Men are likelier to be killed. We don't mind
Celebrating International Women's Day
Last week, the Labour MP Jess Phillips read out a list of the names of women in the UK who had been killed by men in the previous year. It’s a habit that is now nine years in the making, timed to roughly coincide with International Women’s Day, which takes place on 8 March, the day this piece is published.
Part of her motivation is highlighting that better police action might have prevented these deaths – for more than half of the 98 named, in her estimate. “All of these women mattered,” she said. “They need to matter much more to politics, and I urge the government again, as I have done for years, to have a strategy for reducing femicide.”
Preventing women and girls being killed is indeed a worthy goal. But it’s not as worthy as preventing men and boys being killed, for the rather dull reason that this happens more often. Much more often, in fact.
Despite the tenor of Phillips’ speech, the UK is a country in which people don’t much get killed. Our homicide rate1 sits at about one per 100,000 people, making the UK one of least murderous places in the world, comparable with countries like Denmark and Belgium2.
This is confirmed by the Office for National Statistics’ own dry analysis of homicide in England and Wales3. “Compared with most other crimes, the homicide rate remains very low, with 9.9 homicides recorded per million population during the year ending March 2023,” it says.
As mentioned above, men rather skew this statistic upwards, and not just because killers are overwhelmingly male. According to that ONS data, males are more than twice as likely to be killed as females, with homicide rates of 14.2 per million and 6 per million respectively. A baby boy born today, all else held equal, is twice as likely to be slain across his lifespan as a baby girl.
Why do I write this, on International Women’s Day of all days? One: because these commemorative days are stupid, throw rocks at them. And two: were females facing more than double the homicide risks of males, you would hear of little else. Phillips would cite it constantly as a sign of egregious sexism, and a lack of interest in the fate of women and girls. It would be “a testament to our collective failure”.
In her defence, she’s hardly alone in treating female mortality as more important than the male kind. There is, to use her own word, an “epidemic” of disinterest4 in male death.
Cast your mind back to the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Equality reporter Alexandra Topping was writing in the Guardian, when she committed this unimprovable line to pixel: “While more men have died from Covid-19, women’s wellbeing has been hit harder.”
I flunked AS-level statistics, so perhaps am unqualified to dispute this. But it seems to me that death represents a sharper decline in wellbeing than having to do some more housework, as women were complaining of at the time. Indeed, even the Graun seemed to think that dying was bad when it led to corpses of colour.
The paper admittedly ran some pieces examining why men were expiring faster than women during Covid. But as with male suicide being blamed on personal stoicism, male vulnerability to Covid was put down mostly to our poor lifestyle choices. When women die, somebody else – the patriarchy, the wage gap, whichever man owns Cosmo – is usually to blame. Men do it to ourselves.
Even when men try feminism on for size by examining the role of sex in the death trends, the response is dismissive. A BBC debate last year on whether men might, like women, benefit from their own focused minister received a scornful response from pundit Ava Santina, who said it was just culture war fodder and a mental health minister would be better.
I’d guess it is unlikely that Santina would have a similar attitude if three-quarters of suicides involved women. And again, if women were better at killing themselves, this would be trumpeted as evidence that society doesn’t care about female mental health, and that a female-focused strategy was needed.
Some are even reluctant to just acknowledge that there are such a thing as men’s problems, rather than problems men simply happen to have. When Tory MP Philip Davies was arguing years ago for parliamentary debates on men’s issues as part of International Men’s Day – which is also stupid, throw rocks at it – Phillips’ was incredulous.
“Yes, within your group things are tough for all sorts of reasons,” she wrote in an article at the time. “None of them are because you are a man.”
This reasoning is faulty in general, but particular when it comes to violent crime. If it is true that women face particular risks of lethal violence because of their sex, it must tautologically be the case that men do too. You can’t argue for one without accepting the other.
As campaigners focusing on violence against women have noted, women face greater risks from partners and ex-partners. The ONS data for the year to March 2022 says that in 59% of homicide cases with female victims the principal suspect was romantically-linked to the victim. For homicide cases with male victims, the leading relationship to the principal suspect was as a friend or acquaintance (40% of cases), with strangers closely behind (30%)5.
You can argue whether sex is the main factor in many of these deaths (as opposed to specifically being romantically attached to someone or belonging to a rival gang). But the point is an academic one. Males and females face different risk by virtue of their sex, and bringing numbers for either down would require different strategies. And in a world that valued homicide of either sex equally, it would require more resources for male deaths.
But for all the talk of equality, nobody is much minded to fix the discrepancy. Frankly I’m not much minded, despite the above screed. I am “intensely relaxed” about men being killed more frequently than women, to paraphrase New Labour’s Peter Mandelson, and I suspect you are too.
Put it down to a patriarchal protectiveness towards women. Put it down to the absence of male solidarity. Or put it down to the suspicion that a lot of those numbers are just punks shanking each other over drugs. But whatever you put it down to, we don’t really care.
The homicide rate here includes murder, manslaughter and infanticide.
From what I could tell the Isle of Man’s murder rate is zero, which is further evidence that nothing happens there.
The Scottish figures are similar.
I regret bastardising the concept of ‘disinterest’, but ‘uninterest’ sounds weird.
These figures account only for cases where the relationship between principal suspect and victim could be determined, and even here is a discrepancy. “This accounts for 65% of cases with male victims and 79% of cases with female victims,” the parliamentary report says.