Over 95% of violent crimes against women are committed by men. Yet only 0.4% of headlines about this violence refer to the term they’re truly reporting on; male violence against women. Only 5% of headlines about these crimes refer to a male perpetrator and 9x more use the passive tense than the active to describe it: ‘woman attacked’ over ‘man attacked woman.’ 

Passivity and omission of male perpetrators in media, brand and institution language decontextualise this violence. It is read as something that simply ‘happens’ to women, implying that women are the driving force behind it. We compartmentalise it as a ‘women’s problem,’ igniting little action or accountability from the broader male population. Male detachment from violence against women - in both its cause and prevention - leads us to regard it in the same passive voice. We question ‘how many women are attacked?’ over ‘how many men attack women?’, the former being Googled over 1,600x more each month than the latter and referenced in over 2,640x more articles. It is this same misdirected attention that leads to us telling women ‘don't get attacked’ rather than telling men not to attack women. Tellingly, ‘how to teach my daughter self-defence’ is the most Googled ‘how to’ around daughters; the equivalent for boys is ‘how to teach my son how to ride a bike.’

The onus remains on survivors and victims, and women more broadly, to shoulder responsibility for the problem and the solution. After Wayne Couzens murdered Sarah Everard, the Met Police told women to ‘be streetwise’ and ‘not go out alone’. This notion that women should restrict and police themselves re-fuelled conversations about why we suggest curfews for the demographic most likely to be victims than the demographic most likely to victimise. Despite recognition of this hypocrisy, women searched for self-defence classes and rape alarms more than any other time in the last five years in the week following Everard’s murder. 

Responsibility and victim-blaming go hand in hand. When Jesse Kempson murdered 21-year-old backpacker Grace Millane in 2018, the media collaborated and amplified his ‘rough sex’ defence. 19% of articles about the case referred to Millane being ‘interested’ in BDSM and 4% mentioned 50 Shades of Grey. Coverage focused more on her sexual history than his criminal history; significantly fewer articles referred to Kempson having previously attacked other women. Millane became another woman denied a backstory beyond a narrative she couldn’t consent to, silent whilst filling headlines.

Whilst a woman’s history is used to condemn her, a man’s becomes his alibi: to deny his crime as inconceivable, or to condone it as an out-of-character blip. When Brock Turner assaulted author Chanel Miller in 2015, 94% of articles referred to him being a Stanford University student, whilst 77% described him as an Olympic swimming hopeful. Turner became another perpetrator whose ‘promise’ and ‘potential’ were used to protect him, whilst the futures of women victimised remain overlooked. The fact that Turner had been drinking was also used to defend an extremely lenient six-month sentence: another example of alcohol becoming an excuse for men’s violence whilst being presented as justification for women’s victimisation. 

Male violence against women is both normalised into apathy and sensationalised into drama. We navigate a system where 80% of domestic abuse is covered up, rape kits are left on shelves untested, and crimes against women overall are minimised. The latter is particularly true within marginalised groups; Blessing Olusegun, a Black woman found dead six months before Everard, received 2,100x less mentions in the media and her death remains unsolved, demonstrating how women of colour receive significantly less police and press attention. Simultaneously, true crime - which focuses mainly on female victims - continues to rocket in popularity, whilst the media focuses on how women are hurt rather than why men feel entitled to hurt them.

Sarah Everard’s murder did however drive national conversations beyond the #NotAllMen binary, with 35% of posts about what men can do to tackle male violence coming from men themselves. Whilst this is not yet parity, it represents a significant uplift in the proportion of conversations about male accountability posted by men when compared to the peak of #MeToo. Media, brands and anyone discussing male violence against women can further alter perceptions by calling it by its name, abandoning terms like ‘women’s issues’ and ensuring coverage of victims and survivors go beyond defining them according to their suffering and sexuality. In doing so, we can direct accountability towards the roots of the problem – not its casualties.