To not understand how Karen Ingala Smith has the fortitude to do what she does?

[herewegoroundthebastardbush]

Karen Ingala Smith runs the X account 'Counting Dead Women', where she reports every UK woman murdered by a man.

https://twitter.com/countdeadwomen?lang=en

The absolute horror she has to process daily to do this is enough to make me cry. So many women killed by their sons, husbands, partners, ex partners, house mates, friends. Attacked and killed by total strangers while sitting on their front step with their baby asleep inside. Bodies defiled, dismembered, burned. Ingala Smith records them all.

I honestly don't know how she does it. And one could wonder why I suppose, as the numbers get no lower for being counted. But I do think it is important that women know this stuff, see it in one place enumerated - how much some men hate us. How unsafe we are even with those men we love the most.

Is anyone else just BLEAK about men now, especially those of us who have daughters?

Yes. Totally bleak especially since younger men are just as bad.

Not just that young men are just as bad, but if anything getting worse due to the availability of porn from a young age. Just have a look at the latest CPS survey on social attitudes to rape - generationally, attitudes are just getting worse. So many young men think it's not rape in a relationship, whereas my generation are very much aware it is as we remember when marital rape became illegal. I could cry for DD.

She’s a brave and hardworking woman. She keeps doing it because someone’s got to and it’s important.

I’ve got a daughter and a son and I try to be hopeful but some days it’s tough.

It is bleak, and hard and important work.

I don't know how she does it, either.

[waits for the cries of but women do it too but not 3 men a week and Not My Nigel]

Just looked at the account & it's shocking. So many never even made the news. It seems the biggest threat to women is someone they already know. You should be safe in your own home.

What amazes me when I read through it is how few of the cases make it to the national headlines. Some cases are familiar and I guess attracted more attention due to unusual depravity (Amber Gibson) or the public nature of the crime (Elianne Andam), but some of the other cases that only made local news coverage are utterly horrific and obscene (Ailish Walsh and Charlotte Wilcock particularly will haunt me) and yet were never reported widely as far as I recall. It's heartbreaking both that these men treated these women as disposable, as nothing, and then that the press just shrugs it off unless it meets a certain gratuitous threshold of horror.

It's a hard thing to think that we've come as far as we ever will in terms of men's respect for women as people and are now going backwards; but I do believe that is what's happening. I just hope this rise in misogyny among the generation of men raised by women who grew up expecting so much more won't be matched by the increase of a sort of Stockholm Syndrome in the younger generation of women, all this vaunting of 'feminine energy/power' and talking down the idea of the independent woman, the rise of the #tradwife... it's still niche but I do feel a retreat by women and girls from all this rampant male violence and hatred into a more acceptable womanhood, one that might keep them safe from that violence and hatred. 'Strident' feminism will be more important than ever to give women and girls an alternative to this.

@herewegoroundthebastardbush

What amazes me when I read through it is how few of the cases make it to the national headlines.

Yes agreed. Why do some cases get so much national press coverage?

There seems to be a rise in male violence towards women. I also feel that we have regressed from where we were at with feminism a few years ago. Access to more hardcore porn isn't helping. Things that my generation considered risky are considered normal nowadays. For example strangulation during sex seems to be considered mainstream.

I think 'perfect' victims are often preferred (both the victims in the high-profile cases I mentioned were very young). Probably why the increasing number of mothers murdered by their sons is not getting more attention - it's always the mother's fault in some people's minds, isn't it, even when she's the victim? Poor women, women with criminal records, women who went back to their abuser several times - these women get far less attention because they're not uncomplicated objects of sympathy. Same as stranger attacks like Sarah Everard and Zarah Aleena will always get more airtime than 'domestics' (provided the victim can be shown not to have been drunk, 'inappropriately' dressed or otherwise 'asking for it'). Women are judged in life and judged in death. It never stops.

I always wonder how women such as Karen Ingala Smith do such utterly gruelling work.

I feel so grateful that I don't have children as I couldn't take the worry. I feel despairing at the current situation with boys and girls having their expectations of sex warped by violent porn. I'm just (selfishly) glad that for me it's not as close to home as it must be for some parents.

It's utterly bleak

What amazes me when I read through it is how few of the cases make it to the national headlines

Because it's so common place, especially when they are killed by a male family member. The only ones that make the news are the ones that generate headlines.

My cousin was one of these women. Her murder made local headlines but not national. I don't know what makes a "perfect" victim. Depends on what else is in the news I suppose. It's horrible.

I'm so sorry for your loss 💐

So sorry

I'm sorry, how awful.

Men's baser instincts seem to have been given free rein by the availability of disgusting, violent porn and the exchange of shared views and fetishism on social media. Manners and social expectations used to keep these in check to a certain extent but now so much vile behaviour is tolerated and deemed acceptable to spare these men's feelings and accommodate them in the name of 'inclusion'.

This. I have daughters (19 and 16) and I fear for them. Neither has been on a date yet, and I worry a lot about how it will be when they do, as well as all the risks of just walking home alone etc etc. Eldest is away at Uni and there is always that little niggle of worry in my head.

It always shocked me when Jess Phillips read out every woman & child murdered in Parliament every year, the list felt never ending.

She is a wonderful, skilled professional and caring ,like so many of these women who work in VAWAG . And she gets hassle off idiots who centre men's needs and their rights .