Kempton Park Femicide: Telling Women What to Do Doesn’t Stop Predatory Men

GOOD Statement by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary-General:

Seven women are dead, but the messages we keep sending are wrong.

In a functional society women should not have to change their behaviour and stop living the normal lives they want to, just to remain safe. The burden of change should fall squarely on men.

But with fears of a serial killer rising in Kempton Park with the discovery of the seven bodies, once again, before the bodies are cold, instructions are flowing to women.

Be vigilant. Watch what you wear. Run in groups. Don’t go out at night. Change your routine. Share your location. Carry something sharp.

We’ve heard the script so often that it’s become background noise. It is aimed at the wrong people.

Not all men are perpetrators, but the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are men. As a society we need to shift the burden of prevention onto the ones who do the bullying, the harassing, threatening, stalking, hurting and killing.

Families and the education systems must lead in educating our boys, and the criminal justice system must lead in holding them to account. Early intervention, and swift and harsh intervention when they cross the line.

A society that is unable to tell its women to live full lives is an abnormal society. Telling women to live smaller, in a permanent state of calculation, is not freedom. It is a curfew we have normalised and almost stopped noticing.

This is not new. For years, women have done the work, have mapped safe routes in their heads before leaving the house, kept keys between their fingers, sent their location to a friend “just in case,” counted down the minutes until they were expected to arrive.

This work should not belong to women, alone. It should primarily belong to men.

Men must be the ones told not to kill, not to harass, not to stalk, and not to look away when a friend does, or laugh off the comment, the joke, that “boys will be boys.”

That is where real prevention starts: not in a woman’s running route, but how fathers and male peers shape boys and male conduct.

I call on every man reading this to ask women in their lives how safe they feel right now. Ask your sister, your partner, your mother, your colleague, your friend. And do something positive, however small, to stop the injustice.

Until men must take responsibility for their behaviour, including the way they exercise power and bodily functions, women cannot be free.

GOOD Manifesto on GOOD Governance: Upholding principles of GOOD governance.

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