‘As Kyle Clifford rots in jail, Andrew Tate walks free’
When Louise Hunt ditched Kyle Clifford, he did not decide to be a better man. He did not try to win her back. He did not focus his attentions on the other women he was seeing. He went out and bought rope, a crossbow, a knife, and duct tape, and searched for online videos of crowing misogynist Andrew Tate.
He turned up at Louise’s family home, stabbed her mum to death, and then raped and tortured Louise for two and a half hours as she lay next to her mother’s body. He killed her, and her sister when she returned home, and then put their surviving sister and dad through the hell of a trial because, while he admitted the killings, his fragile ego did not want to admit he had to force himself on his ex-girlfriend.
The court heard Clifford blamed Louise’s entire family for the break-up, because they’d never liked him. He didn’t have the self-awareness to acknowledge that he annihilated a family for being excellent judges of character. He tried to take his own life to escape justice, but was incompetent even at that. He was such a coward he didn’t even face them in court.
The prosecution attempted to use the fact he had searched up Tate’s videos first as evidence, but the defence argued it out as prejudicial. It made no difference. It is only after the conviction that we now know he watched videos of a self-confessed misogynist, who has been accused of rape and sex trafficking, and who allegedly texted one victim the words “I love raping you”. He has been released from house arrest in Romania and fled to Florida, where a fresh criminal investigation has been opened. He also faces charges in the UK. Tate denies all the accusations against him, but he has indisputably made a killing from misogyny. That is not a crime, but it should be.
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Nicholas Razzell)
This story plays out again, and again. Every three days a woman is murdered by a man. In the past five years, 175 women have been murdered by their sons. Ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands, bodies shoved in suitcases, found in drains, children killed in their beds. Sometimes women kill a man, but if they were doing it at the same rate as men there’d be uproar and inquiries. There wouldn’t be an MP reading out a list of names once a year while bugger all changes.
Make no mistake: this is a slaughter. And it is done purely in the name of power. For a man who feels he has lost it to regain it from a woman who had just enough of the stuff to say ‘no’. And Britain is not the only place where this happens. In the rest of the world, there are 100 million women who have simply… disappeared.
Let me say that again, because you skimmed over it a little quickly. One hundred million . The equivalent, if you’re into comparisons, of the Holocaust sixteen times over. Or 66,000 Titanics sinking. Remember the Norway massacre by Anders Breivik? Sixty-nine young people slaughtered. Well, imagine that happening every day for 3,835 years. Yeah. That many.
Boys outnumber girls, very slightly, when they’re born. If they get a good diet and are lucky enough to live in a wealthy country like yours and mine – you’re among the 30 per cent of the world with the internet, so you’re ahead of the game – women will outlive men, for simple biological reasons. They are more resistant to disease, deal better with the sniffles, and if you can survive childbirth you can survive pretty much anything.
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PA)
But there are many parts of the world where males significantly outnumber women. These are in the parts where the effects of poor diet and disease would, naturally, mean there are slightly more women. But in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the girls who should have been born are not there. In these places girls are more likely to die at every stage of their lives; they are more likely to be aborted, abandoned, to be denied medical care, to be abused, neglected, beaten and murdered. In China alone there are 50million women who ought to be there, but just aren’t.
Even if they survive, in most of the world girls are seen as less deserving of education, first aid, a doctor’s visit, gynaecology, property, a driving licence, or the protection of the law. And before you stop and think how glad you are your country isn’t like that, here in the UK and in most of the developed world women are less likely to earn the same as men for the same job, to be elected to Parliament or to become CEO of a company. If one of us is raped, a jury will be asked to consider whether we were “asking for it”, and the man will argue, as Clifford did, he doesn’t need to do that to get laid.
In Britain, 66% of those claiming unemployment benefit are women. Recessions and rounds of redundancies hit them harder than men – women are more likely to work in the public sector which is regularly cut, more likely to work part-time, and are generally seen as more expendable by bosses. There are plenty of employers who think they’ll keep the man on, because he has a family to feed, and let the woman go because it’s a lifestyle choice to have children.
Misogyny costs every man, only he’s not counting it. It costs him taxes to fund and run the courts, prisons, police, social services, the people who clean the blood up at crime scenes. It costs him friends and lovers, causes arguments, fuels family-breakups, employment claims. Sometimes, he may lose a loved one, or he may just feel he’s lost something when his mum, partner, sister, daughter, friend or co-worker is having some of the little power they have taken away by a man who is threatened by it.
It costs every woman, too. It costs little girls their self-respect when a little boy in the playground mocks their femininity, or says they can’t do it because they’re female. It costs teenagers the confidence they need to become healthy adults, when they are told they are too fat, too thin, too clever, too stupid, too sexy, or not sexy enough. It costs every woman peace of mind, safety, the ability to walk home in the dark, the right to have a drink with friends, the ability to decide for herself what she does and who with. With misogyny running rampant amid the algorithms on social media, men’s sanity is being twisted at every stage of their development.
It’s not called misognyny. It’s boys being boys. They’re only kids. It’s teenaged hormones. It’s how men think. It’s the battle of the sexes. Has anyone who said those words ever stopped to ask themselves why it’s a battle, and what exactly you’re fighting for? Women are fighting to be heard, and men to be wilfully deaf. Even those who consider themselves not misogynists nevertheless overlook, ignore, and don’t speak up when it’s their son, their brother, their mate, perpetrating it, or liking Tate’s videos. It would not be acceptable to make a fortune out of promoting the hate of a minority. So why is it fine to do it to the one bit of society which should be in the majority, if only they weren’t being killed at such a clip?
With race hate and gay hate, two things changed: the law, and social attitudes, in that order. It became a crime, and while the first generation just buttoned their lip the next grew up in a world where colour, creed or sexual behaviour mattered less. And the murder rate fell. We can do the same with the three women murdered every week in this country, and by example do something to correct the 100million missing worldwide, if we just make misogyny the hate crime that it is.
Catch these buggers early. Pull them up by the ears at school. Ban it from pubs and the workplace. Make it socially unacceptable to be this unacceptable, and in one generation we will have saved thousands of lives, and billions of pounds. We will have saved our granddaughters. So on International Women’s Day, do this one thing: make better men.
