I woke up around 6am this morning. After rearranging dogs so that I wasn’t clinging to the edge of the bed, I should have gone back to sleep. Instead I made that error of picking up my phone and looking at Twitter. Ok, so I might have wanted to see what people were saying about last night’s episode of Death in Paradise, but that’s not really an excuse.

What I saw enraged me. A Daily Mail headline asking “Did living in the shadow of his high achieving wife lead to unthinkable tragedy?” This referred to the murder of Epsom College head Emma Pattison and her 7 year old daughter by her husband.

That was bad enough, but then I discovered the previous day’s headline. Apparently the murderer was “desperate to do more with his days” after his business failed.

Suggesting that either of these things is remotely an excuse, particularly in a headline, perpetuates attitudes that have no place in a civilised society.

The media tries to construct a false narrative that women being murdered by their domestic partner  is “isolated” rather than two or three occurrences per week.

For as long as men have been abusing and murdering women, their excuses for doing so have carried much more weight in society than they deserve.

Women’s behaviour, clothes, sexual history, earnings, weight, or careers are just some of the things that have been blamed rather than the behaviour of the perpetrator themselves.

I am fed up of the media gaslighting women into believing that they are responsible for the behaviour of abusive men.

It’s high time every single journalist, editor and headline writer had on their desk the End Violence against Women Coalition’s excellent and recently updated  Media guidelines on violence against Women on their desks. They should check every story, every angle, every headline against them to make sure that they aren’t just lazily reproducing a misogynist trope or stereotype.

Had the Mail journalists done so before posting these stories, they would have read:

Avoid the narrative that one life event ‘led to’ any
violence that occurred.

Don’t use: The loss of job and financial pressure led
to murder; husband murders wife after her affair.
Phrasing stories this way makes it sound like
violence is an obvious next step in response to
these events, when in fact the only cause of the
violence was the perpetrator. Lots of people lose
their jobs or have an unfaithful partner and most
do not turn to abuse and violence. Women and girls
get stressed too, yet commit disproportionately
fewer violent crimes than men and boys. Job losses,
financial pressures, and affairs are not the cause of
VAWG: abusive men are.

One of the things that the guidelines say is that every report of violence against women should include helpline numbers where women experiencing abuse can seek advice. The Mail fails to do that.

We need people to call out journalists, or, better still, stop buying their papers until we get a better quality media, one which seeks to give an accurate account of the extent of violence against women and girls in our society. This is one of the many things we need to do to change our hopelessly misogynist culture and put us on a path to ending men’s violence against women and girls for good.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings