Earlier this week a court in Hong Kong listened to chilling evidence of how a British securities trader tortured and murdered two Indonesian women in an expensive apartment in the city’s nightlife district two years ago. Throughout the ordeal the accused killer reportedly filmed himself with an iPhone, recording his thoughts as the violence progressed towards murder. While the grisly details of this case have made international headlines, mostly because of the killer’s wealthy background a student at an elite public school in Britain, and a Cambridge graduate far less attention is paid to the routine gender-based violence that affects millions of lives around the world.
A current World Health Organization factsheet estimates that “as many as 38% of murders of women are committed by an intimate partner.” In 2012 Angela Me, the chief statistician for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, reported that “Women are the most frequent victims of intimate partner violence and they are often killed by family members in all countries and across all cultures.” Depressingly, more than half of the ten countries with the worst records are in the Americas. In 2012 El Salvador had a rate of 8.9 homicides per 100,000, followed by Colombia (6.3), Guatemala (6.2) and Brazil (4.8) Mexico and Suriname also made the top ten. To get a sense of how bad these numbers are, consider that Brazil’s rate of femicide is 48 times greater than that of the United Kingdom.
During the last few weeks the #NiUnaMenos (#NotOneWomanLess) movement has coordinated #MiercolesNegro (#BlackWednesday) protests in Argentina and other parts of Latin America to call attention to a surge of sexual violence throughout the region. In Argentina 226 women have been killed so far this year in various forms of what the national congress defined, four years ago, as ‘femicide’ (19 of the killings have taken place this month). In Peru, 54 women have died in similar circumstances.
While it is difficult, especially in the short term, to address the root causes of such violence prime among them the region’s misogynistic machista culture there are compelling economic reasons, in addition to the overriding moral imperative, for regional governments to do so. The development expert Nata Duvvury cites a 2014 study by Peru’s University of San Martin de Porres which calculated the direct and indirect costs of violence against women at almost 4% of the country’s annual GDP – the equivalent of 70 million lost workdays (or the 230,000 full-time jobs). Duvvury also refers to a recent study in Egypt that found that “the greatest costs of violence against women are absorbed by informal institutions and thus remain invisible to governments and planners, while placing a significant strain on families, communities and societies.”
Of course developed democracies also harbour misogynistic subcultures that emerge at unexpected moments. There has, for instance, been a noticeable undercurrent of misogyny in this year’s US presidential campaign, one that extends well beyond Donald Trump’s cringe-inducing opinions. In an essay for the Atlantic entitled ‘Fear of a Female President’ Peter Beinart notes that merchandise available at this year’s Republican National convention included “White T-shirt reading Trump that Bitch. White T shirt reading Hillary sucks, but not like Monica. Red pin reading Life’s a Bitch: Don’t Vote for One. White pin depicting a boy urinating on the word Hillary.”
Beinart suggests that such attitudes may be due to what social psychologists call “precarious manhood” – a psychological theory that sees men’s social roles as more “earned and maintained” than women’s, and thus more susceptible to fears of devaluation and loss. Economic uncertainty seems to have inflamed this sense of aggrieved masculinity in recent years, particularly among the Republican base. Last year, for instance, a majority of GOP base voters told the US Public Religion Research Institute that in the US white men faced more discrimination than women. Depressingly it will likely take much more than a victory by Mrs Clinton to overturn such profound resentment, for as Jonathan Freedland notes in a Guardian Op-Ed: “the depressing evidence of the last eight years is that racial resentment actually rose rather than fell while Obama was in the Oval Office.”
Two weeks ago, as the Trump campaign struggled to address mounting allegations of abuse against its candidate, President Obama tweeted: “Clearly, we still have more to do to prevent sexual assault and the thinking that leads to it. That starts with us.” Sadly his remark holds true not only in the United States but throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
