Fix the System, Not the Women

So how do we fix it? The short answer is that we don't. We have wasted decades telling women and girls how to fix things. How to fix themselves. How to stay safe. It hasn't worked. Because women were never the problem in the first place.

The debate around abortion is not focused on whether or not a foetus is considered fully human; it is really about whether or not women are.

Indeed, capitalism and patriarchy work together to sexualise and commodify women and then to shame women for that sexualisation, so that they are disempowered, thereby enabling others to capitalise on their sexualisation. Just watch what happens when women have the audacity to take control of their sexuality – the fury and backlash it generates. That’s when you can see the connections.

if we cannot trust those at the most senior levels of the legal system even to acknowledge misogyny within their own institution, let alone tackle it, how can they expect us to trust them to deliver any kind of justice to women experiencing crimes motivated by that same, apparently invisible misogyny?

Normalisation breeds acceptance, not only in society but in ourselves.

When you experience something your whole life, it can be hard to allow yourself to see it, let alone to recognise it as something out of the ordinary. Something wrong. It’s even harder when you’ve been trained, nudged or, in some cases, forced to dismiss these incidents, instead of acknowledging, discussing or reporting them, and when other people have reacted to them as though they are normal. Or funny. Or your fault. Shame and silencing can be very difficult to unpick.

We have wasted decades telling women and girls how to fix things. How to fix themselves. How to stay safe. It hasn't worked. Because women were never the problem in the first place.

In the UK in 2019, a businessman subjected his ex-wife to an extended violent assault after discovering she was dating a new man. He attacked her in the car park outside a gym, smashing her head against a BMW so hard that it dented the bodywork, and left her needing hospital treatment. At Stockport Magistrates Court, he was convicted of both assault by beating and criminal damage. He was ordered to pay his ex-wife £150 compensation; he was ordered to pay the owner of the BMW £818.

The media is its own sexist ecosystem. But the problem is compounded by the fact that it is also the lens through which every other broken system is presented to us; the lens through which we view education, the police force, the justice system and politics.

A society that privileges some victims over others because of the way it values and ranks women, making it even less likely that some stories will be heard. A culture that blames the women for asking for it and provoking their own attacks. A justice system that lets 98.6 per cent of perpetrators off the hook, even after they’ve been reported to the police.

The truth is that it isn’t about us at all. It is about the world around us and the way it is shaped. I have identified five ecosystems in which institutional change is necessary, starting with identifying and acknowledging the problem and then tackling it at a systemic level. They are: education; policing; criminal justice; politics; and media – and each of them is suffused with institutional inequality.