Left Out

By Catherine Brockhurst

Domestic violence, rape, violence against women and girls, sexual assault, sexual abuse, harassment, inequality. When faced with a barrage of reports, articles, testimonials, blogs and actual conversations from women either having their stories told for them, or telling themselves – I am still astounded that there are people who genuinely question that there is a bigger issue at play than these experiences in isolation.

More specifically – take Jack O’Sullivan’s piece in today’s Guardian’s Comment is Free section “The masculinity debate: no wonder men stay out of it” – ignoring the fact that men rarely stay “out of it” and indeed rarely even have to debate given that the odds are already stacked in their favour – I’m struggling to understand what purpose this article fulfils, other than to undermine women and downplay (to the point of ignoring) the stance in society the majority of men enjoy.

The statement that jumped out the most for me was this; “But all this fails to generate male leadership or collective discussion. Each of us is operating in our personal world of change, with little sense of what it’s like for the other guys. The women’s movement produced articulate women to narrate their agenda. Where are the men?” – O’Sullivan was discussing how men are now challenging their perceived gender conformity-lucky them, to have a platform to challenge from at all. I fear he may have missed something.  What world is he inhabiting? Not mine that’s for sure; In the UK where 25% of those residing in Parliament are women, just 20% for the House Of Lords. Where in 2012 the percentage of women on boards of the Fortune 500 companies was just 16.6%. Where according to the IBR (International Business Report);

• Women hold 24% of senior management roles globally, a three-point increase over the previous year (Yes that’s right, we’re up from 21%)
• The proportion of businesses employing women as CEOs has risen from 9% to 14% (into double figures here)
• Just 19% of board roles around the world are held by women although quotas have been put into place

But this is just a set of info to illustrate the inequality that still exists-whether this writer believes that men are failing to generate “male leadership” or not. How about the assertion that;

“…An important factor is that otherwise powerful, educated men – the ones you might expect to speak up – tend to have been raised in, and live in, households where they defer to female decision-making and narrative. The reasons are complicated. Women’s centrality in the private arena is a complex expression of both male power and male impotence, of patriarchy and infantilisation. But a consequence of boys and men living in private matriarchies is that even the most senior male chief executive often lacks confidence in areas that might be defined as personal, private or family”.

OK, let’s talk about that oppression of men in their own home. Let’s look at what that means for the millions of women also residing in those households that they apparently have control and autonomy over;

Domestic Violence is insidious, here are just a few stats to back up the assertion that this is far more prevalent that people appreciate and far from being about men lacking the confidence to challenge the women in their lives, the opposite is far more likely and is not mentioned at all in this article by O’Sullivan;

• Domestic violence accounts for between 16% and one quarter of all recorded violent crime
• One incident is reported to the police every minute
• 45% women and 26% men had experienced at least one incident of inter-personal violence in their lifetimes. However when there were more than 4 incidents (i.e. ongoing domestic or sexual abuse) 89% of victims were women.
• In any one year, there are 13 million separate incidents of physical violence or threats of violence against women from partners or former partners
• Women are much more likely than men to be the victim of multiple incidents of abuse and of sexual violence: 32% of women who had ever experienced domestic violence did so four or five (or more) times, compared with 11% of the (smaller number) of men who had ever experienced domestic violence; and women constituted 89% of all those who had experienced 4 or more incidents of domestic violence
• Women are more likely than men to have experienced all types of intimate violence (partner abuse, family abuse, sexual assault and stalking) since the ages of 16. And nearly half the woman who had experienced intimate violence of any kind, were likely to have been victims of more than one kind of intimate abuse
• 54% of UK rapes are committed by a woman’s current or former partner
• On average 2 women a week are killed by a male partner or former partner: this constitutes around one-third of all female homicide victims

Time and time again we are told what a raw deal men are getting, having to fight to be heard, being “emasculated” by women, being pushed out by career women who play the “sex card” or sleep with the boss to get ahead. All the while we are expected to ignore the fact that in virtually every walk of life women are treated as secondary, they don’t even get a platform to debate from let alone get listened to. If only a quarter of the policy makers are women it’s not a big stretch to imagine there will be a weighted view of the law in favour of men. Caroline Criado-Perez has been campaigning for equality in the representation and visibility of women as experts in the media, as co-founder of The Women’s Room, an online database of expert and experienced women in their field. More recently she has been challenging the Bank Of England for their decision to remove the only female representative on our UK Bank Notes, Elizabeth Fry. And you know what the most common challenge to her campaign is? What about the Queen? Her answer, a thousands times by now I would imagine, “What about the monarch?”. Once the queen is gone we are left with an entirely male cast. You can see the petition here.

Everywhere you go, every direction you turn you will be faced with an example of women being treated unfairly, unequally and in many instances in truly awful ways. Please stop telling us that men have the raw deal here, we have our eyes and ears open, we believe her, we hear her, we’re listening and we will not be silenced.

Tags: equalities, equality, feminism, masculinity, women