UK MP Jess Phillips Calls for Action Against Misogyny

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Can I ask you about your own brief as well? Because, as I said, you are the shadow minister responsible for women’s safety, if I could put it that way. And you have been very vocal since Sarah Everard. And you always are about this issue. Again, the Sarah Everard, Colorado, it’s all coming at the same time as what happened in Atlanta, where women were targeted and killed as well. What is it with the stats on gender-based violence and killing that are so out of whack?

JESS PHILLIPS, U.K. SHADOW MINISTER FOR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND SAFEGUARDING: I mean, the reality is, is that we don’t, as policy-makers globally, actually track it properly. So we count what we care about. And the Sarah Everard murder has shaken everybody across the United Kingdom. Men, women, policy-makers alike, have been shocked by that. But the reality is that, in the week that Sarah Everard was missing, before her body was found and somebody was charged with her killing, in that week, six women in the United Kingdom were killed in their home, and a little girl. So, the incidence of this case, compared with the data, the huge numbers of data in the United Kingdom, every three days, a woman is murdered at the hands of a man, usually a male partner or ex-partner. And if you scale that up globally, if we look even at sort of terrorist incidences, domestic and international terrorist incidences in the U.K., in Australia, around the world, we can see that there is often patterns in those who perpetrate such violence of violence against women and girls. Yet I’m afraid to say that women’s lives are still considered to be less important. And so, when women are dying, it’s very rarely tracked as to why that’s happening. It’s very rarely monitored. It’s very rarely seen as being part of an overall issue. It’s just one of those things. And that has been the case in the United Kingdom for a long time. In the murder in Turkey in the last few weeks, we see the same thing. And the shooting, the shooting in Atlanta recently that, the reality is, is to not see that in terms of being violence against women and girls would be wrong. That is not simply just another mass shooting. That is a mass shooting that specifically targeted women because they were women.