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Three recent stories about the male oppression and hatred of women, across time and place, are causing wild storms in my heart. Will this violence never end?
On 6 April, Kulsuma Akter, 27, was pushing her baby in a pram in Bradford’s city centre when she was repeatedly stabbed. She died of the injuries. Habibur Masum, 25, is charged with the murder. Four men are in custody on suspicion of assisting an offender. The baby is described as “unharmed”, as if losing a mum so young causes no harm. A picture released of the victim was taken on her wedding day. Next to her is Masum, her husband. She is bedecked in gold and red. While the wheels of justice turn, that’s all we can say.
Four days after this killing, the death of OJ Simpson was announced. I thought of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and friend Ron Goldman who were murdered in June 1994. TV channels rebroadcast parts of Simpson’s infamous trial and acquittal. Simpson was the prime suspect because traces of their blood were found in his car. I believe, as do millions of others, that he did it.
An old colleague, a British-Jamaican woman, asked me back then: “So, you for the black man or the blonde? That’s the choice.” The worst of identity politics oozed out. “The bloodied, slaughtered woman” was my reply.
Dangerously angry
To millions of football fans, OJ Simpson was an American superstar, a hero. To his wife, Nicole, he was a brute. She divorced him, then went back, and finally left him and moved to her own home in Los Angeles. But Simpson felt he owned her. Previously, she had called the police eight times. They saw bruises, cuts, evidence of blows; they witnessed her terror. Five days before she was murdered, Nicole called a domestic violence shelter to ask how she could disappear to a place where Simpson couldn’t find her. She never got the protection she needed.
A day after OJ Simpson’s death, I watched a programme, a BBC repeat, presented by Stacey Dooley, on young women today who are being obsessively stalked by their ex-partners. You could see how trapped and unsafe they felt. The men cannot stand rejection. Any new relationship makes them dangerously angry. Will one or some of them end up dead?
The latest Femicide Census data shows that, of the men who killed 381 women in the UK in the three years from 2020 to 2022, at least 56 per cent had known histories of violence against women and the victim. Some were out on bail or licence. Not all cases are reported: “Since 2009, a man has killed a woman in the UK on average every 2.6 days… the real figure will be higher, [if] homicides are disguised as missing persons cases, suicides, drug overdoses or other accidental deaths.”
Police failures
These experts also crucially point out that “femicide isn’t an entry level crime. Men who go on to kill women usually have been subjecting a woman or women in general to their abusive and controlling behaviour and for a long time.”
Police failures when called out by terrified victims are well documented. The West Yorkshire Police has referred itself to the Independent Office of Police Conduct because officers had contact with Ms Akter before her death. Nicole Brown would probably be alive today if LAPD had helped protect her. The stalked women had mixed experiences when coppers get involved. Listen to Tracy Chapman’s song “Behind the Wall” about a vulnerable woman who is killed by her partner and the police who “come late, if they ever come at all”.
The criminal justice system must be radically reformed. Misogynist jurors should be deselected, bad police officers sacked. More urgently, social attitudes need to be shifted. Doing that is harder than ever before as social media relentlessly whips up resentment and anti-female anger among young men.
Pervasive sexism and misogyny
Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), has just called for an independent inquiry into the rise of this pervasive sexism and misogyny: “It’s not just influencers such as Andrew Tate, but aggressive hardcore pornography which is really easily accessible to young people. This stuff is having a real impact, particularly on young boys and young men and their views of women and relationships.”
Thirty years after the OJ Simpson case, a rising number of men feel entitled to control, physically intimidate and violate females. We are going backwards. Your daughter, sister, granddaughter, mother, niece could become the next victims. Think about that.
If more than a hundred men a year were killed by women, how would the country react? Would the police, criminal justice system and government carry on with business as usual? I think we know the answer.
Moving forward
Last Friday, in Berlin, 250 attendees showed up for a three-day conference on the Palestinian people to listen to a wide array of speakers, many of them highly respected globally. Just two hours into the event, the police – 930 officers – shut it down and banned it, they said, to prevent “antisemitic and violence-glorifying remarks”.
Among the billed speakers were former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian doctor, and senior researcher at Glasgow University. Immigration officers stopped Abu-Sittah from entering the country. Others are now banned.
This cancellation provoked no concern or condemnation from our government or commentators.
This Tuesday, a National Conservative conference of hard right-wingers was cancelled in Brussels. Speakers, including Nigel Farage and Melanie Phillips, the European and British media and our government got mad as hell. The conference was allowed to go ahead.
Freedom, it seems, is not a universal right, but a privilege reserved for those favoured by Western states and societies.
A conversation I had this week
I had my three grandchildren staying over last week. I took them to a nearby park. Off sped the two boys to the rumbustious playground; their sister chose to make a daisy chain instead. She made the longest chain I’d ever seen, and then quietly went over to a young Somali girl who was skipping around, and handed her the chain. The little girl was first wary, then delighted. On a nearby table her parents were tucking into some picnic grub. They came over, gave us hot chai from a flask. We chatted. It was a very London encounter, a city which pulls in and pulls together diverse people.
Her brothers came back and were clearly baffled by this new, unexpected amity between two families from very different worlds. This doesn’t happen often in the almost wholly white suburbs where they live.
Valuing the kindness of strangers – that’s what they learned that day. I hope they never forget.
Yasmin’s pick: Hanif Kureishi
Hanif Kureishi, one of our most brilliant novelists went to Rome with his wife for Christmas. While there he fainted, and lost the use of his arms and legs. This was in 2022. He is still in that state. One of my favourite Kureishi novels is The Buddha Of Suburbia. I hear it has been adapted for the stage by him and the innovative theatre director Emma Rice for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In a moment life darkened. But his creativity remains undimmed. What a guy.
This is In Conversation with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
