The Murder of Rebecca Cheptegei: Femicide is a Global Crisis

THE world has been shocked by the gruesome murder of Rebecca Cheptegei, the Ugandan athlete who recently competed in the Olympic Games in Paris.

Like the rape and murder of junior doctor Moumita Debnath in India last month, the barbarity of the crime — Cheptegei was doused in petrol and set alight by an ex-boyfriend as she returned home from church with her two daughters — has made international headlines.

Both murders have drawn attention to the status of women in their societies: in Kenya, where Cheptegei was murdered, 34 percent of women report having suffered violence from men. India has been rated the most dangerous country on earth for women, and campaigners led by the formidable All India Democratic Women’s Association have been tirelessly exposing government efforts to protect men who rape and murder women.

But it would be patronising to see these crimes as characteristic of so-called backward “third world” countries. Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is not only a global problem, it is getting worse – including in Britain, where police recorded a 37 per cent increase in such crimes from 2018-23.

Last year, these crimes accounted for a fifth of all recorded crimes, with more than a million violent crimes.

And while the left is right to sound the alarm about the rise of violent racism following the far-right riots in August, we must recognise that the horrific crime that fascists wrongly blame on innocent Muslims and asylum seekers was itself a murderous attack on girls that must be seen in the context of an epidemic of violence against women.

Labour declares that it will treat violence against women as a national emergency.

The aim is to halve these types of crimes within ten years. Positive plans include placing domestic abuse experts in 999 call centres and improving police training on misogynistic violence.

That last point is key: murderous police officer Wayne Couzens was nicknamed ‘The Rapist’ by colleagues, demonstrating that too many officers see sexual violence as a joke, while this week a former Met Police officer from the same unit as Couzens and serial rapist David Carrick – Mark Tyrrell – was charged with multiple counts of rape and sexual assault.

Labour has also promised to look at education. Education that respects women and relationships makes sense, given the huge increase in sexual harassment in schools reported by teachers’ unions.

But we should not underestimate the social revolution required. Violence against women is the sharpest point of a patriarchal system in which women and girls are still often seen as property: like Cheptegei, 60 per cent of women murdered by men in Britain in the past decade were murdered by a current or former partner.

The rapid increase in sexual violence is, as the parliamentary group on commercial sexual exploitation warned last year, inextricably linked to the huge consumption of online pornography.

English children’s ombudsman Dame Rachel de Souza points to the prevalence of violent sexual acts in online porn, which influences consumers’ attitudes to sex. The MPs noted that an exclusive focus on age-checking porn viewers, encouraged by the term ‘adult entertainment’, underestimates the evidence that porn also influences the behaviour of adult men towards women.

“We cannot end the epidemic of male violence against women and girls without confronting and combating the contributing role that pornography plays in fueling sexual objectification and sexual violence,” they concluded.

This requires a holistic approach: you cannot combat the objectification of the female body and at the same time normalise the commercialisation of sex.

Nor can you eradicate violence against women if you maintain a ‘hostile environment’ that pushes refugees into the shadows, while thousands of asylum-seeking women and girls disappear into the sex industry every year across Europe.

If the left is to be a force for women’s liberation, it must address the oppression of women as a gender. It must revoke the privileges enjoyed by men’s possessive attitudes and sexual desires, however profitable they may be.

ebecca Cheptegei in Budapest 2023 at the World Athletics Championships