So sad to hear another father has killed his wife and child

[spongefingeranyone]

Have heard on the news today that a recently sacked police officer has killed his wife and youngest child, with the eldest two escaping with dreadful injuries. It just makes me so sad for his family and very very angry that another father has seen fit to do this terrible thing.

My condolences to the family.

Elfenor,

You can only make sense of something with real unbiased research based on a statistically meaningful amount of data. If you are biased and your data is based on a tiny self-selected sample, guess what? You see exactly what you want to see in it.

"Honour" murders are not very frequent in the UK either.

The police and authorities try to work out which groups are doing it, to whom, what the underlying attitudes are behind it and work to challenge them and provide support to people who may be at risk as well as working within themselves to take the crimes seriously and recognise them for what they are.

Should the relevant characteristics of the people who commit these crimes, and their victims, be overlooked because people get killed for other reasons too? I don't think so.

I don't understand the attitude that characteristics of extreme crimes must not be looked into. For fear of what, exactly? They might look into it and find that there are no common characteristics between family annihilations, that men do it just as much as women, that there is never any warning sign of what is coming in the way of DV, certain behaviours or attitudes. But they might find that there are things in common. What is wrong, exactly, with looking into it?

Personally I think that much of the DV in the UK stems from the same place as honour violence - ie a feeling that women and children are chattels, that they should do as they are told, not step out of line, and that they are not very important. Yet if people are from some parts of the world this is recognised and everyone wrings their hands, if they are from the UK there is much shrugging and questions about provocation / oh dear it's all a terrible tragedy.

Why is that?
Because religion is in the background in "honour" killings?
Because extended family are often involved rather than just a partner or spouse?
Racism?
I honestly don't know but it's very interesting.

Lenin,

This is a discussion about one murderer in the UK, not global feminism. However, I would just take your post a lot more seriously if you focused on the countries where women are desperately oppressed, such as the arab world and indian sub-continent. However, no-one seems to be "sad" or post any of those little blue sad faces about the thousands (10s of thousands?) of women casually killed in these places, rather than the VERY odd case in this country.

Recognising something does F.A to change it and nor does a nice march with a few fellow travellers, followed by a communal coffee at Starbucks. So, what action are you personally taking to address "global" oppression?

That's a terribly offensive post larry. To say that feminists in the UK don't give a monkeys about the plight of women in places like DRC or rural Pakistan.

All people can do is talk about these things and give money and support to relevant charities. I am stumped TBH if I try to think of what else to do.

However in the UK we should have more of a chance of changing things. So we talk about it. Or are you one of these who feels that as long as a woman somewhere in the world is having a worse time than the average woman in the UK, women in the UK should just shut the fuck up and ignore anything that happens to them? Screw that.

Incidentally you have not responded to my point about "honour" killings being studied despite them being a comparitively rare event?

Lenin honestly don't you know that caring about women getting sexually assaulted in the UK (for eg) is bang out of order. You should forget all about that and get on the first flight to saudi arabia and get working on taking down the regime.

Otherwise you are not doing feminism properly.

Sardine,

Firstly, you may regard my post as offensive but pop into the feminist section (I daren't) and tell me the proportion of posts about the third and emerging world relative to posts about the UK? 1 in 20 tops I would guess. There is no reason not to complain about what you see as continuing inequality in the UK but there should be some proportion. Surely, if one cares about an issue, one should really care about those who suffer the most, not those who potentially may still be slightly suffering.

There is no harm in studying any form of killing. Studying anything is always a positive. However, when you have weak data, you have to draw conclusions very carefully and with many caveats.

"Comparing the male/female population split to a racist/non-racist population split is ridiculous."

Why?

Ah yes, Larry's here to tell us that we must only care about women in far away places of which we know little, not about women in our own country where we actually have a chance of influencing policy-makers and practitioners.

Let's all point the finger at ghastly foreigners for treating women badly and ignore the horrific misogyny in our own society.

And someone explain why the attempt to explain attitudes, values and the cultural assumptions around racist and homophobic murderers and honour killing is valid, but to explain the hate crime against women, isn't.

Because the only vibe I'm getting about this, is that to assert that women's lives are valuable and precious and that we must do something about the hatred to which we are systematically subjected, is wrong either because women's lives aren't actually valuable and precious, or because misogyny doesn't really exist and is a figment of our fevered imagination. If there is a third (or fourth or fifth) explanation, can someone supply it please? Ta.

LOL at Larry's willy-waving.

How self-important must you be, to tell women what they should be discussing on a chatboard.

Have you counted up the number of threads on the In the News section and assessed how many deal with overseas issues Larry? And then berated all the posters for not being internationally-minded enough?

I find it absolutely hilarious when men who are uncomfortable about the subject of women's equality, try to dictate to women in the UK that they should be directing their energy and focus into crititicising foreign men, so that they can be left to get on with being as sexist as they like because at least they don't do honour killing.

It's hard to recognise something you don't want to recognise Lenin.

It's like when people can't see that they're alcoholics when they drink 3 bottles of wine a night. Denial is a brilliant self-defence mechanism.

nobody really minds breast cancer being thought of as a female cancer even though men get it too, and research has looked at things like breast feeding history even though men don't breast feed and what ages women were when they gave birth, another thing that men don't do - because breast cancer affects many more women than men

am several posts behind but was thinking have never heard men or women hotly protesting the gendered bias, if that's the phrase, in that sort of research

and there seems to be enough inequality and oppression and injustice everywhere for anyone to pick whichever cause they want, must be better than not doing anything. I don't think people who are campaigning against our own health care reforms are wasting energy that could be better spent on doing something about malaria for example.

Ah well Lenin you know all governments in the world are run by rabid feminist radicals don't you.

That's why so many men are being paid less than women in those countries and being subjected to appalling rates of violence by women.... oh, wait, hang on, I'm getting confused...

I think you're conflating issues though - questioning whether a gendered approach to DV is helpful does not equal denying the need for initiatives around gender equality.

I believe there's still a lot that needs to be done with regards to gender equality, but I don't think it has owt to do with the particular case the thread was started about and I don't think that the figures about gender split in DV is as clear cut as you believe - there is a lot of reporting bias and difference how it is dealt with, which of course again is based in gender issues - a man is not only less likely to report having been attacked by a woman, he's also less likely to be taken seriously (see article I linked earlier)

All domestic violence is horrible, and should be addressed, but making it into a mere gender issue is not helpful, and an oversimplification.

Gender equality, imho, is a completely different kettle of fish which has nothing to do with this thread.

it's not really about reporting is it? how many men in A&E are there because they have been beaten up by women, as opposed to other men? Are you really trying to suggest that there is a huge population of men living in fear of women, suffering serious injury - are all those pissed up fights outside kebab shops staged to mask the true story, that their wives and girlfriends did it?

It is about ownership - which is about as patriarchal as you can get. It comes from the same place as 'honour' killings and domestic violence.

I agree beachcomber - its "if i am not going to be here, my family are better off dead. without me, their lives are not worth living."

this whole argument is ridiculous.

There is a very real danger in getting so caught up in a personal agenda that the individual circumstances are lost.

Yes some crimes are racially motivated. But that doesn't mean that when someone of one race attacks another it is a racist attack - it could be motivated by a number of things.

Yes the prevalence of violence by men against women is higher. But that doesn't mean if a man kills his family and then himself (I think the issue of killing oneself is important here actually) his wife was a victim of domestic violence prior to that incident.

And the prevalence of women killing their children is lower, but that doesn't mean when a woman kills her children she is automatically mentally ill and should be seen as a victim - that is clearly not always the case.

People are all individuals. Just because someone does something that might be categorized doesn't mean it should fall into that category...

We have no idea that this man was a domestic abuser. We have no idea what might have driven him to not only kill and attempt to kill his family but also to kill himself. We have no idea he wasn't mentally ill, equally we have no idea that he was.

In the same way we have no idea that a woman who kills her children is mentally ill/a victim - she might be just as much of a heartless bitch as the men you are all painting as heartless bastards here.

All men are not bastards and all women are not victims.

Yup, women and children as chattel.

Same thing as widows being burnt on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands.

actually aren't children more likely to be killed by their mothers, at least in first year of life? or did I imagine that

cuibono This article explains a bit about the reporting problem because of stigma.

I'm not trying to trivialise the DV women experience at the hands of violent spouses at all. But I believe by concentrating on men as perpetrators there's a danger of creating a rather unhelpful "it's them, not us"-approach to the problem of DV, which means that some victims of DV will simply fall through the net.