Women usually get the boot first when diversity drives begin. Credit: Samuel de Roman/Getty Images
Go home! Stay home! Don’t go out unless you have to! It is sound and welcome advice for most people in a global pandemic. But there’s one group in whom it will have inspired nothing but despair — all those at risk of domestic violence.
Why do 999 calls shoot up at Christmas and in the summer holidays? Because abusive partners find themselves at home with their families for a few days. Imagine, then, what’s going to happen when these angry, frustrated and violent men are shut up inside for weeks on end because of the coronavirus. The nation’s pubs are closed and there isn’t even any live sport to distract them.
According to the ONS, an estimated 1.6 million women suffer domestic abuse in England and Wales in a normal year. (Men are at risk, too, but the statistics show that women suffer more repeat incidents and more severe injuries.) With the lockdown, all those women will have even fewer opportunities to ring for help or go online for advice. In some places, they can’t even escape to the park to make a discreet phone call for help or support, because they have been shut. Thanks Hammersmith and Fulham. But this council isn’t alone in its short-sightedness. Very little has been done to address the problem. In fact, it has barely even been acknowledged by Government.
It’s as though our ministers live in a rose-tinted world where home is the safest place to be, oblivious to the mass of statistics that tell a different story. We know that domestic abuse — the type that gets reported to the police, at any rate — is linked to deprivation, insecure employment and over-crowded housing. And those in the least secure jobs, the cab drivers and construction workers who are mostly self-employed, are the immediate losers amid the pandemic. They’ve had to wait 10 days longer than employees to find out what the Chancellor proposes to do for them. Frustrations and tensions will have been ratcheting up.
We also know that anxious, depressed men are likely to turn to drink, with a quarter of victims of domestic violence reporting that their abusers were using drugs or alcohol at the time of an attack. During lockdown, a spike in alcohol abuse is inevitable — and people are already drinking more. Off-licences are being allowed to remain open, following reports that some supermarkets can’t cope with increased demand for beer, wine and spirits.
It’s not as though we don’t know what to expect. In China, a police station in the worst-affected province received three times as many reports of domestic abuse in February, compared with the same period last year. Some governments, notably those of Germany and Spain, have acknowledged the probable impact of coronavirus lockdowns. The German family ministry has posted emergency phone numbers for anyone experiencing ‘conflicts arising at home’, offering counselling to teenagers, pregnant women and victims of domestic abuse. In Spain, the government has set up an instant messaging service and an online chatroom to provide immediate support to victims. Such measures are welcome, even if they fall short of providing desperately-needed emergency accommodation.
When Boris Johnson was asked about the risk of a surge in domestic violence a couple of weeks ago, he replied with his usual combination of bluster and bragging, insisting that he had just put “record funding” back into councils even though the money wasn’t earmarked for — and is unlikely to be allocated to — services for victims of abuse. But the truth is that organisations trying to help women escape violent relationships were in dire straits before the coronavirus sent the country into quarantine. It was already the case that two-thirds of women in need of a refuge place were being turned away, forcing them to move in with relatives, risk becoming homeless or stay with a man who had beaten and raped them.
Some of these women may now end up being killed in their own homes. Domestic homicides were already at a five-year high before the epidemic broke out. The latest Femicide Census makes sombre reading, listing 149 killings and demonstrating once again that that women are most likely to be killed by a current or ex-partner; in cases where perpetrator and victim were known to each other, more than half of the deaths occurred in households with a history of domestic abuse.
Perhaps Boris Johnson’s masculine War Cabinet should flick through it. The statistic that should really worry them is the fact that 68% of such killings took place in or immediately around the family home – the very place where they’ve told women to isolate.
During Gov briefings am I the only one thinking ‘where are all the women?’ Why are there no senior women in the “war cabinet” or used to convey those critical messages? Equality means better decisions. Don’t pack the women away during a crisis.
— Amber Rudd (@AmberRuddUK) March 18, 2020
In Greater Manchester, there have already been reports of abuse linked to the lockdown, according to Beverley Hughes, deputy mayor for policing and crime. Avon and Somerset police, too, reported a 20.9% increase in domestic abuse incidents in the last two weeks, from 718 to 868. And Police in Cumbria have asked postal workers and delivery drivers to look out for signs of abuse.
But thus far, despite an array of individuals and organisations — including Women’s Aid and the recently-appointed Domestic Violence Commissioner, Nicole Jacobs — pleading for some sort of Government provision, little seems to have been done. The only concession the Government has openly made is to exempt those fleeing a violent relationship from lockdown enforcement fines.
But there’s absolutely no mystery about what the ministers could and should do. They urgently need to provide extra financial support for victims’ organisations to help cope with increased demand; they should instruct the police to check on households with a known history of domestic abuse; they should use domestic violence protection orders (DVPOs) to get the worst abusers out of their homes; and they should use empty hotels to provide emergency accommodations for women and children. They should also do everything within their power to promote the services that are already available for these vulnerable women.
As the scale of the pandemic was starting to become apparent, the Prime Minister boasted in the House of Commons that his Government has an “outstanding record in tackling violence against women and girls”. It was a dubious claim before coronavirus changed the landscape of the UK, emptying the streets and sequestering the population behind closed doors. It looks even more suspect now as thousands of vulnerable women look forward to the next few weeks not just with the anxiety we all feel during a global pandemic, but outright terror.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.
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Subscribe“Leading politicians from all parties seem to be terrified of them…”
They are, and I’d really like to know why. Every single poll shows that the majority of the public – which means most voters – are rationalists who understand that men can’t be women (or vice versa). So why not align with the majority on this issue?
Why are all leading politicians terrified of those few people whose ideas only resonate with an electoral minority?
I agree, but can a Prime Minister be “cancelled”?* It’s a huge shame that he doesn’t have the cojones to find out.
*other than by electoral means.
We’ve created this vast swamp of NGOs and activist orgs that have an outsized influence on politicians. I can only speculate that elected leaders simply don’t interact enough with everyday people – that even their social circles are dominated by people with divergent opinions.
“Why are all leading politicians terrified of those few people whose ideas only resonate with an electoral minority?”
It’s very simple. Leading politicians are ruled not by their voters, but by powerful financial interests. Wealthy NGOs and corporations have a vested interest in backing the trans lobby, making it disproportionately powerful compared to its constituent base. Despite being a supposedly oppressed minority trans rights activists are backed by some of the wealthiest and powerful organisations on Earth, such as Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the Bill Gates Foundation, the Tides Foundation, Arcus Foundation etc. etc. Rishi Sunak fears them over you.
See https://archive.ph/9vaRd – the now deleted from Medium article ‘Inauthentic Selves: The modern LGBTQ+ Movement Is Run By Philanthropic Astroturf And Based On Junk Science’ from 2018 which gives a great overview of how fake all of this nonsense is.
Thanks for the link! Another aspect of this madness is that it provides an opportunity for intra-elite vetting and selection of “useful idiots” and a way for elites to compete and weed out people who may not be “loyal” to the cause of the .1%.
Conversion is changing one set of beliefs for another. The vast majority of people don’t care what others believe as long as the beliefs do not negatively impact on their lives. People generally tend to be live and let live. They have busy lives and don’t have time to stay up to date on current trends. It is the trans activists who have been infiltrating the government, the civil service, schools, not for profits, businesses, etc. to spread their doctrine and are using the power of the law to force their beliefs on the majority and silence objections by having all objections classified as hate speech. Using the power of the law to attempt to force beliefs upon the people should be illegal.
Yes, quite. The ‘infiltration’ has been cleverly orchestrated. Everyone has paid Stonewall to ‘train’ them (with our money, tbh) and to give them brownie points for being good, inclusive organisations. One way to comply was to bring in EDI experts (trans advocates – has anyone heard them advocating loudly for disabled employees?) Jobs for the boys – all those ‘gender’ graduates, with one world view, brought in at management level to devastate women’s rights in industry and government. There aren’t that many of them, but they punch above their weight, because they’re not brought in as office juniors.
Quite an effective tactic, it turns out, and massively difficult to undo.
Transgenderism is an occult movement with billions of dollars behind it. It’s a Trojan horse for those with nefarious intentions toward children and provides a convenient path through which the state can circumnavigate parental protections in order to indoctrinate children.
Politicians are not scared of trans activists but those financially backing them.
Do the Tories ever actually want to win again? Being 5% less radical than the radical left seems like a strategy for party annihilation. At what point do the actual conservatives and moderates in the party jump ship?
Who would they vote for? Increasingly moderate and conservative views are being literally banned. Rishi Sunak doesn’t care about women, doesn’t care about children, doesn’t care about the Conservative Party, and doesn’t care about the next election, because he knows he will lose anyway. He’s just focussed on his own employability after that happens.
Rishi Sunak just fancied being prime minister of a country. He had no loyalty to the U.K. as demonstrated by the US green card scandal. The position will have profited him greatly and enhanced his global profile.
In fact, that probably explains why Rishi Sunak has crumbled. He cares most about his position amongst the global elites, especially if he does not expect to win the next election, and they are mostly behind the the indoctrination of the masses with woke ideology.
How about Farage?
I don’t think they want to be elected and I don’t blame them. The next administration will only be issuing WEF directives to usher in Agenda 2030. This is why we are about to have a member of the Trilateral Commission installed. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see several members of the next parliament assassinated as people finally wake up to what’s been done to them.
I think the current Tory ‘elite’ are not Conservatives and have no interest whatsoever in those who elected them.
I do wonder if some of the problem here is the tortuous language used by the radical trans lot.
Is conversion therapy what the GIDS at the Tavistock were doing or is conversion therapy talking to a worried teen about their feelings?
If the NHS gives clinical advice on child development, then why are these politicians contradicting medical experts?
They are all, without exception, sinister ideologues pursuing the same neoliberal transhuman creed.
Politics in the UK are getting increasingly surreal. For Mr. Sunak ‘it looks as though the Government intends to go ahead with a complete ban on “conversion therapy”. Presumably this is election jitters, not wanting to disturb the trans lobby wasps’ nest.
Meanwhile, here in Scotland, Mr Youseless plans to SCRAP the current conversion therapy ban, not because Mr Youseless thinks this is a good thing, but in order to save the SNP’s skin at the next election.
So both Mr Sunak and Mr Youseless are doing synchronised volte-faces, but in the opposite direction, both hoping to avoid political oblivion.
It’s crazy. The Tories might even win against the odds if they went full berserker against gender bullish*t – and in fact the whole DEI. They are not conservatives basically. Woke-LITE.
Have you considered running for leadership of the Tory party? I’m pretty sure “full beserker” is exactly what they are going for now!
Bonne chance, cherie!
People can never change sexes. But it seems politicians will always change positions, if it’s perceived to serve their interests.
It’s maddening that — at a time when popular sentiment (even in the United States!) seems to slowly be awakening to the delusion of gender ideology — spineless politicians still kow-tow to transactivism rather than standing for the real and pressing needs of women.
Keir Starmer has been having another of his moments about gender self-identification. But who cares what this creature thinks? It is a war crime to aid or abet a war crime, so that without ever having been a Minister, or even an MP for the governing party, Starmer is already a war criminal, thereby matching his foreign policies to his domestic policies. He is the Kid Starver of Gaza and Gospel Oak, and his White Phosphorus Party would privatise the hospitals at home having already bombed them abroad.
More broadly, with its concept of the self-made man or the self-made woman, Thatcherism has inevitably ended up as gender self-identification, which was unknown in 2010, and which has therefore arisen entirely under a Conservative Government. Margaret Thatcher was last depicted on British television, for the first time in quite a while, in December’s Prince Andrew: The Musical, the title of which spoke for itself, and in which she was played by one Baga Chipz, a drag queen. Well, of course. A figure comparable to Thatcher, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman, just as Thatcher herself emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and d**k Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show.
Hence Thatcher’s destruction of the stockades of male employment, which were the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community, an authority that cannot be restored before the restoration of that basis. Thatcher created the modern Labour Party, the party of middle-class women who used the power of the State to control everyone else, but especially working-class men. Truly, as she herself said, her greatest achievement was New Labour. Leo Abse, who had had the measure of the milk-snatcher, also had the measure of Tony Blair’s androgyny.
And if this is a culture war, then where is the culture on our side? At 46, I had always assumed that we would win this one in my lifetime. But I am less and less certain. The other side enjoys the full force of the State and of a cultural sector that the State very largely funds. That double force was what turned the England of 1530, an extravagantly Catholic country of many centuries’ standing, into the England of 1560, a country that would define itself as fundamentally anti-Catholic for the next 400 years. Again I say that that State is the Tory State, there having been no other for as long as the notion of gender self-identification has existed. There is no suggestion of a Government Bill or amendment to give statutory effect to the rhetoric of Kemi Badenoch or Suella Braverman, which is pointedly never quite echoed by Rishi Sunak, whose choice of words to the Conservative Party Conference was very careful indeed.
Does everyone get put into moderation, or is it just me? I pay for this. Do you?
I do. Every time. Sometimes it takes hours for my comments to appear. I have emailed numerous times and asked for an explanation but have never received one.
This comment took about ten minutes to appear.
My latest has now been waiting an hour.
You must be considered more threatening/ dangerous than I am.
It no longer even appears as “awaiting for approval”. Hey, ho. See here.
Happens way too often.
“Awaiting for approval.” Pidgin English.
We no longer have proper political representation we have a uni party interested only in promoting the globalist agenda. US is exactly the same.
“People pride themselves on “speaking truth to power” – leaders, big shots. In a democracy, this is easy to do. Usually, you get nothing but applause for it. What is hard is speaking truth to “the people” – for in a democracy, that’s where the power lies.”
Jay Nordlinger in the current issue of National Review, “Cooper’s Union”
“The constant appeals to public opinion in a democracy… induce private hypocrisy, causing men to conceal their own opinions when opposed to those of the mass… A want of national manliness is a vice to be guarded against, for the man who would dare to resist a monarch shrinks from opposing an entire community.”
James Fenimore Cooper in “The American Democrat” c. 1835