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.
On average, three women are killed by a man each week.
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.
Inevitably, the movement struggled to deliver.
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.
Although it is unconfirmed what exactly happened to Nicola, the headlines and speculation surrounding her disappearance are no less misogynistic. By disclosing intimate (and arguably irrelevant) details about her life — including her alleged issues with alcohol and her mental health struggling from the menopause — it becomes a lot easier to shift the blame on her being a ‘loose canon’ who brought her disappearance on herself. The decision to disclose her menopause struggles feels especially sinister given it’s a gender-specific condition, as it harkens back to an era where any inconvenient truth or issue with misogyny was written off as ‘hysteria,’ which was quite literally considered a sickness of the womb.
How did we get to a point where it was even feasible to argue that having a successful career or experiencing menopause puts a target on our backs? Are we to turn our backs on our careers, not speak up when we’re struggling, and suffer in silence to preserve our relationships, lives, and legacies? Even if Nicola’s mental health issues and ‘vulnerabilities’ did play a role in her disappearance, what’s the purpose of disclosing that to the public? It doesn’t aid the investigation in any way — all it does is imply that she’s somehow less worthy of help than she would’ve been if the disappearance was entirely random.
We must demand better for the next generation of feminist leaders.
In both cases, what we’re seeing overall is the ‘perfect victim’ mentality in action. Based on an absurd ‘if’ statement, this mentality claims that if a woman follows all the rules set out by the patriarchy, then they are deserving of our empathy. But if they act in a way that pokes the bear, then it’s arguably their fault they got hurt or went missing. It started with Sarah Everard’s #shewasjustwalkinghome campaign, a viral message which, while arguably done with the best intentions, pedalled the implication that there is, somehow, a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way to be murdered. If you, as a woman, follow all the rules society sets out for you and still get killed, then it’s a tragedy.
But if you didn’t? Well, what do you expect?
From Sarah Everard’s murder onwards, despite all of us — men, women, and the media — having something of a mutual understanding that we need to take VAWG more seriously, things got worse. Maybe you hadn’t noticed, because it was a gradual process. We decided that Amber Heard was an exception to the “believe all women” rule. Then Megan Thee Stallion and Evan Rachel Wood. Murdered women stopped making the news, and by late last year, you could scroll through TikTok and be faced with an algorithm composed entirely of Johnny Depp memes.
Maybe you believed one woman, but not the other. Perhaps you don’t believe any of them at all. But collectively, over time, all these instances of victim-blaming worked to erode our public perception of gender equality which, if we’re being honest, was pretty shallow in the first place. This is why, as horrified as I am by the way Nicola Bulley’s mental health is being weaponized or by the implication that Pattinson’s murder was caused by her success, I’m not surprised by it.
And you shouldn’t pretend to be either. None of this victim-blaming exists in a vacuum.
For more information about emotional abuse and domestic violence, you can call The Freephone National Domestic Abuse Helpline, run by Refuge on 0808 2000 247.
For more information about reporting and recovering from rape and sexual abuse, you can contact Rape Crisis.
If you have been sexually assaulted, you can find your nearest Sexual Assault Referral Centre here. You can also find support at your local GP, voluntary organisations such as Rape Crisis, Women's Aid, and Victim Support, and you can report it to the police (if you choose) here.\
