Lockdown violence blamed on 'misogyny'

Violence has soared globally since nations throughout the world adopted the WHO's stay-at-home (lockdown) recommendation in lockstep. An Israeli NGO has now documented a sharp increase in murders committed by those in relationships with their victims in what has been described as a “frightening trend" in Israel as the nation moved from lockdowns to mandatory quarantines when exposed to an infected person. 

In 2022, Israel saw the rate of femicide increase by 50 percent from the year before, according to the Israel Observatory on Femicide (IOF).

Because they're women?

Founder of the IOF and Hebrew University Professor Shalva Weil says femicide is defined as “the intentional killing of women because they are female.” 

Weil does not explain why she assumes women killed by their partners were killed "because they are female,” as opposed to being killed for reasons unrelated to gender. Men make up one third of homicide victims committed by intimate partners globally (p.11). Weil does not say whether she considers those men to have been killed because they are men.

Equality

While the 33% male victim rate in partner murders may be shocking to those unfamiliar with partner violence research, even that figure does not tell the full story. Men actually comprise half of all partner violence victims and should be half the homicide victims if not for biological differences in size and strength. Israel National News reports:

Prof. Zeev Weinstock of the University of Haifa, one of the world's leading experts on violence between spouses, revealed this week the truth about violence between spouses, a truth hidden from the public.

Weinstock made an emotional speech at the first ever meeting of the Distributive Justice and Social Equality Committee, headed by MK Mickey Zohar (Likud). "For almost 50 years we have known that men's violence towards women takes place in similar proportions to the violence that women use against men in intimate relationships, in almost every culture and society that we know," said Weinstock, “from traditional societies to liberal Western societies.”

"In addition, we know that in the motivations for violence, there is no difference between men and women. For the same reasons that men beat women, women beat men. The results are different, because of the differences between men and women, and men's physical endurance - they are injured less and therefore arrive less to the emergency rooms. So the visibility of the problem is very high in the case of women, but the motivations and the violent behavior are not a peculiarity of either particular gender."

Escalation

Prof. Weinstock went on to explain that much partner violence is a reaction to violence from the other partner.

The expert also told the committee about a study that determined that the women who are most at risk of being harmed by men are those who themselves engage in physical violence against men.

Solution?

Weil does not advocate rolling back public policies that correlate with huge spikes in violence. For example, after the Supreme court banned school prayer, violent crime saw a six-fold increase. Increased welfare benefits as well correlate with an increase in violent crime.

Instead, Weil endeavors to spread awareness and knowledge of women who died from domestic violence, without explaining why she's not reporting violence against women during the more than one million annual sexual assaults, robberies or other attacks on women in the US in which the perpetrators are strangers (p. 1). She also does not explain her failure to report on the 78% of murder victims who are men — 78% in the US; 79% globally (pp. 28, 136), despite comprising just about half of the population. 

The Israel Observatory on Femicide was established in 2020 by Prof. Shalva Weil at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The purpose of the Observatory is to collect and monitor data and narratives about the murder of women, both quantitative and qualitative, and provide means for building an ongoing knowledge base to eradicate the phenomenon. [Emphases added].

Failure

Israel’s largest news outlet, YNet News, reported, however, that spreading knowledge of violence did not stop violence, emphasizing that the murder rate of women doubled "despite an increased sense of awareness and amid what is considered a lack of mobilization to address the ‘frightening trend'." The failed “awareness” efforts included displays of women lying in coffins in front of Israeli courts to represent victims of domestic violence during International Women's Day events.

Real objectives

Weinstock reports that some feminists are purposefully turning the violence issue into a gender issue by knowingly reporting incidents as gender based even when the man is the victim of spousal violence. 

[Women are automatically referred to as victims of violence, while men are typically labeled as perpetrators of violence] even in cases where this is not true at all. Even in cases where it is the opposite. Even in cases where it is mutual.

Solution or objective?

One feminist, a socialist city council member in the Canary Islands named Aurelia Vera, does not stop at advocating awareness. Instead, Vera has put forward a unique approach to combating violence and advancing women's political empowerment.

From her elected position, Vera advocates castrating 25% of men and boys. “We have to stop men from governing so they give the power to us women.” 

"And if we cut off the ***** of male babies at birth, not only will they no longer be able to have sons, but they also won't develop the hormones to give them their physical strength."

COVID policy

Weil also noted that COVID measures played a significant role in the fluctuation of murder trends in Israel, as well as around the world, over the last few years. She specified how COVID rules specifically endangered women with violent partners.

“In 2020 with COVID and lockdowns, women were released from shelters and went back home to their violent partners. Or prisoners with a violent record were released and sent home because of COVID, and within weeks there were dead women," she said, referring to when Israel's government approved an emergency regulation in March 2020 to release some 400 offenders from prisons throughout the country for 30-day houses arrests to curb the spread of the virus.

Arab victims

Weil did, however, observe one area in which victims were indeed singled out for their gender: Arab women, who were the most in danger of being murdered through domestic violence. Half of domestic murder victims in Israel are Arab women despite Arabs constituting just one fifth of Israel's population. She explained that some of those Arab women were victims of so called honor killings, which Merriam Webster defines as a “traditional practice in some countries of killing a family member who is believed to have brought shame on the family.”

The brothers of a woman seeking a divorce often carry out honor killings, according to National Geographic. The extra tension caused by being forced into close confines 24 hours a day during extended lockdowns and quarantines may lead to violence which in turn leads to requests for divorce which in turn act as catalysts for honor killings. Since men seeking divorce are not targeted in honor killings, these are clear cases of femicide.

Thankfully, not always successful

In a South American study entitled, Femicide and Attempted Femicide before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Chile, researchers found that an increase in attempts to murder a female partner did not always lead to an increase in deaths. They reported that attempted murders of partners rose about 22%, though actual murders of partners “remained unchanged”.