Victim-blaming is the knee-jerk response to male violence against women – how on earth did we get here?

As a woman, how can you keep yourself safe? In 2022, we were given invaluable advice like flagging down a bus and asking police officers for ID. But amid an onslaught of other tragedies involving women — just one month in 2023 — the media has provided some more on things you want to avoid if you don’t want to end up murdered and missing. These qualities include having a successful career, making more money than your partner, having mental health issues, walking your dog, and going through menopause.

I wish I were exaggerating, but these are all examples of real-life headlines and quotes from police officers that were made in the wake of Nicola Bulley’s disappearance and Emma Pattison’s death. Pattison, 45, was headteacher of the prestigious Epsom College before she and her 7-year-old child were murdered by her husband. Bulley, a woman of the same age, has been missing since January 27 after walking her dog.

As is usually the case in these tragedies, headlines bemoaned how such shocking and horrific tragedies could occur. In the case of Emma Pattison, we see reports detailing how the husband was an upstanding citizen, paired with pictures of him grinning as the head of the perfect nuclear family. Meanwhile, for Nicola Bulley, it’s reinforced just how unusual it is for women to vanish without a trace, as if there wasn’t a similar nationwide search for Sarah Everard, and then Sabina Nessa, less than two years ago.

In a world where violence is considered to be the leading cause of premature death among women; where 1 in 4 women are estimated to experience domestic violence in their lifetime and 52% of women suspect medical misogyny negatively impacts their healthcare, we simply can’t wrap our heads around the idea that these kinds of ‘isolated incidents’ could, in fact, not be isolated at all.

Just mere years after #MeToo became public and we all vowed to be better allies to women, victim-blaming has somehow become the knee-jerk response. It’s become part of our DNA when responding to these ‘one off’ (yet frequently occurring) events.

There’s many reasons why people might think this way, but my personal theory is that it comes down to fear. We have to believe women are somehow responsible for the bad things that happen to them so that we don’t need to address the deep systemic bias that exists against them.

If, in the case of Emma Pattinson we can’t truly identify monsters based on appearance alone, the ‘not all men’ mentality so many people cling to comes crashing down. Sure, not every single man is driven to violence, but if they look like any other man, it feels all the more impossible to try and stop VAWG in its tracks. People like George Pattinson could just as easily be a friend, neighbour, or work colleague. 

Similarly, for Nicola Bulley, it feels like rather than actually addressing the possibility that they failed in their investigations, the police would rather rely on the age-old ‘hysterical woman’ defence.  On a systemic level, perhaps, the media and police force don’t want to admit just how incompetent the world is at dealing with women in crisis — whether that crisis be a missing person case or femicide.  So, they grapple to reason some kind of ‘justification’ as to why Emma was murdered, or why Nicola went missing.

In Emma’s case, this led to multiple headlines circulating claiming her husband was jealous of her success, with one national headline reading, ‘Did living in the shadow of his high-achieving wife lead to unthinkable tragedy?’ I shouldn’t have to explain why headlines like this are problematic, but this one, in particular, is perfect at encapsulating just how embedded ideals around gender hierarchy and male egoism have become.