The media coverage surrounding Ashling Murphy has been the first story in a while that the media has designated as more important than Covid. This is a relief to many, but it leaves us with the question of why the media-class has highlighted this as such a consequential story.
The Burkean –
Is Female Homicide a Growing Trend?
The Irish Times published an article titled, “One-third of homicide victims in 2021 were women”, with its sub-heading as, “Proportion is highest since 2017, with most allegedly killed by partner or ex-partner”. This title is reminiscent of a quote from Hillary Clinton when she stated that, “Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat”.
Although this quote has more context to it, it does reveal the hyper-female oriented worldview that some people have. To someone with a more balanced perspective, this quote is self-refuting as it is obvious that the gender that’s dying in war is clearly a bigger victim than the gender that has to cope with the other gender dying at war.
Similarly with the Irish Times article, if one of the genders is one-third of the homicide victims, that would imply that the other gender is two-thirds of the homicide victims. I feel the writer doesn’t even comprehend this self-refutation and proceeds to publish this title as if this one-third figure is unacceptably high.
The sub-heading creates even more alarm as it states that the already excessively high ‘one-third’ is the highest since 2017. The article unfortunately doesn’t show the full context of these statistics, so I’ve posted the full context of these statistics below using their own source, Women’s Aid.
(The graph only goes to up to 2019, therefore, I’ve updated the graph to include the years 2020 and 2021. 2020, 3 deaths; 2021, 6 deaths)
These statistics slightly conflict with the statistics provided by the Irish Times. I presume this is due to the different terminology used. The Women’s Aid, Femicide Factsheet, uses the term “died violently”, which presumably doesn’t include women that died ‘peacefully’. The CSO uses the term “Homicide and related offences”; the Irish Times article just uses the term “homicide”.
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The Burkean
