And it’s not just the fact that these are not women’s crimes. It’s the fact that they ARE male crimes - and we are not even at the beginning of understanding and recognising patterns of male violence against women and children. If we’re not recording male violence as exactly that, how are we ever going to begin to understand it and try to change it?
It’s not that long ago that cases like this were routinely being referred to as ‘a moment of madness’ and articles about the men who carried them out were accompanied by quotes from neighbours and colleagues about how the perpetrator was a lovely fellow really. I think even within the past year, the daily mail reported a case about a public school head and her daughter who were murdered by her husband as being something to do with how successful the mum had been in her career, as though this had been in some way responsible for her death, rather than her husband’s violence. Janice Turner, in today’s Times, has a column about how the link is only just beginning to be made between supposedly low level porn and sex offences and more obviously horrific crimes, as with the Pelicot case and Sarah Everard. This is something that needs recognising and implementing by all our criminal systems.
But if the statistics become confused, if our legal frameworks start insisting some male perpetrators are women, then the chains of cause and effect - which our misogynistic authorities struggle to recognise anyway- become ever more broken. If we’re not seeing the crimes for what they are, then they will keep on happening.