#one of the 54 women murdered this year was a client of ours (not one I'd worked with)

[ukrfeminism]

10 minute read

In early January 2012, Karen Ingala Smith was at the airport returning from holiday when she took a call from a colleague. She heard that a desperate young woman who’d sought help from Nia, the women’s refuge charity Ingala Smith runs, had just been murdered. Once back home, Ingala Smith opened her laptop to find out more.

Searching Google for “woman’s body found”, she soon discovered Nia’s client Kirsty Treloar, 20, the mother of a month-old baby who’d been abducted from her family home in Hackney, east London, by her boyfriend, Myles Williams, from whom she’d recently fled. Stabbing Kirsty’s brother and sister as they tried to stop him, Williams bundled her into his car. Later her body was found two miles away, dumped behind a wheelie bin, with 29 knife wounds.

But this online search yielded other results, so Ingala Smith read on. That same day in Co Durham, Susan McGoldrick, along with her sister Alison Turnbull and niece Tanya, were shot dead by her partner, Michael Atherton. Meanwhile in Nuneaton, nightclub bouncer Aaron Mann had beaten his girlfriend, Claire O’Connor, then smothered her with a pillow. The next day in Shropshire, a retired teacher, Betty Yates, 77, was beaten with her walking stick and stabbed to death by a drifter, Stephen Farrow. On January 3 in Buckinghamshire, Marie McGrory was strangled with a dog lead by her husband, John; in South Lanarkshire Kathleen Milward, 87, was bludgeoned to death by her grandson, Garry Kane.

Through her work, Ingala Smith was grimly familiar with such killings. But this deluge of cases appalled her. Eight British women had been murdered by men – all except one a partner or family member – in the first week of 2012. Each brutal murder, illustrated with a smiling holiday snap, was reported as neutrally as the weather: men killing their womenfolk was “just one of those things”.

“Perhaps because it was the start of the year,” says Ingala Smith. “I made a list of the names, as that’s the easiest way to tell one case from another. And then I never stopped.”

She began trawling local newspaper and police websites, creating an ExCel spreadsheet which she’d update as cases came to court.

It was an upsetting task, which Ingala Smith learnt to avoid just before bedtime. Her data collection method was crude but, until this year, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) only published figures for the sex of victims, not their killers, making female victims of male violence hard to quantify. As her list lengthened Ingala Smith created a Counting Dead Women Twitter account, posting each killing. This attracted public attention and a philanthropist who awarded her a grant to hire part-time staff. Now she could analyse murder trends and since 2015 has published the Femicide Census.

But what mattered most to Ingala Smith were women’s names, not numbers. So in 2016 she was delighted when the Labour MP Jess Phillips – who’d previously worked for Women’s Aid – asked to read them out on International Women’s Day. Now this roll call of more than 120 stolen lives, recited to a hushed House of Commons, has become an annual commemoration. “Dead women is a thing we’ve all just accepted as part of our daily lives,” Phillips said last year, when among the names was Sarah Everard. The list not only put male violence in the national spotlight but, says Ingala Smith, “Family after family have said how important it is to hear their loved one’s name read out in parliament, and know it is recorded in Hansard for ever.”

Now Ingala Smith, 54, has written a book, Defending Women’s Spaces, drawing upon more than 30 years of working with vulnerable women who are homeless or fleeing domestic abuse. After witnessing the power of female-only services she is alarmed by moves to make “gender identity” rather than sex the criteria for admission to refuges and rape survivor groups. She points out that 98 per cent of rapes and 90 per cent of violent crime is committed by males. While “What is a woman?” has become a question politicians struggle to answer, Ingala Smith is categoric. “Allowing biological males with transgender identities to access women’s spaces,” she writes, “poses a serious potential risk to women’s safety, wellbeing and recovery.”

Ingala Smith grew up in a home that was far from harmonious: anger and upset were never far away. The man she called Dad was a builder, providing what she describes as “a comfortable working-class home” in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. But, she says, he was a controlling man: “It felt the whole family, especially my mum, was always walking on eggshells.”

Eventually, when Ingala Smith was 18, her mother left and confided in a friend that Karen had a different father. In fact, she was the product of a fling at 18 with her fiancé’s best man, a Sicilian who’d moved to Yorkshire to marry a local girl he’d met in Milan. While Ingala Smith’s brother and sister were blond, she was dark and, as she grew older, her mother secretly removed photos from the wedding album in case she noticed how similar she looked to a certain guest.

When Ingala Smith heard about her real father she made contact. At 21 she met him at Thornton railway station, near Bradford. “I was looking for this gorgeous Italian man,” she says. “I’m thinking Robert De Niro, Al Pacino – and actually I got Danny DeVito.” She laughs. They hit it off straight away and she was quickly welcomed into his family, later meeting her Sicilian grandparents.

A bright girl, Ingala Smith found school a sanctuary from her troubled home life. There were few books in her house and she’d never considered A-levels let alone college, “but I happened to have a good friend from what you might call a first generation middle-class family. I remember having my mind blown that they had political conversations around the dinner table, because we weren’t allowed to speak when we were eating.”

Studying sociology at sixth-form college was “absolutely life-changing – it put everything I was experiencing into context”. It was here she first encountered feminism, which she regarded then as irrelevant, feeling more in common with the lads from her old comprehensive than the “posh girls” now in her class who’d been at a fee-paying school.

After graduating from the University of Kent, she took a job in a hostel for homeless women, mainly elderly former psychiatric patients. Then, after two years, she began work at a domestic violence refuge and felt immediately she was in the right place. “Any woman I met could have been my mother. In fact, one summer Mum came on a trip we organised for the refuge kids and she started talking about how there hadn’t been anything like this when she’d needed it.”

Would her mother have left for a refuge? Ingala Smith shrugs. “I don’t know. They are not easy places to live in. We had a nice home and to give that up would be really hard, as it is for anyone.” She says people rarely understand refuges are places of absolute last resort. “They can be chaotic, noisy. Women who have other economic choices would go elsewhere. You’re moving into a house with maybe ten other families that you don’t know, with children of all different ages, with very different parenting ideas to your own. They can really help kids who’ve grown up with violent dads because they meet others in the same boat. But they’re challenging places.”

A move to a refuge is invariably fast. A woman in danger is referred by police or social services, then refuge staff have a brief phone call to try to determine whether she’s a danger to others – perhaps has a history of violence or arson – before arranging to meet her close by. (A refuge never gives out its address on the phone.) “You’d imagine women would turn up black and blue, but that is rare,” Ingala Smith says. “I think women wait until they’re ‘decent’. Besides, after an assault they often don’t have the strength to get themselves together. They wait until it’s quieter, when they know it’s coming again, and then leave.”

The refuge suggests a safety plan: to gather up passports and bank books; siphon possessions discreetly to a friend’s house; to remember that you’re most at risk of violence just after leaving. Ingala Smith notes there were few referrals in late December. “Women didn’t want to leave violent men and disrupt Christmas for children, and you knew anybody who came at that time of year – one year we had a woman turn up on Christmas Eve with three kids – was in a really bad way. In January, the phone rings off the hook.”

Ingala Smith has been the CEO of Nia since 2009. Beginning as Hackney Women’s Aid in 1975, it supports about 2,000 women a year, running a specialist refuge for women in prostitution and another for those dealing with substance abuse. Much has changed since she joined the refuge movement: many small feminist charities have merged as they must now compete for council contracts with generic housing trusts. These don’t provide the “woman-centred care” Ingala Smith believes is vital for those fleeing violent men.

Nia also works with women at high risk of domestic violence and runs East London Rape Crisis, serving both sexes. Here it counsels men and trans women, whom it often refers to Galop, a specialist LGBT+ anti-abuse charity. But no male people – whether men or trans women – are allowed into Nia refuges or group counselling.

In 2017, Nia’s trustees decided to invoke the exemptions in the Equality Act that permit single-sex services “as a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”. It knew this was a risk. Such is the toxic debate on gender, female-only services often receive threats to their funding or have staff reported to trustees merely for liking a JK Rowling tweet. They receive hoax calls to test whether they are trans inclusive. The whole sector is chilled by how trans activists targeted Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter: it was defunded, vandalised and had a dead rat pinned to its door for remaining single sex.

The question of whether a trans woman can safely be accommodated alongside women has riven the refuge movement. “They [trans women] are not a potential risk to women because they are trans,” she writes, “but because they are male.” She cites cases of trans prisoners like Karen White who were allowed into female jails and sexually abused inmates. “Prison officers, who are really good at risk-assessing violent men, get it wrong. So how can we screen [people] in five-minute phone calls?”

Besides, this is about more than safety. Many women in refuges endured sexual abuse, often as children. Being housed with any males generates a debilitating and involuntary post-traumatic response in the brain. “It’s not hate. It’s not bigotry. It’s not transphobia,” she says. “It is an impact of abuse by men… The presence of a male-bodied person among vulnerable women causes distress and consternation.” She is aghast that Mridul Wadhwa, the trans woman who heads Edinburgh Rape Crisis, told The Guilty Feminist podcast last year that female survivors who demand male-free spaces should work to “reframe their trauma”.

In group counselling, she says, male people have been socialised to dominate groups, to ask more questions and take up space, while women have learnt to serve and make way for them. “I remember talking to a woman about what her options were and she started crying. I asked why. She said, ‘Nobody’s ever given me a choice before.’ To recover, women have to centre themselves in their own lives.”

But what of women who say they have no problem receiving counselling alongside trans women? “I understand that some female rape survivors can say, ‘A women-only service is not important to me. I’d be happy for a trans sister to be in my group.’ If they want to say that, it’s fine, but they shouldn’t take away that choice from women for whom it isn’t fine.” Young women who campaign for trans-inclusive services, she says, are mainly middle-class graduates unlikely to need them. Nia’s younger staff support the policy, even though defending it has cost some of them friends.

At root, Ingala Smith believes, violence suffered by women and trans women has a different dynamic. In her book she disputes Stonewall’s assertion that trans women suffer the highest levels of domestic abuse and murder. “Well, show me the data. Because I hear that, but I’ve never seen figures to demonstrate it.” She has collated every murder victim who might come under the broad Stonewall definition of a trans woman (which includes occasional cross-dressers). Since 2009, there have been nine murders, the last being Amy Griffiths in 2019. Most were sex workers murdered by punters or who died in drug-related fights. Just one, Vanessa Santillan in 2015, was killed by an intimate partner.

By contrast, only about 8 per cent of women victims are killed by strangers, the rest by men they know. “Most women’s refuges work exclusively with women who are fleeing partners, former partners and, in some cases, family members,” she writes. “That doesn’t mean other people don’t need places of safety or support, just that their experiences and needs are different.” She wonders why Stonewall doesn’t devote its resources to setting up specialist services rather than campaigning against those created by and for women.

The Femicide Census has revealed trends Ingala Smith hadn’t anticipated. “I was shocked,” she says, “by the number of elderly women killed in burglaries. I assumed that if a man broke into an old woman’s house he might push her down the stairs, she could be frail and bang her head. But there’s a real brutality, a particular anger and misogyny involved. Often young men use sexual violence against elderly women.” She was also surprised how many women are killed by their own sons.

Twice as many men are murdered than women but overwhelmingly by other men. When women kill – 8 per cent of murderers are female – they are both more likely to use a weapon (which makes it an aggravated offence in sentencing) and to have been abused by their victim, while men, being stronger, frequently kill with their bare hands. Strangulation is men’s second most common murder method and lately Ingala Smith has seen many lawyers adopt the “sex game gone wrong” defence.

How has devoting her life to the terrible things men do to women affected her own life? “I had a string of disastrous relationships – I just shagged around, basically – and didn’t think men were up to much.” She’d find herself moved to tears when witnessing a happy family, since her own experience was so dysfunctional.

Then, after writing off men as “avenues for happiness”, she decided to apply herself properly rather than settling for “whoever I ended up snogging in a pub at the weekend”. She started internet dating, setting herself high standards. The result was her husband of 20 years, André, a subtitler of South African parentage who speaks four languages, to whom she dedicates her book. They have no children, after several painful failed courses of IVF.

Ingala Smith knows her book will put her further in the firing line – the Labour Party has already refused her application for membership – but single-sex services “are the hill I’m prepared to die on”. That list of dead women never gets any shorter, I say. Will there ever be fewer names? “That’s the subject of my PhD, which I’m just finishing,” she says, “and my next book.” Defending Women’s Spaces by Karen Ingala Smith is out now (£15.99, Polity)

[beks21]

85 Questions {dear god}

Tagged by the fantastic @elanev91 and I’m gonna tag... shit, I don’t know, there are so many fucking questions, answer them if you want!

THE LAST

1. drink:  chai latte

2. phone call:  for funsies? My friend J and I chatted while we got our lives together on Saturday

3. text message: @elanev91, shocker

4. song you listened to:  after watching Lady Gaga’s documentary on Netflix last night, I’m listening to her “Born This Way” album

5. time you cried: last night while watching Gaga’s documentary

6. dated someone twice:  uhhhh never?

7. kissed someone and regretted it: also never

8. been cheated on: never, thankfully

9. lost someone special: my grandparents passed away a couple years ago, and I miss them both a lot.

10. been depressed: um, currently? lololololol I’M NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING

11. gotten drunk and thrown up: never {god I would win “never have i ever” with these questions

3 FAVOURITE COLOURS

12. Hot pink

13. Grey

14. purple IN THE LAST YEAR HAVE YOU

15. made new friends: yes! internet friends and irl friends!

16. fallen out of love: don’t you have to fall IN love first? {gonna steal this answer from Elle because EXACTLY}

17. laughed until you cried: last week at my sis’s birthday dinner

18. found out someone was talking about you: I don’t think it’s happened since college, which means I hang out with great people now

19. met someone who changed you: besides Harry Potter? 

20. found out who your friends are: i mean, we opted not to play “never have i ever” last night because we already know everything, so....

21. kissed someone on your facebook list: there are lists for this?

22. how many of your facebook friends do you know in real life: all - i’m picky

23. do you have any pets: no, but i have a succulent who has been alive for almost a year, does that count

24. do you want to change your name: nah bro

25. what did you do for your last birthday: had a murder mystery party! it was actually quite fun!

26. what time did you wake up: about thirty minutes before my alarm because i suddenly felt like i was oversleeping, dammit

27. what were you doing at midnight last night: sleeping

28. name something you can’t wait for: bedtime. also books coming in at the library

29. when was the last time you saw your mom: well we work in the same office, so like 3 minutes ago?

31. what are you listening to right now: Lady Gaga, still

32. have you ever talked to a person named tom: I just received money from a client named Tom, does that count

33. something that is getting on your nerves: my glasses getting dirty because of air, the voicemail light blinking at me

34. most visited website: tumblr and DoulaMatch.net

35. hair colour: naturally? dirty blonde, but currently, dark brown with reddish-ness in there

36. long or short hair: medium? it’s just past my shoulders

37. do you have a crush on someone: do fictional characters count

38. what do you like about yourself: mostly everything?

39. want any piercings: I really want to pierce my nose, but we’ll see

40. blood type: I actually have no idea? I hate blood-related activities, so ignorance is bliss

41. nickname: Bek, Beks, BG

42. relationship status: single as fuck

43. zodiac: shit I always have to look these up.... capricorn

44. pronouns: she/her

45. favourite tv show: Miraculous, Parks and Rec, This Is Us {which comes back this weeeeeeeek!!!!!}

46. tattoos: three! ankle, top of foot, forearm

47. right or left handed: right

48. surgery: I’ve had 12 teeth pulled, so like 4 surgeries there....

49. piercing: one in each ear lobe and one cartilage piercing

50. sport: lol the one with the sportsball? although I do love watching women’s volleyball during the olympics

51. vacation: I went to London this summer! It was awesome!

52. pair of trainers: the only tennis shoes I wear are at births, and they are grey and hella comfy

MORE GENERAL

53. eating: just had my breakfast yogurt

54. drinking: water

55. i’m about to: make a deposit in QuickBooks

56. waiting for: inspiration to strike for another Hinny fic

57. want: to do yoga

58. get married: whenever mr TDH fucking shows up

59. career: birth doula! and eventually educator, fingers crossed

WHICH IS BETTER

60. hugs or kisses: hugs

61. lips or eyes: eyes

62. shorter or taller: well, i just had to ask someone to get something off the top shelf at the grocery store, so i’m gonna go with taller

63. older or younger: older

64. nice arms or nice stomach: arms

65. hook up or relationship: idk man

66. troublemaker or hesitant: troublemaker

HAVE YOU EVER

67. kissed a stranger: nope

68. drank hard liquor: is this really a question

69. lost glasses/contact lenses: never? my firstborn perfectionist ocd is showing, isn’t it

70. turned someone down: yes

71. sex on the first date: nah

72. broken someone’s heart: I think I disappointed someone, but I don’t think I’ve broken anyone’s heart

73. had your heart broken: not really?

74. been arrested: not yet, but the week is young

75. cried when someone died: yes

76. fallen for a friend: nope

DO YOU BELIEVE IN

77. yourself: um, of course, have you met me

78. miracles: kinda?

79. love at first sight: no

80. santa claus: i believe in parents

81. kiss on the first date: no thank you

82. angels: eh..... let’s skip theological questions, thanks

OTHER

83. current best friend’s name: my nickname for her is Lola because that’s what perfume she wore in high school

84. eye colour: blue-ish? 

85. favorite movie: shiiiiit i don’t know? Can’t go wrong with Jane Austen or a 90′s rom-com. “While You Were Sleeping” and “You’ve Got Mail” are my faves.