The attack in Southport on the 29^th of July where three young girls were murdered by a 17-year-old boy has really impacted me all throughout the week. It was not only the disgusting scenes following the outbreak of the riots and violence by far-right protesters in which bricks were thrown at a local Mosque and police officers, but the way in which this hatred was fuelled by the spread of misinformation. All of which was coupled with the divisive rhetoric from Nigel Farage that led to him being accused of inciting the riot (reported in The Independent, 31st July 2024). Conspiracy theories over the identity of the assailant spread rapidly and included a fake name and backstory that stated the boy was a Syrian refugee who arrived by boat in 2023 and was already known to be on an MI6 watchlist (BBC News, 2024), all of which were unequivocally false. The killer was a British national with heritage from Rwanda, an almost entirely Christian country. The violence and rioting that followed in Southport is the result of consistent xenophobic, racist, Islamophobic rhetoric that is being spread by people all over social media platforms. This has taken the focus off of the fact that we should be mourning the deaths of these three young girls, and shifted the spotlight to the sickening violence and hatred that was on show across the country during the week.

Furthermore, I believe that there is not enough being done by politicians to address or even discuss the blatant issues of femicide that are rampant across the UK in recent years. The Femicide Census for 2022 found approximately 107 examples of women who had been murdered by men in the United Kingdom (ITV News, 2023). This is not a new phenomenon, we only have to think back to the murders of Jo Cox, Sarah Everard, and even in the last month the murders of Carol, Hannah and Louise Hunt in my home county of Hertfordshire. The new 2024 report from the National Police Chiefs’ Council has declared violence against women and girls to be a national emergency that should be dealt with the same intensity and severity as terrorism, it is horrifying how normal these attacks are becoming and we need to see more discussion and action being taken about this within British politics. The Routledge International Handbook on Femicide and Feminicide published in 2023 has several eye-opening quotes firstly that “women and girls who worry daily about threats to their safety and who structure their everyday activities (if they can) with the conscious or subconscious hope that their actions will reduce their own risk of male violence” and that “each time a woman or girl is killed by men and tolerated by patriarchal social structures, another fracture occurs in the fabric of society. Each death is an experience that ripples within and through the communities in which the women and girls live and beyond to broader society” (The Routledge International Handbook on Femicide and Feminicide, 2023: 49). The implementation of legal responses to femicide is of urgent need in the UK, although this is only one step in the path to protecting women from further violence, “those who impose the law must acknowledge the seriousness of violence before society can effectively respond” ((The Routledge International Handbook on Femicide and Feminicide, 2023: 49). I agree with the sentiments from the handbook but also feel that as a society we should be doing more to combat the rising levels of misogyny we see every day, whether it be on social media, internet videos or in our everyday lives; boys younger than me are being radicalised by hyper-masculine social media personalities like Andrew Tate and it is dangerous. Men need to take a greater responsibility for ensuring that younger boys do not fall into this pipeline of misogynistic, racist hate content.

The UK is in a vulnerable place with rising support for far-right groups, blatant racist and Islamophobic attacks becoming more common and the spread of misinformation becoming increasingly normal. It is of great importance that we address these issues before we see them as the norm instead of shocking one-offs.

Links:

BBC News 2024 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd1e8d7llg9o

Independent 2024 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nigel-farage-southport-stabbings-riots-b2588657.html

ITV 2024 https://www.itv.com/news/2023-03-09/the-107-women-killed-where-a-man-is-the-suspect-in-the-past-year

NPCC Report 2024 https://www.npcc.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/media/downloads/our-work/vawg/vawg-framework-for-delivery.pdf

Routledge International Handbook on Femicide and Feminicide 2023 https://www-taylorfrancis-com.uea.idm.oclc.org/books/edit/10.4324/9781003202332/routledge-international-handbook-femicide-feminicide-myrna-dawson-saide-mobayed-vega?refId=665fb078-431d-4708-995f-f8d6f25aff28&context=ubx