Christmas comes but once a year, and other things turn up with the same predictability. The Guardian has once again run an article about the ‘Femicide Census’ as new statistics have been gathered by an organisation called Women’s Aid. On the back of this Julie Bindel has declared that ‘A war on women is raging in the UK‘..

Well, up to a point.

Once again all men everywhere are seen as to blame, implying that the killing of women is somehow part of our general national culture like drink-driving used to be. The section on perpetrators is especially thin. Women killed by burglars are included as an example of male violence, as are indiscriminate terrorist attacks. Neither grisly statistic is relevant, but they are used anyway to push the agenda.

No attempt has been made to define the social backgrounds of the killers, apart from the mildest suggestion that women from immigrant backgrounds are more at risk. This is however cast as being the fault of Conservative government policy, and not the male killers, who might share the same background as their victims. Once again the caveats about how the statistics have been gathered are buried in the report. My TCW article from last year is as valid today as it was then, hence the relative brevity of this article.

More men who know their male killers were killed than women who knew their male killers. More men were killed than women. On both of these, the report is silent. The problem is not male violence against women, but male violence. According to the official prison population statistics, the largest proportion of those behind bars are there for crimes of violence. But violence is not universal amongst males, as this report would suggest. The report breaks down the backgrounds of the perpetrators only by their age, and no further. Male murderers are most likely to be in the age range of men who commit the most crime in the UK. Who knew?

The report fails by being selective about murder statistics, casting men as deterministic robots who are programmed to kill women. The authors also use a skewed proprietary methodology to gather statistics rather than wait for the official version and to use those together with their own research. In fact the report makes no mention whatsoever of any information produced by the Office of National Statistics. The Left-wing agenda, blaming Conservative immigration and economic policy, is quite clear. It fosters the fantasy that a government led by Jeremy Corbyn would somehow reduce murder in the UK. It is unlikely that the murder rate is lower in countries with socialist governments and, if Venezuela’s murder rate is any indicator, the reverse is true.

Violence against women is appalling. Blaming all men everywhere, as this report more or less does, is not as appalling, but is appalling nonetheless. It is questionable statistics that are being used to attack menfolk rather than a knife.