We need to teach children that violence against women isn’t normal

It must have been close to midnight when I heard it: the slamming of car doors from the street beneath my window, a hubbub of voices, then the sudden scream from a woman, choked almost immediately into silence.
And then, inevitably, a man’s furious voice, shouting threats and expletives. So I did what I always do when I hear an argument slide into violence; I called the police.
I was thinking about that night earlier this week while listening to a Labour policy review discussion on men’s role in stopping violence against women and girls.
Organised by the End Violence Against Women (EVAW) coalition – whose members include Amnesty International, the Fawcett Society, Refuge and the TUC – the debate repeatedly returned to perceptions of ‘masculinity’, and how those views effects men’s behavior.
Most violent crime is committed by men. Of course men and boys are victims of domestic violence, of sexual harassment and abuse. But there is no real comparison when it comes to sheer numbers. As Colin Fitzgerald of Respect – an organisation helping perpetrators of domestic violence – says: “There is no equality between men and women’s violence.”
According to EVAW, up to three million women in the UK experience violence in any given year; every nine minutes, a woman in Britain is raped; domestic violence kills two women a week.
In the last ten years, there has been a rush of new laws and police guidance designed to protect women and girls: sex offences, domestic violence, female genital mutilation; all carry tougher sentences than ever before.
I worked on some of this legislation, and I’m proud of it. But laws don’t change attitudes, nor do they create the mechanisms to do so. The attitude of many teenagers towards violence, and the abuse faced by girls in the supposedly-secure environment of school, is horrifying.
A YouGov and EVAW poll of 16 – 18 year olds found that almost a third of girls have faced unwanted sexual touching at school, and more than 70% of boys and girls say they hear sexual name-calling – words like “slut” or “slag” – used towards girls at school at least a few times a week.
A NSPCC survey shows that 43% of teenage girls think it’s acceptable for a boy to be aggressive towards his partner; and one in two boys and one in three girls think it’s okay to sometimes hit a woman or force her to have sex.
EVAW is campaigning to make it compulsory for schools to teach Sex and Relationships Education. Until the government does, there is no chance of addressing the normalization of violence against women and girls, or of changing teenagers’ perceptions.
But we also need to find ways of helping men who are already perpetrators change and take responsibility for their behavior. That means more programmes like Respect that support and help violent men understand why they are abusive, take responsibility for their behavior, and support their attempts to change. And that means money.
Inevitably, getting governments to spend real money on criminals, apart from on the basic bed and board of prison, is almost impossible. Politicians like the idea of rehabilitation, of helping the violent and predatory morph into decency; it’s just that they never want to test the theory with hard cash.
And who can blame them? It’s far easier to talk about cracking down on crime and new tough sentences than risk ridicule or accusations of being “soft”.
Some years ago, I sat in on a group rehabilitation session. Most of the men had served long prison sentences, one or two had ‘self-referred’. “Before I get caught,” said one man frankly.
All of them had sexually abused children. Sitting in a small circle with these men was difficult; listening to them talk about how they’d planned the abuse of a relative, or neighbour’s child, was almost unbearable.
And yes, of course I thought, who wants to spend public money on men like this?
Or on men so vicious and so violent that their partners and children live in constant fear?
But I don’t think we have a choice any more.
The violence, sexual harassment and abuse experienced by so many girls and women is a problem we’ve struggled with for decades. Tight laws and tough sentences are important. But we won’t stop violence against women and girls so long as we keep failing to help men and boys change.
Which takes me back to that night when I phoned the police after a scream in the street. Even as I dialed, I heard more slamming of doors, and a car engine gunning.
When I went outside, the couple had gone. The police came, rueful, polite. But I had only heard the violence, not seen it. I had no descriptions of the man or the woman, or even the car.
The police left, promising to “look around”. I heard nothing more. And perhaps that’s the point of so many stories about violence towards girls and women: we never hear enough about them. They’re too common.

This piece first appeared at http://www.speakerschair.com on 8th March 2013