- 27/05/2025
In 2024, the National Police Chiefs Council declared violence against women a national emergency in England and Wales. The council estimated that 2 million women a year, are victims of male violence. It’s been reported that crimes including stalking, harassment, sexual assault and domestic violence affect 1 in 12 women in England and Wales.
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00:0081% of young women say they feel unsafe when walking home in the dark.
00:07As things stand today, the scale of violence against women in this country is intolerable.
00:12A national emergency.
00:14The scale of violence against women and girls is an epidemic.
00:17It is classed as a national threat by government.
00:20Domestic abuse doesn't discriminate. It can happen to absolutely anyone.
00:24Whether you're, you know, we're seeing stats now that are showing girls as young as 13 going through this.
00:28I just cannot believe as a society, we are not doing more to prevent these cases.
00:34In 2024, the National Police Chiefs Council declared violence against women a national emergency in England and Wales.
00:42The council estimated that 2 million women a year are victims of male violence.
00:46It's been reported that crimes including stalking, harassment, sexual assault and domestic violence affect 1 in 12 women in England and Wales.
00:55That could be your sister, your mother, your girlfriend, your wife or your colleague.
01:00With the number of recorded offences growing by 37% in the past 5 years and with perpetrators progressively getting younger,
01:07I decided to look a little further into this topic and speak to the women who are directly impacted by it.
01:12We'll be right back to that table.
01:15We'll see you next time.
01:22Let's dwell.
01:32We'll see you next time.
01:35Look.
02:09Hi, Alice. How are you?
02:11I'm really well, thanks. How are you doing?
02:19Domestic abuse is something that is often quite misunderstood.
02:24I think for a lot of people, they believe it to be only a case of there being physical violence in a relationship.
02:29And now we know it to be a much broader term that encompasses things like coercive control.
02:33In my own situation, I got into a relationship with someone when I was 16.
02:39So I was still at school. I was very young. And it was my kind of first experience of a proper relationship.
02:44So I was quite naive to what was, you know, healthy and unhealthy in a relationship dynamic.
02:49And as we progressed, I started to notice that, you know, there are a few things that maybe felt a little bit odd that then turned into more intense forms of jealousy and control.
03:02And then kind of culminating in, sadly, you know, physical violence and a lot of kind of emotional abuse as well alongside that.
03:13I thankfully managed to get out of my relationship.
03:19It did sadly end in a really traumatic situation where he turned up at my school, attacked me in broad daylight, you know, in front of all of my friends.
03:30It was very horrific.
03:31And in some ways, I know it sounds like a weird thing to say, but I feel very lucky that I had countless witnesses, you know, that it happened on school property.
03:41So it had to be reported to the police so that I was able to get a conviction.
03:46So many people and so many women don't have that, you know, that that privilege.
03:51I have since managed to rebuild my life after abuse.
03:55And like I said, I feel very lucky for that.
03:58So I find it really interesting the fact that you've called it a privilege for other people to have seen this horrific situation that you've been in,
04:06because there's no woman that wants to find themselves in this situation.
04:09Yet it's seemingly more prevalent that those who are don't have this what you call privilege of someone else seeing this kind of abuse.
04:17So it takes longer to lead to a conviction, if any.
04:21So, yeah, I just find it really interesting that you used that word.
04:26A lot of this time, this stuff happens behind closed doors.
04:29Nobody sees it.
04:30It's one person's word against another.
04:31And a woman is coerced into believing that she's to blame, that she's the problem.
04:36So many women do not recognize that even what they're going through is abuse.
04:40And that's really, really important.
04:42So I think that we know that the numbers are probably a lot bigger.
04:46And it's a lot more of a wider issue than maybe even the numbers that we currently have suggest.
04:53Alice is using her experience to help others and has teamed up with YSL.
04:58In order to prevent and fight against intimate partner violence.
05:02In this, nine signs of domestic abuse have been outlined.
05:05The signs of abuse include intimidation, ignoring, blackmailing, manipulation, intrusion, humiliation, jealousy, control and isolation.
05:17Awareness and education is key to protecting victims.
05:20Killedwomen.org defines itself as an organisation
05:50and network for the bereaved families of women who have been killed by men in the UK.
05:55Those who work at the organisation endeavour to protect women's lives and ensure justice for victims.
06:01Okay, so my name is Cara Gould and I'm one of the founding members of the Killedwomen organisation.
06:07Killedwomen is made up of a group of bereaved families.
06:19And we've built this network so that families can have a voice.
06:23And families who have gone through the most horrendous loss can speak out about the failings.
06:32We feel that we should have a table when policy is being changed, when laws are being changed.
06:38And where there's failures because they need to hear it from the people who have had direct experience of those failures.
06:45Where a male went out one night and had a punch up and hit another male and they hit their head and they died.
07:02There'd be no doubt about it that that would be a manslaughter charge.
07:05You can have a man who makes her life a misery.
07:14You know, the violence she's exposed to, which is known to the police, which is probably known also to social services.
07:21Years of insidious, coercive control and behaviour towards her and violence.
07:27And yet that can't be treated as manslaughter.
07:30But the one punch in the nightclub is straight away a manslaughter charge.
07:34And it just comes down to male-on-male violence is treated seriously, male-on-female violence isn't.
07:41It can't be right that you can violently take a young girl's life in her home while she's sat revising.
07:48And you'll be out of prison by the time you're 30 to live your life, to carry on.
07:53That's just not justice.
08:04We'll be out of prison.
08:06We'll be out of prison.
08:06We'll be out of prison.
08:08That's just not justice.
08:09We'll be out of prison.
08:40So whilst we have violence against women and girls, we also have online violence against women and girls, which is like an entirely different subcategory of abuse which women are regularly subjected to.
08:53So just for some context, according to Charity and Violence Against Women, women are 27 times more likely than men to be harassed online.
09:02In fact, one in five women have experienced online harassment or abuse.
09:07So this kind of online abuse can include cyber stalking, sexual harassment, grooming, exploitation or abuse, image-based sexual abuse like revenge porn, upskirting, deepfakes, sexual extortion and the list goes on.
09:22Now, thankfully, in 2024, the government actually made it illegal to create a sexually explicit deepfake of someone else.
09:31Now, I spoke to Professor Olga from the Open University.
09:35Two years ago, she created the biggest study of its kind on a topic just like this one.
09:40So I wanted to find out what she found about online violence against women.
09:44My name is Olga Jurasz.
09:49I'm a professor of law at the Open University and I'm director of the Centre for Protecting Women Online.
09:56As you know yourself, Iona, there is a pandemic of violence against women and girls in the UK, across the world.
10:05Needless to say, the recent geopolitical situation feeds into that with women all over the world really suffering backlash to their rights,
10:16be it freedom of expression, be it reproductive rights, be it suffering from various forms of violence.
10:23So we're really looking at a crisis, I would say.
10:27What we may have been observing 10 years ago is not necessarily the picture we're seeing now.
10:33Two years ago, I run the biggest study so far in the UK on online violence against women and girls.
10:40At that time, we were also seeing movements towards reform, law reform on what was then called revenge pornography.
10:48I think now more commonly referred to as image-based sexual abuse.
10:52If you look at that picture today, it is much bigger.
10:57There are many more forms of online violence against women that we speak about, that women witness.
11:03It's definitely gone beyond the forms that I've already described.
11:08Most recently, deepfakes are a huge issue for many women online, particularly but not only to women who are in the public eye.
11:20We heard from many political candidates and women politicians who have been targeted with deepfakes in an attempt to discredit them or to misinform general public about what they campaign for and what they stand for.
11:37Of course, you don't have to be a woman in the public eye in order to suffer online harms or suffer from various forms of online violence, quite the opposite.
11:47But it's worth bearing in mind that online violence against women has really, really wide effects on broader society.
11:56A lot of instances of particularly online violence is driven by online hate, by the spread of online misogyny, by the spread of gendered misinformation.
12:12The big elephant in the room, and that is the role of platforms, platform providers, in terms of mitigating harms that happen to women on their platforms, preventing them and actually investing enough resources in order to make that happen.
12:30Online Safety Act, as it currently stands, does not go far enough to ensure that women have these protections enshrined in law, which is a great flaw of this piece of legislation.
12:43So, I'm always wary of framing online violence against women as a new problem.
12:50Sure, it is, I think, by now, not that new, but it is a problem that has been occurring before.
13:00It is rooted in attitudes that have existed not for decades, it has existed for centuries.
13:06Our lives have pretty much moved online.
13:09All these toxic behaviours that women have been suffering for years have also moved to online sphere.
13:15Men and boys being targeted with content from certain influencers who very much spread online misogyny, who think women should be subjected to sexual violence, who normalise and call for violence against women and girls.
13:31So, if you ask me, they incite violence against women and girls.
13:34So, this is something that definitely has shifted and changed.
13:40Under the Prime Minister's plan for change, the UK government has set out initiatives to tackle abuse suffered by women and girls in the country.
13:48This work includes tackling violence against women and girls through the Safer Streets Mission Board, as well as ruling out measures to tackle spiking by making it a criminal offence.
13:59Reneem's law, which was introduced in February this year, was introduced in order to help improve the police's response to domestic abuse.
14:08Ofcom has previously called on tech firms to make the online world a safer place for women and girls.
14:15Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has a five-pillar approach in order to keep abuse off their platforms and to keep women safe.
14:23This includes offering help resources for women, as well as having tools in place to protect women against unwanted content and contact.
14:40Now, it has occurred to me that I haven't looked at the issue of violence against women from the viewpoint of the common offender, a man.
14:48Lately, the topic of toxic masculinity and men's mental health has been brought to the forefront of media following Netflix's drama, Adolescence.
14:57Now, I think it's important to say that a lot of very, very good men do exist.
15:02I spoke to Anthea Sully from White Ribbon.
15:05White Ribbon is a charity which focuses on working with men and boys in order to challenge harmful attitudes and behaviours in society.
15:12They can influence other men, they can really think about themselves and their own behaviour and look to, if we're going to prevent violence against women and girls from happening in the first place, then we all need to work together.
15:3263% of men think that men aren't doing enough to make a difference, so there's a lot of goodwill there in getting involved.
15:40But we also know that men don't necessarily know how to be involved and how to make a difference.
15:45So, some of the things that we are really keen on is giving men the awareness of women's experiences, enabling men to have the confidence to actually ask women what their experiences are, and then how, for example, ways in which you might choose to intervene in a public setting if you see a woman who's being harassed, how you may have conversations with your children about what that looks like.
16:11But the huge, vast majority of men who are talking to us really want to see a difference themselves, they want to live in a tolerant and respectful society, they want that for themselves and they also want that for the women that they have in their lives.
16:31So, that's why I think our positive messaging and talking about culture change, this is better for everyone, and it's particularly better for women and girls who can live the lives that they want to lead.
16:45This is only one issue that there is in society, but that's the one that we particularly focus on, and it's important that it's given that amount of attention and that people are talking about this.
16:57And we're very aware that often, you know, trending is not all men.
17:02Well, yes, but all men can, is what we say, all men can make this different, all men can listen to women, all men can think about the ways in which in their workplaces, they can really stand up for women, give space to women, make sure the workplace is equal.
17:22Making sure men have that level of awareness is vital.
17:25What we're wanting to do is to prevent, we're wanting to foster attitudes of men so that they are promoting equality, they're standing up, and they're self-reflective.
17:37Many men may have grown up in a household where there was domestic abuse present.
17:43It must surely be helpful if he is able, he has men around him who he's able to talk to.
17:49And often men aren't given the spaces to talk about that and to share those experiences.
17:56So those are things that need to happen so that men as well as women are talking about things such as domestic abuse, such as what harassment looks like.
18:08Because actually, if we're having those open conversations, that's one of the ways that we can change things and we can prevent these things happening in the first place.
18:15So those are things that we can change things.
18:45I started the project, I suppose, in 2020, during lockdown.
18:56There was a woman murdered in the city that I lived in, and not long after that, Sarah Everard was murdered and buried.
19:08Both had very similar kind of treatment by the men that murdered them.
19:15But what I found shocking was how many more women were murdered in between those times that I hadn't heard of, that, you know, people weren't aware of.
19:25And I started sort of looking into that more and finding out more and more of these women were being murdered.
19:33And they weren't making press coverage and there wasn't enough information and I felt like something was missing.
19:43So I started visiting the sites where the women had been left in shallow graves.
19:51And after they'd been found, removed, all the rest of it, and I wanted to, I don't know, I suppose, get a sense of how many there were,
20:04create some images to highlight how many there were, so that people could see it in a, I guess, a different way.
20:13And to, to highlight them, rather than the perpetrators.
20:18I'd also spoken to a forensic botanist who spoke to me about how changes in growth can happen where there's been bodies buried.
20:27So I started looking for little clues, and I started taking soil samples as well, not really knowing what I was going to do with that to begin with.
20:36And I made images.
20:37I had to spend a lot of time in the space, and it takes a long time to set up.
20:41So you're spending time, and I felt like I was spending time with the victims, although they weren't there.
20:47I was collecting flowers and soil, and the flowers I took home and froze them.
20:56You know, decomposition happens quite quickly, and there is a trace of us left behind always.
21:03So I was really interested in what that was leaving in the soil.
21:06So I did a lot of research over there, looked at soil, bodies in situ, with bodies that have been removed,
21:15just to get a real feel for what was actually happening with the soil.
21:18And it's really quite beautiful, because it does change the composition of the soil, and it's a permanent change.
21:26So it kills everything to begin with, the body, but then after that, it fills it with nutrients.
21:34So the growth becomes exponential, and you get this, like, amazing sort of wonderful rebirth, if you like, of flowers and just meadowland.
21:46And it's almost like this beauty, this quiet beauty that these women are leaving behind after having been through the most horrific things.
21:56is show that they've left a legacy of something really wonderful and beautiful.
22:02The butterflies do come into the space because of the traces that are left behind.
22:10The, you know, the flowers that grow, all of these things that are feminine or seen as feminine,
22:17become exponentially growing, and it's so quiet and so gentle.
22:22I suppose the only thing is to really say why I, my real beginnings of this was, I found a dead body when I was 13.
22:34And it was a woman.
22:36And I just let the grown-ups deal with it at the time, and I walked away.
22:44And I never knew, I never found out what had happened to her or why or any of those things.
22:50And I think that in some ways, to just add my kind of point, is that I've always questioned why I didn't know more.
23:02And why, you know, I was a child.
23:04I know that now.
23:05At the time, I didn't think of myself as a child.
23:07And I think that in a way, part of this is finding her and giving her her due, if you like.
23:17You know, a man.
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