Southern Spain, a warm summer night: after dancing salsa, I walk alone through the beautiful city back to my accommodation. A man is following me.
I can lose him for a short time, but a few streets later I see him behind me again, I start to run, panicked, full of fear. Make it to the front door, when I close it I see him only a few meters away. Behind the door, in safety, I collapse.
A South American capital: An acquaintance, a work colleague, invites you to dinner. But he doesn’t want to leave it at dinner, he throws me onto the bed, his whole body weight on me, only after minutes of struggling and pleading does he let go.
A man is sexually harassing me
South Asia, a capital in the summer heat: my guide recommends a market, the tuk-tuk driver drops me off. The place doesn’t look like the colorful, fresh fruit-packed market described in the book.
Instead, a large backyard, mostly men sell meat, it smells like dead animals. I walk a few meters until I notice that some of the men are focused on me, coming towards me together and with increasingly quick steps.
I turn around, wanting to go, they start running fast, I run for my life. Berlin, in Wedding. It’s only a few hundred meters between the subway exit and my apartment.
A man is sexually harassing me, I tell him clearly to leave me alone. The rejection only makes him more aggressive, he comes closer, pushes me back, swears at me, his friend pulls him back. I run home in a panic.
The police crime statistics 2022
I’ve been around a lot in my life. No matter where I’ve been, one thing is omnipresent on every continent: male violence. Women around the world are affected by the pervasiveness and impunity of male violence.
Last week, Home Secretary Nancy Faeser presented the 2022 crime statistics with the following words: “We are seeing increasing numbers of cases of rape, sexual assault and sexual assault.”
According to crime statistics, 92.4 percent of victims of crimes against sexual self-determination are women. These offenses include sexual harassment and “rape, sexual coercion and sexual assault in particularly serious cases, including death”. The latter offense increased by 20.1 percent in 2022.
The minister added that the Federal Criminal Police Office’s largest unreported study to date on crime experience recently showed that women felt significantly less secure than men, especially at night, in public and on public transport, which is then not used. More than half of women avoid certain places and means of transport at night.
The ubiquity of male violence
But the danger of male violence lurks not only at night or on public transport. In early 2021, a study by UN Women in Great Britain revealed that 97 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 24 had already experienced sexualized violence in the form of harassment in public spaces.
Girls in Brazil are on average between nine and ten years old when they are first sexually harassed. Almost none of the perpetrators are ever held accountable.
It is estimated that in Germany less than one percent (!) of all rapists (not just those reported) are held accountable for their crimes. In this country, every day a man tries to kill his (ex-)partner. He succeeds every second or third day.
It is a scandal that femicide in Germany is not a criminal offense in its own right and is not punished as severely as possible. And the vast majority of perpetrators are male: for every woman perpetrator of violent crime, there are about ten male perpetrators in all countries.
The American psychologist David P. Barash has clear words for this: “The overwhelming masculinity of violence is so pervasive in every human society that it is typically not even recognized as such; it is the ocean in which we swim.”
The Cost of Male Violence
So it can be said: our societies – our patriarchal societies – are characterized by the ubiquity and impunity of male violence. Male violence against women is a defining feature of our culture.
Whether harassment, digital violence and hate speech, violence in partnership (so-called “domestic” violence), manslaughter, murder, rampages, extremism, terrorism – almost all acts of violence in our societies are committed by men.
As a result, in 2021, 93.9 percent of prison inmates were male and only 6.1 percent were female. The author and economist Boris von Heesen shows this – and many other clear statistics – in his book “What Men Cost: The High Price of Patriarchy”.
Whether violence, discrimination, extremism, addiction or accidents: the total annual cost of toxic male behavior to the German state is at least 63 billion euros than that of women.
In 2018, an important agreement came into force
For example, men are more than 80 percent of the perpetrators of domestic violence and the almost 115,000 registered female victims in 2019 are only the bright field – it is estimated that only 20 percent of all cases are intimate partner violence.
The direct annual costs of male partnership violence against women alone amount to over 800 million euros – including costs for the police, judiciary, women’s shelters and health care.
If you add the indirect costs of domestic violence, such as illness, unemployment or trauma in children, this adds another almost 2 billion euros a year that this form of male violence costs the state.
And the biggest cost is the individual experiences of violence of all those millions of women behind these statistics. There are instruments and opportunities to take more vehement action against male violence against women.
In 2018, for example, an important international agreement came into force in Germany: the Istanbul Convention – the Convention to Prevent and Combat Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, better known by the name of the city where the treaty was signed in 2011.
“Family dramas” are reported too often in the media
But most recently in autumn 2022, an expert report reprimanded Germany for inadequate implementation of this important agreement. For example, in Germany there is no nationwide strategy to combat male violence against women, and there is also no national coordination center for combating this form of violence – although this is a core requirement of the Convention.
If we lived in a society where almost all men were subjected to some form of violence, there would be a national outcry, special funds would likely be released, and combating that violence would be a priority.
However, since those affected are women, this rich country does not even manage to set up and create a strategy and a coordination body to combat male violence against women. This makes me so angry.
What we can all directly do is be precise with our language. Too often the media still talks about “family dramas” or the like when men kill women.
Situation report on domestic violence in summer
The term “violence against women” is also not sufficient – where does this violence come from? It certainly doesn’t fall from the sky. It is a matter of male violence against women.
We need to identify dynamics in order to act against them. Nor are dark parks or poorly lit streets the culprits—it’s the men who too often turn these places into crime scenes.
Every woman in our society lives in insecurity because of the behavior of men. The problem is normalizing an accepted, violent understanding of masculinity that is pervasive.
At least Interior Minister Faeser promised that misogynistic crimes would be recorded and evaluated more precisely in the police statistics in the future.
In addition, a new situation report on domestic violence is to be presented in the summer, “because good prevention requires good data,” says Faeser. But that can only be a first, small step.
