New Zealand was always the Zero Covid paragon, along with Australia and Hong Kong and a few other places. As recently as August, a single Auckland case that couldn’t be traced to a point of origin led to a several-week lockdown. But this week, the Wellington government formally abandoned its policy of eliminating Covid, and moved to a plan to live with the virus (albeit, no doubt, at a much lower level of the virus than we have to live with). The costs of maintaining Zero Covid in the face of the Delta variant — and the reduced threat of the virus itself, given the vaccines — led them to decide that going for absolute zero wasn’t the best policy anymore.
In the UK, we have decided that a certain mortality rate is acceptable. Professor Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, said recently that “living with the virus” will probably mean about 100 deaths a day, or more than 30,000 a year. It’s a grim thought, but we have to be clear-eyed and say that the elimination of risk is probably impossible, so we have to tolerate some level of it.
But when it comes to violence against women and girls, what is an acceptable number of murders every year? It’s an appalling question, but it’s one we have to ask, just as we had to with Covid. And it’s worth stopping at this point and asking whether you know how many women are murdered each year right now. Give a figure, in numbers per 100,000 per year. And then say how many you think is acceptable, again in numbers per 100,000 per year: 10 per 100,000, one in 100,000, 0.1 per 100,000?
Here’s the real figure: according to the ONS, there has been an average of about 200 women and girls murdered each year in England and Wales for the last 10 years. Out of a population of about 31 million, that is a little under 0.7 women per 100,000 per year.
To be clear: I’m not saying that’s acceptable. But if you’d just said that you thought about one woman in every 100,000 was killed every year, and you wouldn’t rest until the murder rate was below one in 100,000, then we’re already below that.
If you said one in a million, then we’ve still got some way to go. But soon you’re going to start hitting up against some really hard limits. According to the World Bank, only two countries in the world recorded 0.1 murders per 100,000 female population (that is, one in a million) in their most recent data, and those two countries were Oman and the Palestinian territories, which makes me think that the data might not be entirely reliable.
Other countries manage 0.3 per 100,000: Singapore, Japan, Macao, Norway, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. But most of the countries we tend to think of as our peers — France, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Canada — have roughly similar numbers. Getting the numbers much below that seems to be very difficult.
You could argue that it does no harm to aim for zero, even if you know you won’t get there. But it’s not as simple as that. Reducing some societal harm costs money and time, and at some point, you’re going to hit diminishing returns. You’ll have to spend ever more resources for smaller and smaller improvements.
Maybe you’d say that you can’t put a price on a human life, and that’s understandable. But the reality in which we all live puts a price on human lives for you, via opportunity costs. If you spend the money on street lighting, you can’t spend it on dialysis machines, or early years education, or renewable energy subsidies. At some stage, because of diminishing returns, you’ll reach a point where spending more money on reducing murder rates means that more people die (or more people are harmed) elsewhere.
Whatever social problem you’re talking about fixing — obesity, police brutality, inactivity, racist abuse — we need to be explicit about whether we’re aiming for zero, and facing up to all the costs that will come with, or admit that you’re really aiming for some more achievable (but more painful to accept) figure.
When it comes to police reforms, there are all sorts of trade-offs to consider. One obvious reform, for instance, might be to impose stricter rules on recruitment — such as that no one with any criminal record at all can be a police officer. But I imagine that would hinder the efforts to increase the number of non-white police recruits, since young men of colour are the most likely to have criminal records. How much it would hinder them I don’t know, and perhaps the trade-off would be worth it, but you need to start by acknowledging the trade-off.
I’m really, really not saying there’s nothing that can be done. Couzens turned up to a police work party with a sex worker, and his colleagues “jokingly” called him “the Rapist”. There is something wrong with a culture that allows that, and there are clear failures on the part of the police in investigating his earlier offences.
Most importantly, we need better data on how many police officers do commit crimes, so that we can get a sense of whether they’re more or less than we would expect. Profoundly affecting though they are, policymakers can’t make these decisions on the back of high-profile anecdotes and shocking individual stories.
Any group made up of thousands of people, such as the police force, will include some number of dreadful individuals, however hard you try to keep them out. And every so often, a dreadful person will do something dreadful.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeThe protest that one crime is too many, is often the opening gambit of authoritarians, seeking power whilst cloaked in virtue.
Many of the people who are so keen to “end violence against women” and who claim that “something must be done” about misogyny, are the same people who see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil, when it comes to the habitual abuse and disappearances from grooming gangs in Rotherham, Oxford and other cities.
It leaves me with the suspicion that the reason this case has come to the fore is because the murderer fits the description of the bogeyman of the day: white, male, bald, heterosexual. If he had been black, or Muslim, it’s likely that the crime would have remained off the front pages, as so many of the murders by people fitting the latter description are.
This barely made the press https://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/national/19466976.murder-probe-launched-woman-31-dies-severe-burns/
Yes, earlier this year, a man was convicted for the murder of a woman named Lorraine Cox. She was about the same age as Ms. Everard, but was attacked and killed in Exeter. Her murderer was an illegal immigrant from Iraq who’d been refused asylum but not deported, his continued presence here allowed him to commit his crime. She was dismembered and some of her remains have yet to be recovered.
Not a single feminist said a word.
Actually, that’s not true. Many of us have tried to protest this, but the media has not exactly been cooperative.
I can certainly see the media being uncooperative. The MSM tried to pretend it didn’t happen – wrong sort of perpetrator.
My thoughts exactly; plus of course the ‘lockdown’ side to the story makes it even more ‘de jour‘. At the risk of sounding bad I think there is far too much fuss over this one murder anyway, horrific as it is, all police seem to be now tarred with the same brush. This doesn’t happen with nurse baby killers or doctors ‘helping’ their patients die or teachers having sex with their pupils etc. (but interestingly does seem to happen a bit more with paedophile Catholic priests or Scout leaders…)
Immodest dress and flirtatious behaviour fuelled by alcohol makes women vulnerable to abuse, but if one suggests such a thing, one is shot down….women should be able to dress and enjoy themselves without constraint. I’m sorry, I don’t accept that. They shouldn’t give come-hither vibes in social situations and then be outraged if a man misinterprets the message being given..
Having a Minister of Women and Equality in the government and a daily Women’s Hour on the radio is bound to give prominence to women’s lives and viewpoints rather than giving equal weight to statistical evidence involving men.. .
Excellent article. I hope we hear more of this, ideally from official quarters, failing that from Unherd.
One interesting piece of context that Tom Chivers should maybe have added is that 70% of UK murder victims are men and 30% are women (459 v. 184, Wikipedia). Even if murderers are mostly men (92%), what does it say about us that female victims get the overwhelming majority of the attention and the reform proposals?
Exactly, the outrage of the many fatal stabbings to young people just beginning their lives has seen no major improvements in police performance.
I mean we have all seen the Police action over the road protests or the appalling figures by the success rates for burglary and assault, most of which are not even investigated relative to the hate crimes and other low level ‘woke’ crimes. (Abuse of Facebook).
Usually offering the protestors a cup of tea, wasn’t it?
It is (as you state) that 92% of murders are committed by men and women are generally physically weaker, thus easy pickings. Most women feel rightfully that they do not stand a chance if attacked by a man. This also overlaps with sexual crimes which are greater in man on women crimes, than in other groupings. Plus I would assume that a lot of man on man murders are gang related and/or testosterone fuelled.
All true. I am still curious about the precise justification for spending a vast majority of the outrage and reform effort on a minority of the victims. Are men assumed to have asked for it (victim blaming)? Or do we judge that men as a group deserve it (never mind the individual victims)? Or are women and girls seen as more precious and deserving of protection (a bit Victorian, that. And why exclude male children, in that case)? Or is because women as a group can push all the responsibility for solving the problem onto someone else, whereas men cannot?
So relieved that I married an empathetic, caring and intelligent man who cares deeply about my safety and male on female crime and doesn’t bang on about male rights every time female rights and safety are mentioned.
Whom exactly is it that is saying that men’s lives don’t matter? The same subset of men here blah blah ‘whatabout the men’ every time female safety and rights are mentioned. It is very distasteful especially in a community where so many of the commenting women are reasonable. Why don’t you write an article about men’s safety?
Your point is fair but we really don’t hear much about men being murdered and disproportionately so. I understand too that we, somehow, have to exclude those men murdered as a result of their own very foolish decisions. It would even things out a little.
We can be shocked by the wickedness of the recent murder of the young woman near my home and it’s right to make an issue of it.
But women are safer on the streets than men. This isn’t a question of a failure to empathise with women but murders of men do not receive such attention and the consequences of such are similarly terrible.
Why would anyone want to write an article about men’s safety? With the exception of rape and sexual assault, violence is not a gender-specific problem, it is a human problem. We do not want a segregated justice system, where some groups fight for women only, some for men only, and they compete for resources. To the extent that women have particuar problems, of course it makes sense to deal with them specially. And perpetrators are mostly male, no point in denying it. But victims of violence are more likely to be male than female. If you are agitating that violence against females (but not males) should be given top national priority equivalent to terrorism, and that girls (but not boys) should be included in the specially protected group – even as the majority of victims are male – it carries a very clear message that females deserve protection and males do not. Or not as much, at least. Imagine that there was huge press flap about an epidemic of violence against ethnic Norwegians, complete with the introduction of ‘norwegicide’ as a special kind of crime, and a potentially successful campaign to make violence against Norwegians a specific national priority on par with terrorism. Would you not start asking why other nationalities did not deserve equal protection?
There could be several reasons why you would like to give much higher priority to the female victims of violence and murder – even though the majority of victims are male. I tried to list some of the possibilities, good and less good.Would you be able to give us the reasons that you believe in?
Most men who get murdered live in the Criminal /Demo Monde World.If one leaves this World, the risk of violence declines. It does not take much training for a man to be able to defend themselves whereas it takes far more for a woman to reach the same level. Skill can make up for strength. Very few women can take a blow to the head compared to men.
Women get murdered even if they are not on the Demi Monde/Criminal World.
Therefore women are more at risk from forces they cannot control. The decline of chivalry has put more women at risk from violence. Far fewer Fathers are telling their sons not to hit girls as this is not the action of gentleman.
You do not sound woke. So why do you use ‘themselves’ instead of ‘himself’ when you refer to ‘a man’?
Your comment is peak Victim-Blaming.
It also begs the question that – if it’s women that are easy pickings – why are most murder victims male ?
What is worth adding is that the proportion of men in crime fighting branches of the police, frontline army units, firefighters, or working in dangerous, stressful occupations are usually more than 92% male
You’re being too kind really. It’s only inevitable in the sense that we all know that certain ideologues will be jumping straight in with institutional this or systemic that.
There may be misogyny in the met, it may even be widespread. But even if so it does not lead to individuals, with a record, committing a horrendous crime. Nor is an individual committing such a crime evidence of institutional misogyny.
But who, with an axe to grind, would miss an opportunity like this.
It’s why I hate ideologies and axe grinding, and governments reacting to it. Do they even do cool-headed analyses like this?
Also “policymakers can’t make these decisions on the back of high-profile anecdotes and shocking individual stories”. That’s exactly what they do. It gets them reelected
Couzens failed a medical in the Nuclear Police yet managed entry to the Met, how ? Also how did Couzens pass entry into the Diplomatic Protection Unit ?
The Armed Forces have rigorous selection and training for private to Corporal, Corporal to Sergeant and to Officer; producing tough and polite personnel. Could the Police learn from the Armed Forces ?
If all Police are to be considered Officers what are the qualities needed to be an officer? Unless we achieve the correct answer we cannot select and train the Police adequately bearing in mind the massive range of tasks they have to perform.
Good point. In Italy the Carabinieri are both police and a branch of the armed forces (and have splendid uniforms btw).
All very rational. But campaigns for this and that emotionally attractive demand are and always will be a statistics free zone while agendas can be advanced and the media is happy to publicise them without analysis.
I am even more appalled at the number of sex crimes that DONT make it to law enforcement notice – 90% estimated . It seems to me that society is too weak to challenge innappropriate behaviour which is often the precurser to acting out – because the ramifications are too clearly out their – IE not many ramifications. In some older societies if a man rapes a female family member he would know that without a doubt the male members would come after him and take him apart. Now a perp has a 90% chance of getting away with it plus at worst free accomodation, food and entertainment – and will be protected by the police if a family member seeks ‘real’ retribution. Zero personal toleration from the whole of society is all that will deter these cowardly scumbags.
Societies with privatised retribution tend to have blood feuds, high levels of violence, lots of license given to the (male) avengers, and little protection given to the weak and their families. Think of Afghanistan. Are you sure their system is better than ours?
Surely the first step in battling misogyny in the Met is to appoint a female commissioner?
Oh…
It is actually gross misconduct for a serving police officer to fail to report wrongdoing by another officer. What we are seeing now is a CYA offensive by Cressida d**k and her cronies. All beginning to sound like a pathetic excuse for lack of action at every level.
These acts of covering up or cronyism have been going on for years, long before Cressida d**k took up the role of whatever it is she does. Investigating one case, however heinous that was, is not going to restore public faith in the police.
Another (somewhat chilling) approach is to collect data and establish league tables of crimes by occupational groups. In that way occupational groups come under pressure to remedy what can be remedied to improve their position in the league tables.
You may or may not be surprised by the league tables. How many NHS staff are likely to have committed sex crimes? According to the rough figures above there may be 1,400 sex offences per year. Is this anywhere near true or do people discount wrongdoing from beloved organisations?
The late Sir Jimmy Savile, OBE, KCSG had free access to various NHS premises and what he did to various patients, living and deceased, has not attracted much attention.
A local GP was in the process of being struck off for the second time for horizontal relations when I met him in 1976. I was very surprised that he had been given a second chance. Surely a second striking off was really the final, definitive, total, no-way-Jose end of his career. Twelve years later, he was on BBC local news as a doctor working for DHSS……
Oh, so you can have a criminal record (provided that it is not too dodgy) and join the Met? In 2006 I filled in a long application form to be employed by Nat West Bank. Question 2 asked if I had a criminal record. If I answered “Yes”, in the old Mafia advice, fuggetaboutit. Absolutely no entry for anyone with even one criminal conviction.
That was 15 years ago. Nowadays, I don’t know if asking such a question would be a breach of my human rights or cause me acute emotional distress (seven figure damages to my usual account).
We seem to have forgotten many policy truths. Hard cases make bad law. Unintended consequences of good actions. Justice is blind rather than always believe the victim etc. It is so good to read an article using evidence. Another side too, in tough professions, are we breaking people so they do bad things?
Every year we budget for a few thousand traffic fatalities. These could be largely eliminated if we imposed a universal 10 mph speed limit and erected fences alongside every pavement. But we are not going to this, are we? Because the cost would be too high.
The approach of not allowing people to be police officers (and other professions) on the basis of type of criminal record would seem obvious to me.
However, generally the police force seem much less visible to me than in the past and tend to appear in groups mainly to patrol crowds. There do seem to be more community type security officers around who may not be full police officers but who are more visible. The same rules should apply to them regarding recruitment and with strong safety culture that will sicken the “bad ‘uns” to death.
Sufficiently strong safety culture can sicken everybody, not just the bad’uns. You might end up with a force made up of people who are happy to see ticking the right boxes, following the safety rules (sensible or not) and staying out of trouble as the main purpose of their work. While caring little about secondary objectives like achieving actual results. That too would be a trade-off.
…the other issue being that some aspects of Policing require tough young people, perfectly willing if required to “get stuck in” to the villains…in hand to hand combat…with batons or other non-lethal weapons…or with firearms, and with the intention of taking life (if necessary and proportionate).
This requires a level of controlled agression most probably associated with highish levels of testosterene, mostly found in confident and assertive young men…who are also the ones mostly likely to display agressive conduct in their private lives, outwith the very specific rules of “Policing by Consent”…
…and I can see no easy solution to this inevitable and unavoidable conundrum.
Answers on a postcard please?
There have been plenty of occasions where decisive, courageous, vigorous actions by the police have been invaluable.
20th June, 2020 in Reading…..unarmed policeman rugby tackled the nutter who had just fatally stabbed three gay men in the town centre park.
May 2017….Ariane Grande’s manager noticed how Manchester police were running towards the danger zone after the nutter bombing, while the civilians were fleeing
It is the same with elite military men who we ask to risk their lives, but probably have less than touchie feelie attitudes to sex.
Apart from better management and some education in kindness and consideration, I can’t think of anything which would improve the problem.
It might be desirable to reduce murders to zero but it is a fantasy that is not achievable. The argument here fails because it treats the murders of men as irrelevant. It also ignores the fact that 57% of women are murdered by somebody they know. Murders also seem worse than other causes of death but there is a far higher risk of being killed in a road accident but we don’t have demands to ban cars. Because of the recent murder we have calls for higher standards from the police, but what about murders by doctors and what about unnecessary treatments or errors by the health system that ruin lives? We need to face reality that we are far from perfect and stop deluding ourselves that perfection is possible. Death has the greatest impact but what about other actions that can ruin lives, and Robert Maxwell comes to mind. Perfection will not be achieved in one area unless it is achieved in all areas.
The only good point in this article is the reference to moving limited resources around and the consequences in other areas of doing so. The one thing missing, as with all these cases, is any idea of what could have been done to prevent the murders. Being wise after the event doesn’t prevent the next murder.
I think you are right, but what it says to me is that these sorts of analyses are needed for all these issues to see if improvements might be possible, and what would be the consequences.
I don’t know much about the ONS. Maybe they do that already, but I think governments only react to headlines
Most large organisations include a few employees who ought to be jettisoned simply because they don’t perform very well, are not of the right calibre and probably shouldn’t have been taken on in the first place. But the rigours of employment law make it more or less impossible to get rid of such people in the absence of specific and serious misconduct. (Admittedly this was not so in Couzens’s case, where evidence of serious misconduct was to hand.)
Cue all the misogynists saying that it isn’t that bad, and anyway, women probably contribute to male violence by not going around covered from head to foot with a slit to see out of (until we get leads, that would be good).
just one point Tom, and that is that your statistical arguments are poor. The vast majority of of crimes of violence, and especially sexual violence, are committed by men, so averaging it out over the population is not a particularly insightful contribution. There as been quite an increase in ‘female’ crime of this sort, exactly tied to the point where ‘self identification’ of gender became the statistic the police and judiciary record.
i don’t know what the answer is, either, though I feel that ignoring indecent exposure ( on camera) and thinking that calling someone a rapist is amusing might be a good place to start.
I don’t see anyone who said that it isn’t bad and that women should be covered. Some murders are regarded as more terrible than others
I’ve posted a few comments and queries about ‘flashing’ here, on the Telegraph and on Spiked. I said how common it is (from my own experience and that of every woman I’ve ever asked); I also said that I, for one, have never reported it, didn’t understand it and hadn’t realised it could be a precursor to more serious crime. I had such angry reactions to my posts that I’ve been stunned. One person complained about women wearing leggings! I’ve decided that some men must think some women are blaming all men for somehow being complicit in this hideous crime -otherwise I can’t make sense of it. Every man I know personally has, if anything, been more outraged by the existence of Wayne Couzens than we women are, so what’s going on?
All just a simple application of Critical Theory. Find the worst case example that you might possibly use as justification to help further your likely authoritarian goals and then spin the the quasi-rational story of outrage and virtue.
Keep up the good work Mr. Chivers!
“But this week, the Wellington government formally abandoned its policy of eliminating Covid, and moved to a plan to live with the virus (albeit, no doubt, at a much lower level of the virus than we have to live with)”.
Why would this be true? Surely the virus will spread throughout all populations everywhere? Even with vaccination, won’t this still happen? What am I not understanding?
This is the sort of hand-me-down, superficial, sheeplike rubbish I’d go to the Guardian to get.
I expect better from Unherd such as an examination of why the legal system and law enforcement is structurally and institutionally misandrist.