Almost every woman you have ever met – “almost” being a generous qualifier – has at some point in their lives known a man, if not multiple men, they think capable of something gruesome or deadly. It would be wrong to suggest women live in constant fear of potentially violent men, but every woman has, on some level, had to work around them. Women live with the risk that they could be in danger because of this person, with effectively no recourse to do anything about it. Sometimes it’s impossible to know whether or not the man is truly a threat at all. This has more or less always been a part of our reality.
On 9 July, Carol Hunt, 61, and her two daughters Hannah, 28, and Louise, 25, were killed at home in Bushey, Hertfordshire in a suspected crossbow attack. The suspect, the BBC has reported, is believed to have been known to the family. The women died at the scene shortly after paramedics arrived, and a national outpouring of grief for their deaths has followed. How could something so grisly happen in a quiet English suburb? How could three women be killed in such sickening circumstances?
Carol, Hannah and Louise’s killings have rightly triggered horror and despair. But why is it only now in retrospect that we realise the risks they were living with? Research shows that a woman has been killed by a man, on average, once every three days in the UK over a ten-year period. In 2021, most women killed by men were killed by a current or former partner, and 74 per cent were killed in their home. Even if the woman doesn’t die, tens of thousands are attacked, abused, stalked and harassed each year. It’s a platitude to emphasise how normalised this has become. The national outrage that is being expressed now – these occasional flickers of consciousness – typically happens in such circumstances, as seen after the killings of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa, for instance, both of whom were murdered in 2021. But after a few days, maybe a week or two, societal apathy returns.
This reality is only made more unbearable by the debate around the ways in which a woman’s sense of safety can be improved. In the six weeks of general election campaigning that preceded the three Hunt women dying, the majority of the conversation around protecting women from threats of violence centred around limiting trans rights, despite one study suggesting there is little evidence to support claims that trans people pose greater safety risks to women (trans people are, in fact, much more likely to be the target of violence than cisgender people). The conversation in the days following their deaths is equally depressing. Already, the new Labour government is talking about moving “at pace” to legislate against crossbows – as if the problem were the weapon itself, not the problem of widespread violence against women. Crossbow legislation, while certainly valuable, would have a minimal impact on women’s lives, and ignores the deeper causes. You can’t help but feel regulation is being prioritised precisely because it is easier to address and tick off the list as an issue “solved”.
Until we start seeing violence as the core risk for women today – and seeing it as the pervasive threat it is – more women will die in terrible circumstances. This is the tragic result of abandoning women to misogyny which, without immediate, aggressive intervention, will remain just as deadly. These tragedies are preventable, but only if women’s lives are seen as worthy of protection.
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