Fri Martin
In Liverpool Crown Court, a mixed-race woman is standing in the dock, small and slight, looking even younger than her 28 years. Farieissia ‘Fri’ Martin peers through the glass that separates her from the rest of the courtroom, trying to catch the eye of those friends and family members who are in court to support her.
Her mother, Lyly Maughan, is sitting next to her best friend, Heather Savage, who is the foster mother to her daughters. The girls were aged one and two when Fri killed their father with a single stab wound. Fri’s three brothers and other family members are sitting together looking nervous in the public gallery. Their hope is that Fri will walk free today and be reunited with her children. She has not seen them since March 2020, when Covid prevented prison visits.
Fri was convicted of murder six and a half years ago and jailed for life. But she is back in court because that ruling was quashed after new evidence came to light, and a retrial ordered. Her lawyers are convinced that Fri has served her time and doesn’t pose a danger to anyone.
Her case is the perfect illustration of everything that’s wrong with the criminal justice system when it comes to domestic violence: a misunderstanding of coercive relationships, a misreading of abuse, victim blaming, excusing the perpetrator. And as recent research shows, failures by criminal justice agencies to provide protection to women almost always precedes domestic homicide, with women overwhelmingly the victims. So, this case comes back to trial at the perfect time to assess whether the domestic abuse bill has made a blind bit of difference to what happens in the courts and in women’s homes.
In a separate part of the public gallery sit the cousins and family members of the deceased, throwing hostile glances at Fri and her family. The police are also there, in case of any trouble between the two families from Toxteth.
Fri killed her partner, Kyle Farrell, during a violent row in which he had attempted to strangle her. She had been out visiting a friend and when she got back Kyle complained that she was later than he expected. A neighbour heard Fri screaming for help and, when they entered the house, saw “a lot of blood” and Kyle on the floor. In a panic, Fri told the neighbour a stranger must have come in and attacked him
The young couple, both 21 at the time, had known each other since school and had been in a relationship for five years. This fateful night was the climax of those five years of abuse. Kyle raped and attacked Fri on numerous occasions during their years together. Lyly often heard arguments between the couple, including one that ended with Kyle shouting that Fri should “go and get raped”.
Fri’s two daughters were born just ten months apart, the first when she was 19, the second 20. She had terminated several other pregnancies, telling Heather that they were a result of force and “not made of love”. I knew something was going on,” says Lyly. “One time, she came over and her face was a terrible state, it was covered in bruises, but she gave excuse after excuse, saying one of the kids threw a bottle at her.”
However, she didn’t tell anyone in authority about the violence, in keeping with a largely unwritten code in the black community of Liverpool that you don’t “grass”.
She maintained that pretence when the police arrested her, assuming that Kyle would survive, and her children be removed if she made allegations of domestic abuse — something she had seen happen to many young women in her working-class community. It was only when she was told that Kyle had died, and the police said they believed she was a victim of domestic violence, that Fri eventually provided an accurate account of events.
Despite that evidence, in May 2015, a jury in that same Liverpool court, and before that same judge, convicted Fri of Kyle’s murder. Her family was deeply unhappy. They felt the legal representation had failed to show the impact of the abuse Fri had suffered. So shortly after the conviction, Fri’s uncle contacted Justice for Women, which arranged a new legal team to explore grounds of appeal. Harriet Wistrich, the solicitor who had represented Sally Challen, took up the case. She was shocked to see that Fri’s previous legal team had failed to obtain any evidence exploring the impact of the history of domestic abuse on her mental health.
It takes a long time for victims of abuse to feel safe enough to talk about it to a psychiatrist. In particular, Fri was terrified of disclosing that she had been raped when she was 15 by a family friend. It was only after spending many months working with a counsellor specialising in domestic violence that Fri was able to open up.
The resulting psychiatric and psychological report set out the extent and nature of the sexual, physical and psychological abuse that Fri had suffered, concluding that Fri was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which made her hypervigilant in the face of further violence and may have caused her to lose control when threated with violence. The experts also noted that PTSD can cause “dissociation”, which may have explained why Fri could not remember stabbing Kyle, only the blood and panic afterwards.
Fri’s new lawyers also instructed a pathologist to closely examine mug-shot photographs of Fri taken by police shortly after her arrest for murder. The pathologist concluded that the visible bruise marks to her neck were probably caused by strangulation, consistent with Fri’s account of having been throttled prior to her grabbing a knife and stabbing Kyle. Had this evidence been disclosed by the police at the time of her original trial, Fri may not have ever been convicted of murder.
Fri’s lawyers were convinced they had a solid case to appeal. But an application for permission to appeal was dismissed in February 2018. The application was then renewed before three judges, who noted that this was a “paradigm case of coercive control” and ordered the appeal to go ahead. The Crown Prosecution Service commissioned its own psychiatric and psychological evidence which agreed with the diagnosis of PTSD. However, the Crown opposed the appeal. The case eventually went to a full Court of Appeal hearing in December 2020, at which point the court quashed her murder conviction and ordered a retrial.
Fri’s lawyers wrote immediately to the CPS, indicating that Fri was willing to plead guilty to manslaughter, a lesser offence than murder. This was despite evidence supporting self-defence which, if successful at trial, would lead to a full acquittal. But the CPS rejected repeated requests to drop the murder charge. Eventually, the case was prepared for a retrial on murder to begin on 17 May.
On 18 May, the CPS agreed to accept a change of plea from guilty to manslaughter without intent. Fri readily agreed, fearing a hostile jury could reconvict her of murder despite the additional evidence. The case was adjourned for sentencing until 21 May.
I was there last week in Liverpool Crown Court last week to witness Mr Justice Dove sentence Fri for manslaughter, following a six-year battle for justice. There was, also, a separate offence to consider. Last year, when prisoners had been confined to their cells for 23-and-a-half hours a day during lockdown, Fri illicitly obtained a mobile phone to keep in touch with her children. She also removed a blade from her Bic razor, which she used to make picture frames for her girls.
When sentencing, the judge told Fri to stand and addressed her sternly, more so than in other cases I have observed where the female defendant has been cleared of murder. Looking over at the row of family members of the deceased I wondered if the judge’s harsh tone was for their benefit.
He gave her 10 years for manslaughter, with an additional nine months for the possession of the illicit items and ordered the security staff standing either side of Fri to ‘take her down’. Instead of walking free, Fri had to go back inside for another six months. The maths is insanely complicated. But the point is, he could — he should, in Wistrich’s opinion —have chosen to let her go back to her family then.
The legal team was distraught, and everyone visibly upset that Fri was to have to go back to prison. Lyly was shocked that daughter had been “painted as the monster some of the media wrongly made her out to be. The judge didn’t say she had been strangled or mention that’s why she picked up the knife,” says Lyly, “so it sounded like she did it out of badness.”
Fri’s best friend was devastated. “He didn’t mention the strangling when he sentenced her. The judge praised Kyle as a brilliant father, but he kicked her in the stomach when she was pregnant. Why not let her come home to her kids?”
Fri, though, was grateful: “I’m no longer a murderer. It’s now accepted that I never intended to kill Kyle and that means the world to me.”
Wistrich was appalled by the harshness of the sentence. A just result, she says, would have been a sentence of six to eight years which would have better reflected the nature of the crime and would have meant immediate release from custody. Ten years is excessively punitive. Especially when you compare that with the lenient five-year sentence given to Anthony Williams who fatally strangled his wife in 2020 claiming depression. Fri was found guilty of an even lesser type of manslaughter. Sure, we’ve got a new Domestic Abuse bill, but “this result makes me feel like we have gone backwards for women victims”, says Wistrich.
While Fri sits alone in her prison cell for twenty-three and a half hours a day, having not seen or held her children for over a year, her legal team, her friends, and her family console themselves with the fact that she is not dead, and that she was able to defend herself against the violence inflicted upon her unlike so many others.
But no one should die — not women nor men — because of domestic abuse. It should be stopped before it gets anywhere near that stage, or, better still, stopped from ever happening in the first place. As Jane Monckton Smith outlines in her brilliant book In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder, domestic violence can be stopped in the early stages if police and prosecutors do their jobs effectively.
Every three days, a woman dies at the hands of her violent former or current partner. Those deaths are preventable. And had Fri been properly protected, Kyle Farrell would be alive today.
Julie Bindel is an investigative journalist, author, and feminist campaigner. Her latest book is Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation. She also writes on Substack.
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SubscribeI think until Julie. Brindel sees a woman like Fri ‘small & slight’ in a temper with the strength of several men she doesn’t really know what she is talking about. People can have lots of different faces and Fri is presenting a favourable one to Bindel , but unless the judges have a personal prejudice against this woman , there are lots of things in her records that concern them. Has Bindel talked to Kyle’s family-does this description of their relationship tally? There are relatives of men killed in these incidents who are very upset at the way their son/brother is just casually demonized. I watched a woman get away with this behaviour all her life-I eventually had to walk away , still blaming myself & thinking I had done something wrong. I keep meeting her friends & relatives who say what a wonderful person she was-someone even dedicated a book to her-I just decided that that was nice for them & just to keep quiet as that was the only ‘story’ they wish to hear. When I actually talked about incidents that happened when i was an adult with witnesses ( I never mentioned my childhood) I was told that I was lying-it is apparently the last taboo to say that some men & some women can be equally violent.
Yes, despite much evidence pointing that way, Ms Bindel appears to have given no consideration to the very strong possibility that this woman is a plausible, manipulative and homicidal liar.
Julie writes about domestic abuse ….. “ It should be stopped before it gets anywhere near that stage, or, better still, stopped from ever happening in the first place.”
How Julie?
Should the police become involved every time a couple has an argument? or perhaps only after the second one? How could it be resolved?
This case, from the little I have read, was a long term abusive relationship from both sides. At what stage should the two people be separated? Is that even practicable, or would the couple just get back together?
Julie always assumes that the man is wrong, but as Fri already had one conviction for affray (which Julie has forgotten to mention), how can she be so certain that Fri was as innocent as she portrays?
The emotional blackmail, in the article, about the loving mother wanting to be with her children is just that. Should she be allowed anywhere near the poor children – after all she did kill their father?
Sounds like some culturial thing, underclass here are always beating eachother, the problem is their culture is protected, funded even, paid to have children as single mothers – and the cycle repeats.
Not to mention, lots of killers say their victims deserved it. It may be true in this case, but you can’t take it at face value. Bindel always treats the testimony of killer women as gospel truth.
I thought it would be fun to reimagine this article and to rewrite it in the way Julie would have written it if she hated women rather than men.
Changing no facts but interpolating only bigoted opinion and spin in bold, here’s the sort of account we might end up with.
So without changing a single one of Julie’s selective facts, I’ve just superimposed a wicked and thoroughly immoral opinion on top of them, thereby turned Julie’s “victim” into the villain, and misrepresented the whole lot as fact.
That was fun! But the source article is, of course, wholly untrustworthy and entirely worthless.
Hear! Hear!
This article literally almost made me unsubscribe from Un-herd.
Its this continuous poisonous journalism that wilfully wants to tip over how women and men play equal parts in relationships. All to maintain the eternal narrative of women as victims.
What i find most nauseating is the deliberate overlooking of studies which find that women are the first to be violent in relationships or that they are the most violent in relationships, as men are aware of their physical advantage.
Its this overlook, that makes me immediately dismiss articles of this kind because they are so biased and understudied, they do not deserve the light of day.
And i will say. Its becoming increasingly patronising to have this matriachal tone in the media where all of men are being told off like naughty boys who need to be told how to behave and are being told they are guilty before they have done anything wrong.
How did the editor let this through?
Presumably thats why police didn’t like to get involved in ‘domestics’ because they are incredibly complicated.
Yes, which doesn’t stop activists-posing-as-journalists like Ms Bindel. Her prejudices inform her with unerring accuracy of what really happened. So either the police are really stupid, or she is.
I would rather the police concentrated on children’s safety. The thousands, some of whom are still emerging in upcoming court cases , put a lie to ‘believe every woman’ ? Whenever some awful case like Baby P emerges it is clear that the authorities have been misled by adults who like to play cruel games with children’s lives. Yet still that well worn phrase ‘lessons will be learned’ Probably this woman has had a sad upbringing but when you become an adult , you get treated like an adult
Indeed. Given her own history of violence there must be quite a strong chance that she’d have harmed one or both her children by now had she not been in jail.
What about victim blaming or does that only apply for the benefit of the female of the species, just like most everything else
“And as recent research shows, failures by criminal justice agencies to provide protection to women almost always precedes domestic homicide, with women overwhelmingly the victims.”
And as my research shows, failures by criminal justice agencies to provide protection to everyone almost always precedes any kind of homicide, with men overwhelmingly the victims.
I think I’ve nailed the problem right there.
Yes, men make up the majority of the victims of homicide, but in domestic situations where murder or serious assaults occur, women are overwhelmingly the victims. Sure, it is irritating that the conversation about these matters is dominated by a men bad/women better narrative, but it is plainly the case that women find themselves on the receiving end from husbands and boyfriends’ way too often and that currently the protections afforded to them are inadequate.
Simply untrue. Not only do the stats show about 40% of partner-murder victims are male, but most domestic murder by women is not recorded as such or missed. Unlike male perpetration, the female-typical mode is either by third-party proxy or subterfuge.
It sounds exactly like what often happens in patriarchal third world countries, with the police and courts ignoring years of violent abuse, focusing only on the fact that a woman killed a man, and finding her as guilty as any murderer.
“However, she didn’t tell anyone in authority about the violence, in keeping with a largely unwritten code in the black community of Liverpool that you don’t “grass”.”
And this is my fault is it? The criminal justice system refuses to take account of evidence that the victim withholds.
I’m sure that there is a problem with domestic violence, but you are not helping by addressing the wrong audience.
“However, she didn’t tell anyone in authority about the violence
, in keeping with a largely unwritten code in the black community of Liverpool that you don’t “grass”.because it never happened”FTFY
Let’s hope you never end up on a jury.
I find that a ridiculous and repugnant attitude. I’ve been robbed, burgled and attacked a few times without reporting it to any authorities. Am I to assume these events never happened?
If you later killed a burglar on the grounds that you were fed up with being burgled, you’d have a better defence if you could prove you ever had been burgled.
There is not a shred of evidence in the account of events Ms Bindel gives. Literally not a shred. The account she prefers to believe is ex post sexist unsubstantiated flimflam that omits key facts, such as the woman’s history of violence, to serve an agenda of painting her as a saint because she’s a woman.
Lack of evidence does not mean it never happened. There are many reasons for not reporting crimes, and fear of ostracism by one’s community, and of retribution by one’s attacker, can be powerful such reasons.
Asserting after the fact that it happened equally doesn’t mean that it did.
Courts deal with facts. A completely unsubstantiated claim of domestic violence doesn’t meet the standard.
I’m not saying it did happen. But you wrote “However, she didn’t tell anyone in authority about the violence because it never happened,” which seems unjustifiably certain, stating a possibility as a fact. (Yes, I noticed some crossed-out text, but crossing text out usually means the reader is expected to ignore it, as if it isn’t there – did you have some other purpose in mind?)
It never happened on the evidence. The facts are that she reported no domestic violence at all – until the police put the idea into her head that she could use this to get off.
Nobody else witnessed violence towards her by Kyle, she was the one with the conviction for violence not him, and on the night in question, he was looking after the children when she killed him.
It wasnt unsubstantiated. Loads of evidence was there, the police and CPS choose not to investigate it.
I believe this constitutes a substantial shred.
The pathologist concluded that the visible bruise marks to her neck were probably caused by strangulation, consistent with Fri’s account of having been throttled prior to her grabbing a knife and stabbing Kyle.
And we did not hear the evidence at the trial.
No, that’s not what the pathologist concluded. He only looked at photographs, and said they were probably – not definitely – caused by strangulation. Nor did he say when they happened. She said they happened before she stabbed him. But she lied about someone else having stabbed him nor did she mention any previous domestic abuse in her own defence until the police brought it up. Why would you believe her?
All I am doing here, by the way, is taking the same selection of facts assembled by Ms Bindel and showing how, if you take the misandry out of them, you can – off the same set of facts – rearrange them into a quite different narrative. All it takes is an agenda.
If I wanted to I could edit the facts to make it even worse. Kyle was found dead at 5am – what time did she kill him? 2am? 3am? She didn’t call the police, a neighbour did. She had a criminal conviction for affray; Kyle had none. The night she killed him, this terrible man was…looking after the children. How many young black men stick with the mother of their children and look after them? If he was some horrible scrote, why didn’t he abandon her in that way that so many black youths notoriously have? He doesn’t really fit the template at all, does he? And so on.
She’s had two trials and she’s tried it on in all the usual ways. How many more trials should she get? 3? 10?
She had 1 trial.
No, she had 2. She was convicted of murder, retried and convicted of manslaughter.
At this rate, if she keeps going and has 20 more trials, she’ll be canonised.
And this is my fault is it?
Did someone say it was your fault? And it appears the criminal justice system was aware of the evidence by the time of the second trial.
This woman could have left this abusive relationship long before the moment when she stabbed a guy. She chose not to. SO, unless we start to treat women as children what exactly do we do when it comes to women who are subject to domestic violence YET choose to stay?
Indeed!!!
Feminists like Bindel have helped convince me that patriarchy is the solution, women clearly cannot be trusted to make decisions about relationships (and proper degrees of self defence, apparently) without a mature man to help guide them. Sad.
People like Julie think that most women can’t be trusted to make decisions for themselves. The only way they differ from traditional, chauvinistic males is that they think it is feminists who should control women’s lives not men.
Notice how all her supposed extenuating evidence – the alleged rape aged 15, the alleged domestic violence – all came to light only after she had killed. Nobody heard about any of this stuff before. It wasn’t until the police suggested it to her that it occurred to her to present this as her defence.
In the same way, Peter Sutcliffe didn’t kill people because he was evil. He killed them during blackouts because of the voices in his head, none of which he had mentioned to absolutely anybody until he had to come up with a story that would keep him out of Strangeways and in Broadmoor.
There was reams of evidence from texts etc. to support this women claims of domestic abuse. You may not like Julie Brindel, so maybe have a look a look at some of the stuff the Freedom programme puts out.
I think the point is with coercive control the victims don’t believe that they can leave.
Am I a patriarchal bigot for thinking that she may not be fit to look after her children?
Do I need woke training?
I’m trying, I realy do, but I still think that she is not fit,
Well, only if you’re one of those old-fashioned stick-in-the-muds who bizarrely believes that murdering your children’s father could sometimes be bad for the children.
Surely there are no dinosaurs like that around any more?
The dinosaurs have not gone extinct, we have evolved. At 30 years old, I have had the immense pleasure of meeting men the same age and younger who increasingly perceive the modern hellscape we have created, with absurd feminist legal strictures and deranged family policies. It will change in time, the madness isn’t sustainable.
This like others is a truly shocking tale of domestic abuse. Preventing these relationships from developing is very difficult and complex and action is/can only be taken when an actual event occurs.
Every killing has to be taken seriously and self defence can surely only be used in these most extreme circumstances, and not exploited by violent partners.
On another point, perhaps judgements/sentencing should be made by more than one judge to improve justice.
Fri Martin had a thing for sexy bad boys. She had previously been convicted of a violent attack (“affray”). I strongly suspect the abuse went both ways, but if the man had stabbed the woman there would no pity. I can just about accept the manslaughter charge, but if we’re honest, it was murder.
Gosh, holding women truly accountable AND giving them the same treatment as a man would get. What a ridiculous idea.
I know, right? Even when a man is lying dead in a pool of his own blood, as long as his killer was a woman (a woman of colour no less) then we know who the REAL victim has to be…
I made a comment about UnHerd being gynocentric and it was removed. How nice to see censorship alive and well.
What does and doesn’t get censored here is baffling.
I just love the downvotes but no effective rebuttal. Coz there ain’t one.
Why would it go both ways? This guy stuck around with her from the age of 15 to 22, had 2 kids with her, and was looking after them while she went out, came home at 5am, stabbed him to death, then blamed him for his own murder. What in that picture suggests he was the bad character?
There’s no evidence there was any domestic abuse. She never mentioned it until the police suggested it.
The male of most species is prone to violence. Sadly, there is none worst than the male of the human species. Only sadistic, impulsive, monsters prey on what used to be called the weaker sex.
According to the ONS instigated of intimate partner violence is done by women 40% of the time.
According to this Harvard study –
Women were perpetrators of first-time violence on 70% of occasions.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17395835/
Women prey on those weaker than themselves: unarmed men (when they have a knife), their children, their unborn children (200,000 of those a year), and so on.
Is there any sanction for a legal team that so conspicuously fails in its duty to its client? You say her first legal team failed to obtain evidence that might have influenced the jury to judge her less harshly during the original trial. If that is true then it is surely grounds for some action on her part. Does the Law Society have any say here? Why was she so poorly represented?
In addition, was the judge properly disinterested? It doesn’t sound like it. Is there any sanction for a judge who does not maintain a proper state of disinterest when overseeing a trial? Can he be struck off in the same way a solicitor can be struck off? If not, why not?
There’s no evidence her legal team did fail her. The appeal was based on “evidence” her second legal team came up with. The fact that the first team didn’t cite any of it suggests that it hadn’t yet been fabricated.
What’s the basis of your belief that the judge wasn’t properly disinterested? Is it the sexist spin and smear in the misandrist article above? If so, why so easily gulled?
I don’t think the author is misandrist. I’ve been reading her articles for a while now and I don’t detect misandry, just a tendency to challenge the reader.
Your first paragraph is so stuffed with prejudice it is impossible to address its content.
Rubbish. It’s an entirely plausible reading of the facts. She was convicted of murder; to be allowed an appeal new evidence had to be presented; so new evidence was concocted – a completely new allegation of domestic violence, a completely new supposed rape, completely new psychological trauma – the whole lot of which could perfectly easily have been thought up after the fact, and not a shred of which was substantiated by any contemporaneous evidence. Not a shred.
For anyone who thinks gender is just a “social construct,” imagine if the roles had been reversed: If Fri had tried to strangle Kyle, and Kyle had stabbed her, there is no doubt he would go to prison for life.
The other day I watched a woman walking behind a man. She was cowed, her arms folded in a defensive posture. I speculated there was an abusive, coercive relationship on view, but of course that may have been my over active imagination. Nevertheless, it invites speculation based on your assertion. He was very well built, and probably had twice my physical strength. I imagine he would have at least three times her physical strength. If she had tried to strangle him he could have stood there for an hour inviting her to do her worst. If he wanted to strangle her he could have finished the job in two minutes.
So unless this woman was roughly equal in terms of physical strength, there is no reason to make the comparison. None at all.
So she’d have to stab him.
Good job you’re not a misandrist.
And there’s not a shred of evidence that Kyle Farrell was any such man. Literally not one. Just the word of the serial liar accused of his murder.
“Had this evidence been disclosed by the police at the time of her original trial, Fri may not have ever been convicted of murder.”
Might. Not may. Regardless of what goes before it, to say “[x] may not have [happened]” means “it is possible that [x] did not happen”, and we know that it did happen. To say “if [x], then [y] might not have happened”, on the other hand, is to say that, had the circumstances leading to an outcome been different, then so, too, might the outcome have been different.
I wish that journalists, who write for a living, would learn not to abuse the language in which they write.
Those ‘journalists’ are not objective and they know exactly what they’re doing with the language.
I don’t believe the deaths are preventable. In so far as some of the deaths may be preventable, the resource required to accomplish this would be disproportionately high. It’s already the case that the greatest damage to families is caused by the loss of income to the parents through the payment of tax. None of this money is spent on children. The majority of national income in already sequestered from our children to the government. There never seem s to be any end to the amount of money governments need to not do their job
Ban single parent families (both Fri and her victim came from these arrangements).
Institute legal and social control of daughters by their fathers until marriage.
Remove psychological excuses from the legal system so that people don’t stab each other and then claim “I didn’t mean to KILL him!”
Somehow, I don’t think this is likely to happen.
Well we live in a free society so hopefully not.
Interesting concept but I have no idea how to implement it, or what to do if one partner dies after children exist.
No way, or at the very least no more than currently exists.
This one I would probably support.
No, just refuse point blank to fund them. And re-stigmatise such terrile arrangements, make it so that a single mother (isn’t it always?) would never openly say that she is a Single Mum by choice, she would say, “Oh I am widow” or “This child is my little sister/cousin” or “The father is away on an oil-rig in the North Sea, he’s back for one day a year”. The shameless creation of the little crime/delinquency factories is astonishing. All social research into mental health, crime and poverty points to marriage-less generations and family breakdown.
As for the legal and social control of daughters, I am being slightly facetious, but Julie Bindel’s logic would surely call for it. Either girls can make their own decisions AND be responsible for them, or they can’t.
Are you suggesting a Muslim state with sharia law.
They’re winning you know. 😉
Simply by virtue of ability to form stable families and have children. Take from that what you will, but the facts are indisputable.
There is a reference to Jane Monckton Smith in the article. This lady was a police officer and was called out to a number of domestic abuse incidents. She wondered why she repeatedly kept seeing things that did not appear in court reports. After a while she left the police and a some point became a researcher investigating domestic abuse. She has outlined a sequence of steps of escalating abuse which lead to murder. The suggestion is that police involvement, at some of the steps shortly before murder would prevent many murders.
Some of the signs would not be common. Such as a controlling partner insisting the partner must not have the lights on.
I know little more than this and it is not something I have investigated at all really.
I’m happy to say I’ve reached a point of zero tolerance for woke progressive thinking.
This article, as usual, takes one case and suggests it is the norm and part of a deeply rooted systemic problem.
But we all know that approach is bollocks.
There is a whole lot wrong with how domestic violence is prosecuted, beginning with the default presumption that the man is always wrong. This issue has long since emerged from the shadows. Perhaps she should be released but let’s not pretend this is a one-sided thing. Increasingly in the US, police have adopted a policy of “arrest both of them” when called to domestic scenes unless the evidence paints one party as guilty.
Shouldn’t Julie have mentioned that Harriet Wistrich is her partner?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Wistrich
It might just be relevant.
First you kill the person then you kill and destroy their good name. This is easy they are dead. They can no longer defend their good name against lies and we know and are constantly told that women don’t lie but we also know that she has lied to the police already. She lied when she told them that a stranger had committed the murder.
Much of what the author of this presents as fact seems to be the defense case and hotly disputed both by the prosecution and by the survivors of the homicide victim. I’d rather see a more nuanced presentation.
Misandrist feminists don’t do nuance.
I suspect Ms Bindel would want this woman sprung even if she was certain that she had murdered her children’s father.
If the bloke being dead could be seen as a consolation, would it have been all that bad if she had died, and her husband had survived their train-wreck of a relationship? What makes one death a tragedy and the other less so?
Maybe we should just kill all the husbands in such cases. It’s clearly not as desirable as the strategies suggested by Jane Monckton Smith, but until we get there it’s a workable solution, no?
You mean it would have been just as preferable an outcome if he had abused her for years and then killed her?
Why not just hand all men carte blanche to abuse and then murder women when they have had enough of them?
As it happens, in the absence of any other solution, I do think it would be preferable to kill all the husbands in such cases. The partners are better off without them, the children are better off without them, society is better off without them. I would be fairly happy to see them shot and then for the state to step in and provide the financial support that would then be needed.
Ah, the episodic Un-herd token male-bashing article crops up about once a month or so. It’s something us men need to get used to in every aspect of life. I’ve concluded it’s best to treat it like a recurring spasm and ignore it.
Feminism’s primary objectives have been achieved and they have nothing left to do now but rub us out. I say let them have everything: wipe us off the face of the earth if it makes them feel better. No man will be left to witness it, but they’ll be scratching each other’s eyes out before the day’s end.
Bindel’s misandry comes across in spades. For example, “Their hope is that Fri will walk free today and be reunited with her children. She has not seen them since March 2020″, Would Bindel use this if a man was in the dock. Statistics – one woman is killed every 3 days – no, not as often as that, and why not mention the number of men who are killed by their partners. Write a balanced article & you may get more kudos for neutrality.
Indeed, and the kids haven’t seen their dad since the day she killed him.
Data from the Home Office Homicide Index for the year ending March 2017 to the year ending March 2019 show that over three-quarters of victims of domestic homicide were female (77% or 274 victims).
Table 1 shows that of the 274 female victims of domestic homicide, the suspect1 was male in the majority of cases (263; 96%). Of the 83 male victims of domestic homicide, the suspect was female in 39 cases, and male in 44 cases.
The data is a complete misrepresentation of the reality, given that the female typical mode of murdering a parner is by either third-party proxy or subterfuge, and hence either it’s recorded as murder but not by the partner or its not recognised to be murder at all. By great contrast, the male mode is overt, often a murder-suicide.
Leave then and put your kids first if its that terrible.
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Julie Bindel could not be more wrong about domestic violence. Women are by far the main PERPETRATORS rather than the victims.
I’m the author of three peer-reviewed journal-published science review papers on this topic, with my latest being ‘How and Why Partner Violence is Normal Female Behaviour but Aberrational Male Behaviour.
’ABSTRACT: That intimate partner violence (IPV) essentially is female-perpetrated is explained bottom-up from the biological principle that the female is the limiting factor in reproduction, through genetic and neuro-hormonal levels. Female-specific aetiology stems from greater female need for pair-bonding, spurring greater mate-retention behaviours to assuage attachment anxiety, and avoiding implantation failure by restricting (channelling) partner sexual attention in evolved cyclical hostility (PMS). IPV is violence in which females specialise: uninhibited preferred physical aggression modes in couple context. Unless part of minority mental-pathological general violence, males are self-inhibited. The reality of IPV, captured holistically at its inception in dyadic study of adolescents & young adults, shows much greater female perpetration, initiation and escalation, uni- and bilaterally; males usually non-responsive or mildly reciprocating.
I don’t think we need any pesky facts thank you. We have a narrative to sell