Men who kill women can come from any country, not least our own

From these tragedies, we sometimes try to draw hope. Maybe this will be the case that makes people truly aware of the scale of the problem of violence against women. But people are aware. Is the real challenge making them care? Before we can consider that question too deeply, the news will tell us about another body of another woman and the cycle will start again.

We often wonder why it is that some cases of femicide receive so much media attention, while other women can lose their lives in their own home, at the hands of someone they loved, and can struggle to hold headlines and our attention for even one whole day. A well-considered theory is that it is because of the lure of the “monster myth” — the misguided notion that the greatest threat to women is an unknown force that stalks the shadows behind us on lonesome walks home at night. The appeal of this theory is that it takes the problem of violence against women out of our hands. People who kill women are not people, not men at all. They are monsters, natural aberrations that nobody can reason with or reform.

The reality is more uncomfortable. We know that women are more likely to be killed by the ordinary and familiar men in their lives, whom they love. Research by An Garda Síochána has found that, when women are murdered, it is most likely to have happened in her home, at the hands of a man that she knows. But those who point this out are often derided, accused of whipping themselves up into a state of hysterical misandry, demonising and alienating innocent men in the process.

But then late last year, the threat of male violence seemed to suddenly be taken so seriously that only the most extreme measures could be proposed to mitigate it, removing even the potential threat posed by men from communities entirely. Except this excessive precaution would only apply to one very, very specific group of men.

As the national infrastructure to support and accommodate asylum seekers started to stress and strain, the state was scrambling to find new places for people to stay. In Dublin’s East Wall, protests erupted against the accommodation of asylum seekers whose greatest crime was — as the extremely loaded signifier told us — being “single adult males”.

For now, we will leave aside the fact that anti-asylum-seeker demonstrations have just this week targeted women and children, which, in my opinion, exposes these demonstrations of “genuine concern” from organised roving agitators for what they really are.

It seemed in November at least that a lot of people showing up to East Wall — often the very same people who deride those who genuinely campaign for women’s safety — were suddenly more than willing to indulge the notion that men are fundamentally and irrevocably savagely violent against women, as long as those men have darker skin and different accents. This, of course, is just a more rudimentary version of that same aforementioned “monster myth”. Those purporting to suddenly care deeply about the welfare of women and children were happy to conjure a threat from within a group of asylum seekers, based on the racist idea that people from other countries are a dark and dangerous unknown. Male violence against women is universal, and not something Ireland has ever or will ever need to import. This means that men from any country could be violent against women.

But if or when a man of colour, or a man who is not Irish, or a man who sounds different, or a man who is an asylum seeker attacks and harms a woman, it will be an absolute jamboree of ersatz campaigning. Those who hate and fear people from other countries often have just enough sense not to state their prejudice so plainly. Good reasons for racism are hard to find, which is what motivates the frenzy to seize on and exploit an attack on a woman if anti-refugee campaigners believe it can make their bigotry sound better.

When white, Irish men kill women, they are lone beasts — fellows of nobody, and products of nothing. But when foreign men kill women, they are and will be made out as proof positive that a lethal fraternity of women-beaters have inveigled their way onto our shores and into our lives.

Those who are sowing fears of asylum seekers will only ever care about violence against women when it is useful for their contemptible cause. They will only feign concern when they can weaponise the body of a woman, using it as a shelter and shield for their own sorry prejudices.