Our approach to violence against women and children is passive

“We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women,” said US educator Jackson Katz.

I love the fact that someone pointed out the simple mistake of omitting that violence against women has to be committed by someone; girls fall pregnant by men … We are hurt mostly by men.

We are certainly not doing this injustice to ourselves; someone is hurting us – and it’s an injustice not appropriating blame correctly. Someone is doing this; someone is hurting the female population – and it is not Casper the friendly ghost.

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We are not fixing the problem, be it be omission or by commission. And we are failing the hundreds of thousands of women who are being violated … by the bogeyman, of course!

I agree the blame game can only get us so far as a society, but the appropriation of responsibility allows us to diagnose the problem, probably medicate and help it to heal… But as is, we act as though there is no wound that needs to heal. We are blaming the skin, not the scab.

Our approach to violence against women and children is passive. While we acknowledge that it exists, we are also trying to not offend those who we believe the problem lies with.

Sure, let us not offend each other with hashtags such as men are trash – but let’s admit that these crimes are being committed by someone, a specific gender… Name that gender; add them in the data collection, because if you cannot identify it, how do you think you can heal it?

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There is a portion of our society that is sick, be it psychologically or otherwise, and there needs to be rectification.

Stop counting the victims and count the victimisers, then perhaps we can start healing. Hold people accountable and then, perhaps, the number of victims will decrease.

In light of the latest crime statistics, what does our inept policing do? Read the numbers and revel in them, or use the patterns exposed by these numbers to address the dangers?

We are counting numbers and in turn, doing nothing with the sums. Women and children are dying and it has to stop.