We often consider gender-based violence against women to be an individual man’s fault with “bad apples” engaging in these actions, but the reality is that there is a systemic problem within global societies which allows and encourages femicides and violent actions towards women. Deflecting attention away from the accountability of men in the conversations of sexism and gender-based violence, opponents to feminist commentary commonly refer to the phrase: “Not all men!”
Yes—not every man would willingly engage in sexual violence or gender-related crimes. However, when there are multiple countries stating that gender-based violence is becoming a national emergency and an influx of extremely graphic sexual crimes are regularly reaching the headlines, it is becoming abundantly clear that while it may not be all men, it is enough men. Gender-based violence is not the result of isolated incidents but rather a pervasive, systemic issue fueled by deep-rooted misogyny that spans across global societies. The increasing frequency and severity of gender-related crimes in our so-called “modern world” highlights the urgent need to hold not just individual perpetrators accountable, but to address the cultural, legal, and governmental structures that enable and perpetuate violence against women and girls worldwide.
From 2011 to 2020, Frenchman Dominique Pelicot regularly drugged his wife of fifty years, Gisele Pelicot. Dominique recruited men on the internet to rape Gisele for no monetary exchange, just with the condition that he could film and watch the crime. Over ninety men, including Dominique, had raped an unknowing Gisele for almost a decade until she found out in 2020. The French police discovered over twenty thousand sexual images of an incapacitated Gisele, as well as inappropriate pictures of Caroline Pelicot, the Pelicots’ daughter. Dominique Pelicot is now facing charges of rape, gang rape, and privacy breaches by recording and sharing sexual images in a public case that is dominating the media.
On August 9th, 2024, a thirty-one-year-old postgraduate trainee doctor was found brutally murdered with potential signs of a violent gang rape in the place of her work, RG Kar Medical College Hospital. Protests and shutdowns have swept across India with medical workers and civilians demanding for better protections against women and a more thorough investigation into the victim’s murder. The police have accused Sanjay Roy, a police volunteer employed at the hospital, of being the perpetrator. However, civilians suspect collusion between the police and the hospital and believe that the two entities are using Roy as a scapegoat.
In August of 2024, Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers issued a legal ban on women’s voices and bare faces in public under new laws in an effort to promote a culture of virtue. The Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan has been widely referred to as a state of gender apartheid, with Afghani females facing severe restrictions on their rights, movement, and participation in the economy. These new laws have placed extreme limitations on women, disallowing them from being heard in public, participating in sports, visiting public parks, looking at men they are not related to by marriage or birth, traveling solo, and much more. In the past year, multiple UN agencies have reported increased rates of child and forced marriage plus gender-based violence and femicide with impunity. As a result, there has been a rise of depression within the Afghani female community as well as suicide.
On September 1st, less than a month after competing in the Olympics, Rebecca Cheptegei, an accomplished Ugandan Olympic runner, was set on fire by her abusive ex-boyfriend Dickson Ndiema Marangach. In the months leading up to her death, Cheptegei attempted to report Marangach to the police at least three times for his threats and physical abuse. Due to Marangach’s attack, Cheptegei suffered burns to 80 percent of her body and died from her injuries on September 4th.
Currently, South Korea is experiencing a deep fake porn and digital sexual humiliation crisis occurring on the popular messaging app Telegram. South Korean men have been sharing sexually exploitative materials in “humiliation rooms” and AI-generated porn in group chats. These humiliation rooms revolve around group chat members “humiliating” female family members by taking sexually exploitative content of them, including daughters, sisters, mothers, and cousins. A Telegram channel containing more than 220,000 members has been widely used to create and share AI-generated pornographic images that target women and girls, using their school photos, public selfies, and even military headshots.
These are just a fraction of the many current worldwide cases of gender-based violence—especially sexual violence—and the systemic suppression of women. The oppression of women has always existed, however even researchers and experts are growing increasingly concerned with how frequent and egregious these gender-related crimes are becoming. Welsh police have even stated that the recent statistics of men perpetrating violence towards women has amounted to a national emergency. In England and Wales, gender-related crimes with female victims have risen by 37 percent in the past five years.
Greece, Kenya, the United States, England, India, Iran, Italy, Kenya, Canada, Mexico, Turkey, Puerto Rico, Brazil, South Korea, Australia, Spain, and a myriad of other countries are reporting significantly increased levels of gender-based violence and femicide: the intentional killing of a woman or girl, in particular by a man with a gender-related motivation. Although general global rates of homicide are decreasing, femicide cases have been rising continuously. In fact, the UN reported that femicide has reached a twenty-year peak across the globe. With a multitude of countries from varying regions reporting increased levels of such crimes, it is clear that femicide and the oppression of women is an international epidemic.
Beyond the direct perpetrators of sexual violence and femicide, there are an alarming number of male bystanders or accomplices that allow for these crimes to take place. In the countless number of men that Dominique Pelicot approached to rape his wife—including the men that rejected his invitation—not a single one reported Dominique to the police. In a study conducted by the International Association of Forensic Nurses on gender differences in attitudes with bystander behavior and sexual assault, experts found that males tended to have less positive attitudes towards sexual violence intervention and were more likely to be a bystander in such situations than women. Even many of our systems in place that are intended to protect victims are biased and complacent in these crimes.
According to the UN, despite gender-based violence being one of the more common crimes in the world, it is least likely to result in conviction due to legislative gaps, gender stereotypes, and inadequate responses of criminal justice institutions. Rebecca Cheptegei’s family blames the police for failing to protect the Olympic athlete after her repeated attempts to report her ex-boyfriend’s abusive behavior. Cheptegei’s father even told the police in February of this year, seven months before her murder, “this man is going to kill my child,” after Dickson Marangach beat the athlete up and broke her phone. Cheptegei’s family claims that when Marangach refused to listen to the police’s warnings to stay away from her, the officers simply gave up on intervening in the situation.
As the law enforcement field is indisputably male-dominated, with 87 percent of American police officers being male, many female victims of gender-based violence feel uneasy and reluctant to contact the police as a resource. In a report from the ACLU, experts in domestic violence and sexual assault stated that police inaction, hostility, and bias against survivors are the key barriers against victims seeking intervention from the justice system.
In addition, when a crime of sexual violence occurs, there is a disturbing “brotherhood” phenomenon where fellow misogynists team up to defend these predators and support them in their war against women. After the rape and murder of the medical trainee in Kokalta, thousands of people peacefully marched through various Indian cities calling for stronger laws, swifter police action, and for the overall better treatment of women. Medical workers across India have been protesting and going on strike, even refusing to provide non-emergency medical care, to demand justice for the victim. Nevertheless, on August 15th, while a group of women were demonstrating outside of the RG Kar Medical College Hospital, an unidentified large group of men swarmed the protestors and stormed into the building. In retaliation to the ongoing marches for justice, the group of men vandalized the hospital and attacked protestors, police, and doctors.
The increasing rise in misogyny and hatred towards women is reaching to a point where misogynists view women protesting for justice as an attack on the male gender as a whole. The ambush on the hospital as a reaction to the ongoing protests in India shows that misogynistic men are teaming up to perpetuate a culture of male dominance and female suppression.
Researchers attribute the recent rise in misogyny and gender-related violence to a multitude of reasons. First of all, the misogyny that leads to these violent acts is just a more extreme version of the same misogyny that lies in mainstream society. As men statistically become more conservative, the misogyny in our cultures grows more pervasive, which in turn leads to an increase in gender-based violence. In the past twenty-five years, the partisan gap between young men and women has almost doubled from a 12 point difference to a 23 point disparity with men becoming more right-wing, and women leaning more left. As men become more politically conservative, their views on gender are concurrently rapidly shifting. In 2022, 49 percent of American Gen Z males believed that the United States was becoming “too soft and feminine.” Only a year later, that percentage rose to 60 percent of Gen Z men.
The expansion of misogyny can also be traced to the fact that women are becoming more progressive, independent, and feminist. Some researchers believe that the current rise in misogyny is a reaction to the simultaneous widespread surge in feminism and female empowerment. In the American male population, surveys show there is a growing feeling that society is becoming more hostile and discriminatory towards men as more women adopt feminist ideologies. As a result, many young men are rejecting feminism and finding comfort in the opposing side. The current ideological divide between men and women is unprecedented and continuing to grow as the two sides become more polarized.
Surprisingly, experts have named the COVID-19 pandemic as another major factor in the recent rise in hatred towards women. The widespread practice of quarantining not only led to increased rates of domestic violence, but also, in combination with mental stressors and hardships, widely triggered pornography addictions or dependencies in men. A multitude of psychological studies have suggested that there is a relationship between heavy pornography consumption and sexually violent acts. Some experts believe that male pornography consumers are more likely to objectify females and commit acts of sexual violence. While this is not proven to cause sexual crimes, experts widely agree that pornography can be harmful to how men perceive women due to how graphic and accessible pornographic content is becoming. Violent pornography promotes rape culture as it normalizes the mistreatment and extreme objectification of women in the minds of many young males.
Ultimately, women and researchers shouldn’t have to investigate why men are committing these crimes. Governments and societies need to better protect their female citizens, and most importantly, our cultures need to reshape our dialogues to teach men that they simply need to respect women as human beings. Even though more and more women are becoming independent and progressive, our lives are still in danger because more men are becoming increasingly misogynistic and acting on their instilled hatred for women.
It may be easy to ignore these trends, naively thinking that they don’t personally impact us, but they absolutely do. As an epidemic that places 50 percent of our global population in danger, these widespread crimes of gender-based violence should concern every single one of us. Although feminism is gaining more traction and expansion in the United States, the same systems of misogyny that strip away the rights of women in Asia and Africa are the exact same patriarchal systems that allow for the subject of abortion to still be a topic of debate in our country. The statistics presented in this article are extremely alarming, yet they are only the tip of the iceberg. The true scale and consequences of violent misogyny are still immeasurable due to inadequate investigations and international variations in criminal justice recordings and practices.
Nevertheless, researchers have already concluded that misogynistic worldviews seem to be a common thread amongst perpetrators of mass shootings, hate crimes, and other extreme acts of violence. University of Rhode Island’s Professor of Psychology, Miriam Lindner stated in her new research, “when we look at the people who commit these very violent acts, it turns out that what they have in common is not that they are male—though 98 percent of them are male—it is actually that they are extremely misogynistic.”
The general public tends to view gender-related crimes as isolated incidents that result from evil individuals simply because misogyny is so ingrained into our society that people are unwilling and uncomfortable to draw the connection. However, undermining misogyny and the global phenomena of gender-based violence is not only ignorant, but extremely dangerous. When society disregards sexism, women’s tolerance for sexual harassment increases, radical male supremacy groups become more confident, female mental health suffers, and the rate of gender-based crimes increases. If we continue to turn a blind eye to the systems of sexism that permeate throughout every single one of our civilizations, the issue is only going to get even worse with women bearing the brunt of the repercussions. Misogyny affects all of us, men and women, even if you don’t feel like it does.
