Wednesday briefing: The grim toll of a ‘national emergency’ in attacks on women

Good morning. The first was Keotshepile Naso Isaacs, a 33-year-old mother of three said by friends to be a “beautiful soul”, who was found dead at a property in North Berwick, Scotland on New Year’s Day. Since then, in a project called Killed Women Count, the Guardian has been tracking cases this year in which a woman has been killed and a man charged with her murder.

The most recent is Courtney Mitchell, a 26-year-old with three children who was described as “courageous and full of spirit”, found with stab wounds to her chest at an address in Ipswich. Her death brings the count this year to 50. In recent years, a woman has been killed by a man in the UK every three days.

Campaigns such as Counting Dead Women, the Femicide Census and Killed Women have been highlighting the toll of men’s violence against women for years – but with violence against women described recently by police as a “national emergency”, the numbers remain stubbornly high. For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Alexandra Topping, the lead reporter on Killed Women Count, about why that is, and what needs to happen to change it. Here are the headlines.

Five big stories

1. Inflation | Britain’s poorest households saw the bill for their weekly shop rise by far more than that of the rich during the height of the cost of living crisis as the sharpest price increases fell on cheaper brands.

2. Ukraine | Russian authorities are scrambling to bring the situation in Kursk under control, a week after Ukrainian forces launched a surprise attack taking a swathe of Russian territory. Russia used missiles, drones and airstrikes on Tuesday, with one senior commander claiming Kyiv’s advance was over, even as the evacuation of residents from border areas continued.

3. US politics | Tim Walz on Tuesday held his first solo campaign event since being selected as Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential nominee, rallying union members in Los Angeles and denouncing Donald Trump’s record on labour rights.

4. Japan | Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, will not run for the presidency of his ruling Liberal Democratic party next month – a decision that will see the appointment of a new leader of the world’s fourth-biggest economy. Kishida has been battling low approval ratings and a damaging funding scandal.

5. Travel | A street cleaner who was unable to go on a crowdfunded holiday due to his employer’s rules on accepting gifts will get to go on the trip after all thanks to a loophole. After Veolia said that Elvis fan Paul Spiers, 63, could not accept the gift, travel company On the Beach ran a “competition” for a holiday with conditions including loving Elvis, being between the ages of 62 and 64, and having the surname Spiers.

In depth: ‘It’s almost background noise – and we wanted to change that’

Killed Women Count started with a conversation at the Guardian about how rarely cases in which a woman is allegedly killed by a man are covered in the media, and how rarer still it is for those cases to be recognised as part of a common problem.

“It just seems intractable,” Alexandra Topping said. “It’s almost background noise – and we wanted to change that. So we decided we were going to treat these awful killings as newsworthy, even if they happen with horrific frequency.” We might think of Gary Younge’s gloss on the adage that “when a dog bites a man, that is not news; when a man bites a dog that is news”:

There are things that happen with such regularity and predictability that journalists have simply ceased to recognise their news value … there is value in asking “Why do dogs keep biting people?”, and “Why do the same people keep getting bitten?”

The project draws on the work of Counting Dead Women, a campaign documenting cases of women killed by men since 2009. The victims range in age from 22 to 96; they include a creative writing student, a personal trainer, a medical secretary and a businesswoman; they lived in villages, cities and in remote countryside; they loved learning languages, glam rock and funfair rides; they were killed in temporary accommodation, at home, in the street and on holiday.

The cases are not connected except by the fact that in each one, a woman has been killed and a man charged in connection with her death. “These women deserve to be remembered,” Alexandra said. “Their lives mattered. But it is not simply a series of one-offs. These are individual tragedies that are also indicative of a global, tragic story.”

The numbers

Since Karen Ingala Smith started the Counting Dead Women project in 2009, “the numbers haven’t really gone up or down dramatically”, Alexandra said – other than during the pandemic, when it appears that a reduction in the number of women trying to leave violent partners led to a depression in the figures. “The picture is of a crisis that is not going away despite promises from successive governments to bring the numbers down.”

On average, 140 women have been killed by men every year since 2009 in the UK – the equivalent of two women every five days. Worldwide, more than 133 women or girls are killed every day by intimate partners or family members, the UN estimates, a figure that is likely to be a significant underestimate because of variation in how criminal justice records are maintained.

Current and former partners are responsible for most of the deaths, often as the culmination of long periods of domestic abuse and coercive control. There were an estimated 2.1 million victims of domestic abuse in England and Wales in the year ending March 2023. Women are the victims in 73% of cases, a number that goes up when looking at victims of repeated incidents; women are also much more likely to be seriously hurt, and much more likely to act in self-defence or in retaliation.

While it is true that overall the majority of homicide victims are men, they are also overwhelmingly the victims of men. “Of course the problem of male violence massively impacts men, and particularly younger men, as well,” Alexandra said. “But when women are the victims, it is very rarely a question of a violent altercation – it is often a woman who has been the subject of abuse for years, someone who is among the most vulnerable members of our society. Most of the time, men don’t get killed because they are men. Women often get killed because they are women. That’s why you have to look at it as a specific crisis.”

The explanations

One common theme is the number of women who have been victims of abuse or stalking and have protection orders in place that are supposed to stop their abusers approaching them. “There are depressingly large numbers who repeatedly report breaches of these orders to police who have gone on to be killed,” Alexandra said. “These orders are often broken without consequence. That’s not every case, but it happens regularly – there will be an inquest setting out how this happened, and then six months later it happens again.”

Then there are the low prosecution rates for domestic violence: of the 2.1 million estimated victims of partner abuse in 2023, only 890,000 cases were recorded by police, and only 6.8% of reported cases resulted in a charge.

“There are processes that the police are supposed to follow that are sensible, but forces are overwhelmed,” Alexandra said. “And there is evidence that there are still times that violence against women is dismissed as a ‘domestic’. We need to listen to women when they tell us they are being ignored by police.”

Research by the charity Victim Support in 2022 found that nearly a quarter of domestic abuse victims reported an instance three times before appropriate action was taken, with many Black and ethnic minority victims feeling that they were dismissed because of their ethnicity.

But it is also true that there is no single explanation for the crisis of male violence, and no single lever to pull that will fix it. “It’s a multilayered, multifaceted, deeply engrained cultural problem,” Alexandra said.

The solutions

The ways to reduce the scale of the crisis are inevitably complex. But there are practical things that could change relatively quickly. “There has been progress on the policy front in the last 10 years,” Alexandra said. “There is a greater understanding among police officers about domestic abuse, and really good things happening in some police forces. The processes that the police have in place are sensible – but they need to actually be followed. There need to be real consequences for men who are violent and controlling towards the women in their lives.”

Other useful changes include the ability for vulnerable victims to give evidence in trials by video link, and Theresa May’s domestic abuse bill, which introduced a statutory definition of abuse and granted survivors of abuse priority in social housing applications, among other measures.

Outside of the justice system, Alexandra points to the need for more consistent application of the healthy relationships curriculum in schools; the lack of attention to misogyny in the Online Safety bill; and the need to provide civil society groups which do much of the frontline work to help women in danger with more consistent and predictable funding.

But those are only the tip of the iceberg. “It may sound overblown to say so, but there really is a whole societal transformation that needs to happen,” she said. “In the end, we live within a patriarchal structure that gives men more power than women. And that is the root of why this happens again, and again, and again.”

What else we’ve been reading

• Sirin Kale’s interview with the family of John Balson – the true crime TV producer who took his life earlier this year – is a devastating but necessary look at an industry under immense pressure, and Balson’s abject final months. Hannah J Davies, deputy editor, newsletters

• Marina Hyde on Elon Musk’s glitch-ridden interview with Donald Trump on an X audio livestream: “It was so dysfunctional that even Trump’s dentures were trying to escape”. Archie

• Nigel Slater’s here to save you from another boring back-of-the-fridge meal, with a super-simple recipe for courgettes, lemon and ricotta. Hannah

• If you’re still nursing your Paris 2024 withdrawal symptoms, soften the blow with this great gallery of Guardian photographers’ best pictures from the Games. David Levene’s shot of Sky Brown and a cameraman is a particular favourite. Archie

• Gender norms are back, back, back! The Atlantic (£) has a great piece about how the popularity of the viral hit Man In Finance signals the end of culture’s girlboss era. Hannah

Sport

Cricket | Ben Stokes will miss the rest of the English summer after sustaining a left hamstring tear while playing in the Hundred. The absence of Stokes for the Sri Lanka series means Ollie Pope, the vice-captain, will lead his country in an international match for the first time.

Football | West Ham have signed Aaron Wan-Bissaka from Manchester United for a reported transfer fee of £15m. The 26-year-old defender, who made 190 appearances over five seasons for United after joining from Crystal Palace for £50m in 2019, has agreed a seven-year contract with the Hammers.

Paris 2024 | The British runner Rose Harvey has revealed she completed the Paris Olympics women’s marathon with a broken leg. Harvey, who finished 78th in a time of 2hr 51min 3sec, said that tightness in her hip later turned out to be a stress fracture to her femur.

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