We Do Not Have That Kind of Time. Dawn Intelligence.

It is a Wednesday in late April. The light is doing that thing it does at this latitude in spring, where it lasts longer than you expected and you keep losing track of the hour. Nothing in particular is happening. There is no headline. There is no hashtag. There is no high profile case dominating the front pages. By all accounts, this is a quiet week.

Three women in this country will be killed by men this week. Mostly by men who claimed to love them. Mostly in their own homes. You will not hear most of their names. By next Wednesday, three more. By the Wednesday after that, three more. And so on, in a rhythm so steady you could set a calendar by it, if anyone was looking.

This is the baseline. This is what an ordinary week of femicide looks like in the country I am writing from. It is the background hum we have been trained not to hear.

I want to begin somewhere a witch would begin. With what is being done in plain sight that the room has agreed not to see.

This essay is about the year 2158, which is when the United Nations estimates women might finally be equal at the current pace. About what an ordinary week of femicide actually looks like. About the gap between what the data is telling us and what the discourse is willing to say. About patience as the velvet glove on a very old fist. About what we do, given that we do not have that kind of time.

The gap

I am writing this in Edinburgh, in late April 2026. I walked past three different newspaper stands on the way to my desk this morning and not one of them had a woman’s death on the front page, which sounds like a good thing until you remember it does not mean women have stopped being killed. It means we have stopped reporting it. The deaths are happening. The reporting is what has gone quiet. There is a difference, and the difference is the entire problem.

I have spent the last six months in a strange double consciousness. W.E.B. Du Bois used that phrase first, talking about the experience of being a Black American, the always-being-aware-of-oneself-through-the-eyes-of-others. I am borrowing it. A lot of women, especially women doing this kind of work, end up living inside a version of it.

Here is mine. I work in the field of gender based violence prevention. In any given week, I am looking at fresh data on harassment, domestic abuse referrals, escalation patterns, hidden victimisation, across multiple regions of this country. The data does not stop. It updates daily. The pattern keeps going. It has its own pulse. If you sit with it long enough, you start to feel it move.

And in that same week, I am also a person who lives in the world. I open Instagram. I open TikTok. I go to events. I have conversations with people who do not work in this field. The texture of the conversation about violence against women in those spaces, in 2026, is curiously calm. Curiously settled. Curiously over.

You might have noticed that. The volume has gone down. The big organising movements of the late 2010s and early 2020s, MeToo and Reclaim These Streets and Everyone’s Invited, have all moved into a kind of historical mode. They are referred to in the past tense. They are taught as case studies. They are written about with the gentle sepia tone we use for things that are finished. The hashtag energy has migrated to other causes. The corporate feminism cycle, the brunches and the leadership panels and the pink filters, has consolidated into a kind of low grade ambient backdrop. Quote graphics. The occasional documentary.

And meanwhile the data keeps going.

That gap, between what the data is saying and what the discourse is willing to say, is what this essay is about. The gap is not new. The gap is, in some senses, the original problem. But the gap is widening, and the widening is dangerous, and not enough of us are saying so.

Something happened to me a few weeks ago. I was at an event. I will not say which one or where. There were women I respect there. Women older than me, with much more experience in this work than I have. We were talking about something else, work things, projects, the usual. One of the women, who I like, who has been on the right side of every issue I have ever cared about, said something offhand. She said, “I think we’re winning, you know. I really think we’re winning.”

She meant feminism. She meant the long arc of it.

I did not know what to say. I was sitting there with the most recent data from the police forces I work with running through my head. I was thinking about a specific borough I had been looking at the day before, where harassment reports against teenage girls had risen significantly year on year. I was thinking about a school the safeguarding lead had sent me about, where the boys had started using a particular Andrew Tate phrase as a casual greeting between classes.

We are not winning. I said it inside my head, because I am still British enough not to say it across a canape table. But I have been turning the moment over ever since. The fact that women I respect, women who would never lie to me, can sincerely think we are winning, is itself one of the most disturbing data points I encounter in this work. If she thinks we are winning, the people in the next ring out, the ones who were never that engaged with feminism in the first place, must be even more confident that we are winning. And that confidence is what allows the funding to be cut, and the legislation to be diluted, and the conversation to move on.

We are not winning. I do not say that to be bleak. I say it because the gap between what the people who care think is happening, and what is actually happening, is one of the central problems we have right now. It is also a deeply old problem. Women who could see what was coming and could not get the room to listen is one of the most consistent figures in the history we have. Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy and the curse of being disbelieved. Every woman doing this work is on some level operating in that lineage, and you can decide for yourself whether that is comforting or whether it is the worst news you will hear all week.

What has been hollowed out

Feminism, the public version of it, has been doing something strange for the last few years. I keep trying to find the right word for it. The closest I have got is professional consolidation. The militant phase of MeToo is over. The street movement phase of Reclaim These Streets is over. What is left is more polite. More institutionally legible. More brand friendly. It speaks at conferences. It writes for the Sunday papers. It runs leadership programmes. It posts on LinkedIn.

I do not have a problem with most of those things in themselves. I run a company. I speak at conferences. My mother runs leadership programmes. We post on LinkedIn. These are real things and they are part of how change happens, slowly, inside institutions.

But the consolidation has come at a cost. The radical feminist analysis, the structural critique of patriarchy, the argument that women are being killed by a system rather than by a series of unrelated bad men, has gone quiet. It is not in the mainstream conversation. It is in the academic journals. It is on Substacks like this one. It is at certain feminist events that fewer and fewer people seem to attend. It is not in the room with the politicians and the brand managers.

While it has gone quiet, the data has kept going.

That is the gap. The professional, institutional feminism is doing fine, in the sense that it is a recognisable category that fills column inches and gets funding. The radical structural feminism, the kind that names the system, has been quietly demoted to fringe, or academic, or too much.

The result is a public conversation about violence against women that operates within a frame that cannot actually solve it. The frame says the problem is bad men, individual bad men, and the response is to identify them and prosecute them and pass laws against them. The frame does not say the problem is the structure that produces the bad men in such numbers. The frame does not say the structure is patriarchy. The frame does not say the solution requires rebuilding institutions, redistributing resources, redefining what counts as ordinary.

There is a line of Audre Lorde’s I keep returning to. She is talking about the difference between the symbolic gesture and the structural commitment. She says, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. The line has been so over-quoted that people think it is rhetorical. It is not rhetorical. It is operational. It means: a feminism that uses the master’s frameworks, the master’s language, the master’s metrics, the master’s permission, will produce a feminism the master can live with. Which is the feminism we currently have. Which is the feminism that is failing the women being killed.

Patriarchy is the only system whose primary product is corpses and whose marketing budget is bigger than its body count. We are inside it. The brand is so successful that we cannot see the building.

I came to this work the way most people come to it. Imperfectly. Personally. Through anger and grief that took me a while to know what to do with. I am not going to do the autobiographical bit. I have written about it elsewhere in fragments, when I was ready.

What I will say is that I do this work because I had spent enough time looking at the data to be unable to look away from it. The data, when you actually engage with it, is impossible to read as anything other than an indictment of the structures we live inside. Silvia Federici, the Italian Marxist feminist who wrote Caliban and the Witch, makes an argument I think about almost daily. She argues that the European witch hunts, the burning of women between roughly 1450 and 1750, were not a medieval superstition that capitalism replaced. They were the violent foundation on which capitalism was built. The witch trials were how a particular kind of patriarchal economic order was installed. The bodies of women, especially older women, healers, midwives, women with land and knowledge and refusal in them, were the price of admission. Read her if you have not. It will rewire something.

I read Federici and the data I was working with started to look different. Femicide is not a glitch in the system. It is a feature. It is the thing the system was originally for.

That is when liberalism stops being available to you as a frame. You read Federici, you read Lorde, you sit with the actual numbers, and you cannot go back. The data is structural. The response has to be structural. And the structural response that is currently on offer, in this country in 2026, is inadequate.

On lineage

I am Caribbean. Let me actually talk about that for a minute, because it is not just a fact about me. It is where I do my thinking from. It is the tradition my brain is shaped by, and I want to bring you into it properly, not just nod at it.

The specifics. My grandparents came over from Soufriere, in St Lucia, in the Windrush years. Both of my parents grew up in this country. I am third generation. The island is, for me, inheritance more than memory. It is a real place I have a real claim on, but it is not, day to day, where I live or have lived. I want to be honest about that, because there is a tendency in diaspora discourse to overclaim. I am not a St Lucian woman in the sense that a woman in Soufriere right now is St Lucian. I am the granddaughter of people who left, raised in a country that has spent the last seventy years working out what to do with the people it told to come. That is a different thing. It is not a smaller thing. But it is its own thing.

What it does mean is that the Caribbean feminist tradition I am about to walk you through is not abstract for me. It is family. It is my grandmother’s expectations of me. It is my mother’s library. It is the books that were on the shelves when I was thirteen, and the books that should have been on the shelves and were not, and that I have spent my twenties tracking down.

The way “ancestors” gets used as a politics drives me a little bit mad. You know the gesture I mean. The vague invocation. The tote bag version of lineage. I love my actual ancestors. I am trying to do something more specific.

What I mean when I say Caribbean feminism is this. There is a tradition of women, mostly Black women, mostly from or descended from the islands, who have been writing the most useful feminist theory I know how to read. And when I say useful, I mean it does work. It does not sit pretty. It cuts.

Audre Lorde first. Her parents were from Grenada. She lived most of her life in New York. She is the one you have probably heard of, and the one who has, frankly, been flattened the most. The line you have seen on Instagram, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, that line comes from a paper she gave at a feminist conference at NYU in 1979. The conference had barely invited any Black women. Or working class women. Or lesbians, except as tokens. Lorde got up and said, in front of a room full of mostly white feminists, what does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy. That was the context. That was the room. The line that got onto your tote bag was, originally, a confrontation. It still is.

I read Sister Outsider when I was about 19. The essay I keep going back to is The Uses of Anger. She wrote it in 1981. She is talking, again, partly to white feminists, about why the reactions of white women to Black women’s anger are themselves a problem. She says, every woman has a well stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Anger as arsenal. Anger as stock. Anger as a resource you can draw on and use and direct at the actual problem.

That essay rewired something in me. It permitted something I had been trying to talk myself out of. It told me my anger was data, not damage. I am still working from that essay. I will probably be working from it for the rest of my life.

Then there is Sylvia Wynter. Jamaican. Still alive, in her nineties. She is harder to read than Lorde. Her sentences are long. Her references are dense. She is doing philosophy, properly, and she does not slow down for you. The argument she makes, when you have sat with it long enough to get it, is that the figure of “the human” in Western thought is not a neutral category. It is a specific construction. A particular kind of European man got designated as the human, and everyone else, women, Black people, Indigenous people, the colonised, got measured against him and found wanting. Her work is about what happens when you refuse that frame. It is a project I am still working on. I am not pretending I have finished it.

Hazel Carby. Born in Devon. Welsh father, Jamaican mother. Her 1982 essay “White Woman Listen” is one of the founding texts of Black British feminism, and it is shockingly under-read in this country given that it is one of our founding texts. The argument is direct. She is saying to the white feminist movement of the time, you cannot generalise from your experience of the family as a site of oppression to ours, because for Black women in Britain the family has often been the site of resistance against state racism. She is saying your feminism will not work if you do not let it be complicated by race. And she is saying it because she wants the feminism to work.

I want to flag something here, because it is important to me. All three of these women, Lorde, Wynter, Carby, are writing in part to white feminists. Their work is not hostile to white women. They wrote it for everyone. The whole point of “White Woman Listen” is that white women are part of this. The whole point of The Uses of Anger is that the reception of Black women’s anger by white women is something we have to work through together.

If you are a white woman reading this, I want to be really clear. Sacred Space is for you. This whole project is for you. The women I am naming wrote for you too. The reason I am naming Caribbean feminism specifically is not to draw a line away from anyone. It is to bring more of us into the room. To say, here are the writers I learned to think from, and you should know them too, because they are also, whether you knew it or not, your inheritance. We are doing this together or we are not doing it.

Other names. I will go faster, because we will be here all night otherwise.

Derek Walcott. My countryman, in a manner of speaking. Born in Castries, St Lucia, 1930. Won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. Wrote some of the most important poetry in the English language about being a Caribbean person, holding the African inheritance and the European inheritance and the islands themselves all at once, and refusing to choose between them. I did not grow up with him on the shelves automatically. I had to find him. Most St Lucian children of the diaspora do.

Maryse Condé from Guadeloupe. Novelist. Her book I, Tituba retells the Salem witch trials from the perspective of the only Black woman who was tried there. It changed how I think about who gets to be a witch and who gets to be a victim.

Erna Brodber from Jamaica. Sociologist, novelist. Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home is a strange book that took me three attempts to get into. It rewards you when you let it.

And Jean Binta Breeze, who passed in 2021. I am still grieving her, honestly. She was a dub poet. She performed her work, she wrote it, the two were not separable. Her poem “Riddym Ravings”, sometimes called The Mad Woman’s Poem, is one of the great works of late twentieth century English language poetry. If you have not heard her perform it, do me a favour. Pause this essay after we are done. Search her name. Listen. The recording is online.

Linton Kwesi Johnson is the dub poet most people have heard of. He is brilliant. The women were also there. Jean Binta Breeze. Lillian Allen. Louise Bennett, Miss Lou, before them, who basically invented the form even if she did not always get the dub poet label. The lineage is older than the men’s reputations make it look.

I have been thinking lately about lineage as a structure of accountability. We talk about ancestors as if they were simply behind us, in the past, watching benevolently. I think that is a sentimental misreading. Saidiya Hartman, the Black scholar of the archive, writes about the afterlife of slavery, the way the past is still operating in the present. The ancestors are not behind us. They are inside us. They are also the women being killed this week, who will be ancestors to someone in twenty years. The lineage runs in both directions.

What that means, practically, is that the women in my family who refused, somewhere along the line, to accept the fate that was being arranged for them, did not refuse it for me. They refused it for themselves. And I owe them, partly, by not accepting the fate currently being arranged for the women of my generation. I am 24 years old. I have been told my entire life that things are getting better. And every year that I have been alive, the women I work to protect have been dying faster.

The data and the discourse are diverging. The discourse says the worst is behind us. The data says the worst is right now.

The numbers

I want to do this carefully, because numbers can either land in your body or slide past it, and the difference depends almost entirely on how they are framed. Numbers are not neutral. They are an act of attention. The decision to count something is a political decision. The decision to count it in this category and not that one is a political decision. The decision to publish the count in this format and not that one is a political decision. By the time you receive a statistic, it has been through a series of political decisions, and the cleanness of the final figure tends to obscure that.

So when I give you these numbers, I want you to hear them as artefacts. As what was extracted, recorded, classified, allowed through the gate. Not as the violence itself.

The most recent United Nations report on gender parity estimated that at the current pace, full gender parity will not be reached until 2158. That is 132 years from now.

132 years means, in human terms, this. If a person born today had been born 132 years ago, they would have been born in 1894. Queen Victoria would have been on the throne. The motor car had been invented eight years earlier. There were no antibiotics. There was no women’s vote in this country. There were no women in Parliament. The Married Women’s Property Act, which finally allowed married women to own property in their own name, was 12 years old.

132 years from now, our descendants will be living in a world we cannot imagine. We have no idea what technology, what climate, what political situation will exist. And we are being told that, in that unimaginable distant future, women might finally be equal.

That is not a plan. That is a refusal to plan dressed up as a target.

More numbers. From Focus 2030. No country in the world has achieved gender equality. Not Sweden. Not Iceland. Not New Zealand. None of them. Women’s rights are actively regressing in 18 nations right now.

Over 40 percent of women globally live under restrictive abortion laws. Since the overturning of Roe v Wade in the United States in 2022, that number has gone up, not down. The second Trump administration has accelerated the trend.

In 2022 alone, the United Nations recorded 89,000 gender related killings of women globally. That is the highest figure in over two decades. The numbers since have not improved.

In the UK, in the year ending March 2024, the Office for National Statistics recorded that 29 percent of homicide victims were women. The total number of homicides fell that year, slightly. From 585 down to 570. Every news outlet that reported the statistics led with that fall, as if it was a victory.

It was not a victory. The fall was in the male homicide rate. Female homicides did not fall. The contexts in which women were killed are themselves an indictment.

Eighty two percent of intimate partner murder victims in the UK are women. Ninety six percent of those women were killed by a current or former partner. Seventy eight percent of all female homicides take place in the woman’s own home. For men, homicide is more likely to come at the hands of acquaintances or strangers, on the street, in a fight. For women, homicide comes from the man you sleep next to.

Stay with me. The next one is the hardest.

The Femicide Census in this country reports that 59.2 percent of women killed by men show evidence of overkill. That is the technical term. Overkill. It means excessive violence beyond what was needed to cause death. More than one in five women murdered by men were subjected to post mortem violations. Nearly six percent experienced sexual violence during or immediately after death.

Read those numbers again, because we have been trained to skim past them. I have been. I read them in the report and my eyes slid off them the first time, and I had to go back and force myself.

These are not random crimes. These are not the result of mental illness. These are not the result of substance abuse or any of the other excuses we have got used to applying to violence against women. These are acts steeped in misogyny, control, and dehumanisation. They follow a pattern. The pattern is structural. The structure is patriarchy.

I am going to use that word. Patriarchy. I know it is unfashionable. I know it is the kind of word that gets you eye rolls in mixed company. I am going to keep using it because it is the correct word. There is a system that produces these outcomes. The system has a name. The name is patriarchy. We can argue about whether the term is too academic or too 1970s, but we cannot argue that the system does not exist while women keep being killed in their own kitchens.

The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 promised progress. It expanded the definition of abuse to include coercive control. It introduced Domestic Abuse Protection Notices. It created Local Authority Domestic Abuse Commissioners. These are real things. They are real progress.

But the enforcement is patchy. The funding is patchy. The training of police, courts, social workers, on how to use the new powers, is patchy. The result is legislation that, on paper, gives women significant new protection, and in practice, women are still being killed at a rate of three per week in this country.

Names

I want to give you names. Because I have been talking about numbers and the numbers can blur into wallpaper.

Sarah Everard. Murdered in March 2021 by a serving Metropolitan Police officer who used his warrant card to falsely arrest her on the street. She was 33. Her case did become a national event because she was, as the discourse uncomfortably said at the time, the kind of victim who gets coverage. Young, white, professional, abducted by a stranger.

Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman. Murdered in June 2020, less than a year before Everard. Two sisters in their thirties, killed in a north London park by a 19 year old who had been radicalised online. Their bodies were not found for 36 hours, despite the family raising the alarm, because the Metropolitan Police mishandled the missing persons case. Two officers later took selfies with the bodies. Bibaa and Nicole were Black. The case got a fraction of the coverage Everard’s did. Their mother, Mina Smallman, has been one of the most articulate and devastating voices on race, gender, and police failure in this country in the last five years.

Sabina Nessa. Murdered in September 2021 by a stranger in a south London park, on her way to meet a friend. She was 28. A primary school teacher. British Bangladeshi. Less coverage than Everard.

Zara Aleena. Murdered in June 2022 in Ilford, walking home, by a stranger with a long history of violence against women. She was 35. Of Iranian heritage. She was a future barrister. Less coverage.

Brianna Ghey. Murdered in February 2023 by two teenagers in Cheshire. She was 16. A trans girl. Her case sits at the intersection of misogyny, transphobia, and the particular vulnerability of teenage girls who are already marginalised.

Olivia Pratt-Korbel. Shot in her own home in Liverpool in August 2022, when a gunman chasing another man burst through her front door. She was nine. Nine years old.

These are some of the cases that did make headlines. There are hundreds that did not. Three women a week, on average, in this country. Most you have not heard of. Most you will not hear of.

This is what the structure looks like.

There is one more thing I want to say about the data. I have read more datasets in the last two years than is probably healthy. One of the things that becomes obvious very quickly when you read these datasets is that the data we have is not the violence. The data is what was reported, recorded, processed, classified, and not lost in the system.

Every step of that pipeline loses information. Women do not report. When they do report, the police do not always record. When the police record, the case does not always make it to court. When it makes it to court, the conviction rate is what it is.

Women’s Aid have been pointing out for years that the ONS data still lacks clarity on coercive control, on repeat victimisation, on psychological abuse. We do not even see the full scale of what is happening, let alone tackle it.

So when you hear someone say the official statistics show that violence against women is roughly stable, or has slightly fallen, or has slightly risen, what they are actually telling you is that the visible part of the iceberg has moved by some small amount. The invisible part of the iceberg, the bit that does the actual structural damage, we do not measure.

It is worse than the data says. It is always worse than the data says. The data is the floor, not the picture.

Hortense Spillers, the Black feminist literary scholar, has a phrase I think about a lot. She talks about the difference between the body and the flesh. The body is what gets counted. The flesh is what is underneath. The flesh is what carries the harm that does not get counted, the harm that does not have a category yet. Most of the violence women experience lives in the flesh, not the body. The data sees the body. It does not see the flesh. The flesh is what we are also responsible for.

The cultural moment

What does this look like, right now, in 2026?

It looks like the long shadow of the Pelicot case in France. If you somehow missed that case: Gisèle Pelicot was a French woman whose husband, Dominique, had been drugging her unconscious and inviting strangers, more than 70 men over the course of almost a decade, to come to their home and rape her. She did not know it was happening. The case came to light in 2020 when Dominique was caught filming up a woman’s skirt in a supermarket. The police searched his computer. They found everything.

What was extraordinary about the Pelicot case is what came out about the men. The 70 plus men who raped her were not strangers. They were not professional rapists. They were not gang members. They were her husband’s friends, neighbours, acquaintances. Nurses. Firefighters. Men with wives and daughters of their own. Men who, when interviewed, said things like “I thought it was a sex game” and “she was asleep but I assumed she had agreed.”

They were ordinary men. That is the point. Ordinary men. Not monsters. Not perverts. Not criminals before this. Just normal French men in a normal French village who, when offered the chance to rape an unconscious woman by her husband, said yes.

The case ended in December 2024. All 51 men on trial were convicted. Dominique got 20 years. The other sentences ranged from three to 15. Gisèle waived her right to anonymity, which she did not have to do, and faced the men in court, and gave one of the most remarkable feminist statements of the century, which is that shame must change sides. That her shame was not hers. That it belonged to them.

That case is, I think, the single most important feminist event of this decade. Not because it was unusual, but because it revealed how unspecial the men were.

There is a feminist concept that has been doing the rounds since around the 1970s, called rape culture. Susan Brownmiller and others. The argument is that sexual violence is not the action of a deviant minority but the logical extension of a culture that produces consent as ambiguous, women’s bodies as available, and men’s desire as entitled. The Pelicot case is the empirical proof of the concept. Seventy two men. None of them, prior to this, identifiable as the kind of person you would warn your friends about. All of them, when offered the opportunity, willing.

It is now April 2026, almost a year and a half after the verdict, and one of the things I want to flag is how quickly that case has been allowed to recede. There was a documentary. There were the obligatory anniversary pieces. Gisèle has continued to speak. But the structural conversation that case demanded, the one about ordinary men, the one about what we do with the information that ordinary men are in fact dangerous in numbers we have been refusing to acknowledge, did not happen. We did the cultural mourning and then we moved on.

The other thing happening right now is that the men we have been told for years to admire keep getting outed as serial perpetrators, and the men’s industries that produced them keep refusing to learn anything from it.

Sean “Diddy” Combs. The criminal proceedings. The civil cases. The video footage that became public in 2024 of him assaulting Cassie Ventura in a hotel hallway. The wider allegations. The witness lists. The patterns of behaviour across decades that everyone in the music industry knew about and no one stopped. Diddy is not unusual. Diddy is a worst case version of how the music industry has functioned for a very long time, and the only thing surprising about the case is that he is finally facing legal consequences.

Conor McGregor. The civil verdict in Ireland in 2024. The rape case which the criminal courts had refused to bring but which the civil court found him liable for. McGregor is now part of the international far right circuit. He has spoken at far right rallies. He has been welcomed at Donald Trump’s events. The transition from MMA fighter to civilly convicted rapist to far right political figure took about 18 months and has cost him very little, because the audience that loved him as a fighter does not particularly mind the rape verdict. Some of them prefer it.

Andrew Tate, who I will spend a whole essay on later in this season, sits in the same constellation. The criminal proceedings are one thing. The fanbase is another. The fanbase is younger every year.

What ties these men together is that the cultural infrastructure that produced them and protected them is still there. The music industry that protected Diddy. The combat sports industry that produced McGregor. The social media platforms that built Tate’s audience. None of those infrastructures have been meaningfully reformed. The men get charged, sometimes. The systems do not.

Then, closer to home, there is the political threat. Reform UK. Nigel Farage. The polling that has Reform either ahead or close to it depending on the week. The Conservative leadership under Kemi Badenoch positioning rightward to compete. The general drift of British politics toward a Trump adjacent populism that is openly contemptuous of “woke” issues, by which they always mean, in the end, women’s safety and minority rights.

If Reform UK form a government, or even a significant part of a coalition, in the next election, the practical consequences for VAWG policy will be severe. Funding for refuges will be cut. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s office will be hollowed out. The Online Safety Act, which is already inadequate, will be weakened further. The police will be told that “real crime” is more important than “harassment.” We have seen this script before. We have seen it in the United States in real time over the last 15 months.

The Labour government, who came in with serious manifesto commitments on halving violence against women within a decade, has been wavering on the funding required to actually deliver that. The conversation about VAWG in this country is structurally fragile. The window for serious policy may be closing.

If you needed a reason for urgency that is not statistical, that is your reason.

The aesthetics

You cannot understand the political moment without understanding how it is being aestheticised.

The tradwife pipeline is one of the more disturbing things to watch as a feminist on the internet right now. You know the content even if you have not sought it out. Hannah Neeleman, Ballerina Farm, blonde, eight children, married to the heir of an airline fortune, performing the labour of an idealised 1950s farm wife. Nara Smith, filming herself making baby food and bread and chewing gum from scratch in haute couture. Estee Williams, evangelising for traditional gender roles outright.

The aesthetic is gauzy. The kitchens are immaculate. The lighting is golden. And the message, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, is that women would be happier if we just gave up on the whole feminism thing and went back to baking.

This is not nostalgia. This is reactionary politics with a Pinterest board. And it is enormously effective on young women who have grown up with girlboss culture and burned out on it. The promise is rest. The reality is dependence. The thing the tradwife content does not show you is what happens when the husband leaves, or hits you, or refuses you access to the bank accounts.

There is a wing of this content I want to flag. The trad witch. Women who have repackaged tradwife aesthetics with paganism, herbalism, “wisdom of the ancestors” content. Pre-modern feminism that is essentially patriarchy with sage. The actual witch was burned for refusing patriarchy. The trad witch is selling you a candle and a calligraphy course.

Susan Faludi wrote a book in 1991 called Backlash. Her argument was that every period of feminist progress in modern history has been followed by a period of cultural reaction, in which the gains are aestheticised, sentimentalised, and rolled back. She was writing about the 1980s. She was, we now realise, also describing every decade since. The tradwife pipeline is the 2020s version. Glossier. More individuated. Better lighting. Same project.

Pop feminism is doing weirder things too. The “I’m just a girl” trend, post ironic for a while, has hardened. Girl math. Girl dinner. The intentional dumbing down. I get the appeal. The world has been hostile to women’s competence for a very long time. Performing incompetence can feel like a form of rest. But the rest is a trap. The rest is what they want.

Feminism has become entertainment. The corporate version is a marketing window. The tradwife pipeline is a counter revolution in real time. And meanwhile, the women being killed continue to be killed.

I want to do one thing here. The only feminist response to a woman being murdered is to refuse to let her be a statistic. So pause this essay for thirty seconds. Open another tab. Go to the Counting Dead Women project run by Karen Ingala Smith. Read the names from the last month. Just the last month. See how long the list is.

That is what we are accelerating action against.

What now

Awareness is not action. Awareness without urgency is performance. And performance is what kills us.

We have spent a decade building incredible feminist awareness. MeToo. Reclaim These Streets. Everyone’s Invited. Enormous archives of testimony. We have changed the cultural conversation in some real ways.

We have not, in that decade, stopped women being killed. The rate has gone up.

The question for the next decade is not how to raise awareness. The awareness is raised. The question is how to move from awareness to infrastructure. From hashtag to system. From sentiment to structural change. The legislation already exists. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 is on the books. The political will exists in pockets. What is missing is the connective tissue between what we know and what we do.

The women who already know what to do are the specialist organisations. Refuge. Women’s Aid. Sistah Space, in Hackney, working specifically with African and Caribbean heritage women. Southall Black Sisters, who have been doing this for over forty years and have repeatedly had to fight the government to keep their funding. Imkaan, the umbrella for Black and minoritised women’s services. Karma Nirvana on so-called honour based abuse. Counting Dead Women. The Femicide Census. Your local rape crisis centre.

These are the organisations that have been telling the institutions what they need to do for years. Mostly they have been ignored or underfunded or both. They are the actual experts. The next time you see a policy announcement on VAWG, look at which of these organisations have been consulted. If none of them have, the policy is likely to fail the women who are most at risk.

If you have money, set up a small monthly direct debit to one of them. Five pounds, ten, twenty. Consistency matters more than amount. If you have a vote, write to your MP about specific policy, not general concern. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s resource. Refuge funding ringfencing. Implementation auditing.

If you have a young woman in your life, share this. Talk about it. Make it impolite to be calm about it. If you have a young man in your life, this is also your responsibility. The radicalisation pipeline I will be writing about in a later essay is real. The boys are being radicalised in their bedrooms. Talk to them before the algorithm does.

Small things. Not enough. But they are infrastructure, and infrastructure is how we get from a 132 year wait to something faster.

Time

I want to end with something harder.

The hardest thing about this work, the thing that nearly broke me when I was younger and that I have had to find a different relationship with as I have got older, is the way time bends inside it. You are working on something whose horizon is 132 years out, and whose data is updating every single day. You are looking at women who died last year and women who will die next month and women whose great great great great granddaughters are who we are nominally working for. The temporal scale of this work is enormous, and the urgency is right now. Both are true. You have to hold them at the same time.

Witches understand this. The actual witches, not the Instagram ones. Healers, midwives, priestesses, the women whose practices were criminalised across every culture that decided to consolidate patriarchal power. They understood time as something you stand in, not something you stand outside of. The past is in you. The future is in you. The dead are in you. The not-yet-born are in you. You do the work in the present because the present is the only place the work can be done, but you do it on behalf of the entire timeline, in both directions.

I am working on behalf of women who lived four hundred years ago. I am working on behalf of women who will live four hundred years from now. I am also working on behalf of the woman who will be killed by her partner in this country tonight, whose name I do not yet know. I am working on behalf of my grandmother, who came over from St Lucia in the Windrush years and built a life here that her daughter and her granddaughter could stand on. I am working on behalf of the granddaughters I do not have yet, who will inherit whatever it is we manage to build now.

The lineage is the practice. The practice is the politics. The politics is the work. The work is what we have.

Two thousand one hundred and fifty eight is what they say we will be equal at the current pace.

We are not waiting that long. Not for ourselves. Not for the dead. Not for the women whose names we will learn this week. Not for any of us.

If you are still here, thank you. Sit with it. Light something if you light things. Write to someone you love. Send a small amount of money to a women’s organisation if you can. Do something this week that the ordinary version of yourself would not do, because the ordinary version of yourself is what the structure is counting on.

Reading list

On lineage and structure

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984), especially “The Uses of Anger” and “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004)
Hazel Carby, “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood” in The Empire Strikes Back (1982)
Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom” (2003)
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (2007)
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987)
Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991)
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975)

Caribbean writing

Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948-1984 and Omeros (1990)
Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986)
Erna Brodber, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980)
Jean Binta Breeze, The Arrival of Brighteye and Other Poems (2000)
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (1988)

Data and current research

The Femicide Census, latest annual reports at femicidecensus.org
Counting Dead Women project, Karen Ingala Smith, kareningalasmith.com
ONS Crime Statistics, Year ending March 2024
UN Women, Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The Gender Snapshot
Focus 2030, Women’s Rights Worldwide dashboard

Organisations to support

General

Refuge: refuge.org.uk
Women’s Aid: womensaid.org.uk

Specialist services

Sistah Space (African and Caribbean heritage women): sistahspace.org
Southall Black Sisters (Black and minoritised women, 40+ years of work): southallblacksisters.org.uk
Imkaan (umbrella organisation for specialist BME women’s services): imkaan.org.uk
Karma Nirvana (so-called honour based abuse): karmanirvana.org.uk

Caribbean region

WOMANTRA (Trinidad and Tobago): womantra.org
CAFRA (Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action): cafra.org
The Women’s Resource and Outreach Centre (Jamaica)

Calls to action

Donate. Set up a small monthly direct debit to one of the organisations above. Five pounds is enough to start. Consistency matters more than amount.
Write to your MP. Specifically, about the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s resourcing, refuge funding ringfencing, and implementation auditing of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021.
Read. Pick one book from the list above and actually finish it. Then pass it on.
Share this essay with one woman in your life who has gone quiet about this stuff. The conversation only widens if we widen it.
Subscribe to keep reading the rest of this season.

This essay accompanies Episode 1 of Sacred Space. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Sacred Space is a feminist podcast and Substack written by Leah Garrett. New episodes Wednesdays. New essays the same day.