Sabina Nessa

The murder of Sabina Nessa is another thread in an all too familiar pattern of women being murdered by men while going about their daily lives. Women and girls are not safe and this has been the case for a very long time. Over time society has adopted norms that make it tolerable for men to murder women and feel able to get away with justifying their actions. Whether it is the French notion of ‘crime of passion’, the murder defence of “violent sex”, or the implication that rape victims somehow did something to provoke their assailants; society finds a way to make violence against women reasonable under certain circumstances. The truth is that males need to learn to respect the rights, choices and bodies of women.

Violent urges are primeval but over time the desire for social acceptance has restrained people from wantonly resorting to it. Unfortunately we are at a point where men seem to feel that giving in to violent urges is liberating and empowering. There are too many instances of people resorting to violence to resolve personal differences. It has become common to find people on social media threatening violence against strangers whom they might be having a difference of opinion with. Social media personalities have taken to promoting and organising boxing matches as a way of amping up rivalries. The US experiences of minorities subjected to violent police interventions have been disturbing and disruptive. And recently the increasing exposure of violent assaults by U.K. law enforcement officers has spotlighted a very worrying trend. 

As a society we need to address and change the culture of violence against women that has become entrenched in our lives. We should be able to rely on law enforcement and government institutions to recognise the dangerous trends and actively work to combat them. Talking about it isn’t enough. Not enough is being done and women are paying the price for this negligence. Keeping women safe is not about finding protectors, it’s about stopping perpetrators. 

Stop! You're Killing Me

Modern society has been blighted by a plague of killings and a fascination with killers. We live in world where depicting killing has become normalised and in fact popularised over generations. Almost every major religion makes frequent references to killing as a way of propagating its beliefs or maintaining its integrity. National governments have installed the threat of war as a deterrent. Government sanctioned killing by agent or drone are rife. Nationalistic causes have largely adopted killing as an attention grabber and negotiation leverage. The news media literally salivate at the prospect of reporting murders and deaths in any context. Book, film, tv and social media are dominated by killing and gratuitous violence.

Tragically we now live in a society where people too often resort to murder to take what they want, avenge a slight or assuage hurt feelings. One can only pray that resorting to murder to resolve knotty issues doesn't become the norm. It seems to be a consistent theme in everything we read and watch.

It is difficult to imagine us evolving into a kinder and more gentle society when killing and maiming have become skills to most desire. Violence in our society won't abate until we turn away from the gratuitous enjoyment of killing and violence. Killing is a reality of the world we live in but we have become dangerously desensitised to its destructiveness.