Day

Joanna Cherry Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP) [V]]

In a debate to mark International Women’s Day, it should not be a revolutionary statement to say that sex matters. But it is and it does.

Despite the fact that men’s violence against women is a leading cause of the premature death of women globally, research in the UK and Europe is inadequate. Thanks to Karen Ingala Smith’s Femicide Census, we now have detailed, comparable data on femicides in the UK since 2009. In a report published at the end of last year, the Femicide Census examined 1,425 cases of women killed by men. It found that the number of women killed every year by men has stayed distressingly consistent over the past decade, at between 124 and 168 each year. This raises serious questions about the state’s response to men’s violence against women in the past decade.

The Femicide Census believes there is a lack of willingness to tackle the root causes of this violence, and identifies a number of systemic problems, including a lack of funding for and cuts to the specialist women’s sector and a failure to collate, store and make easily accessible transparent, disaggregated data on violence against women. We need this data because sex matters. Women are uniquely vulnerable to men’s violence because men are so much stronger than us. That is a fact of our different biological make-up. Sex matters.

This week, as women responded on social media to the horror of the abduction of Sarah Everard, one woman tweeted:

“Half my timeline is women being told they’re responsible for keeping themselves safe from male violence. Half is women being told they’re bigots for insisting on retaining existing protections against male violence.”

Her exasperation echoes that felt by many women. It feels like our society is going backwards. Women who speak up for women’s rights are accused of bad behaviour, while men accused of abusive behaviour are often shielded from the consequences of their actions.

Men are still largely in charge, and many women who get the top are too scared, once they are there, to challenge men who want to silence and control women. So they invent a new kind of feminism—one that is so inclusive and so kind that it will not dare name the problems that women face. Nobody wants to pit women against men, but we need to be able to name the problem of male violence against women. We also need to be able to acknowledge that sex does matter, without being labelled bigots. The high incidence of male violence against women shows us that sex is a reality that we cannot ignore. If we ignore the reality of sex, we distort reality in a way that will only make women more vulnerable.