Why is the rise in domestic violence being ignored?

On Monday, 35-year-old Sana Muhammad was shot dead with a crossbow in east London. She was eight months pregnant, but her baby miraculously survived. Her ex-husband has been charged with her murder. This is what it takes for an alleged victim of domestic violence to make it from statistic to headline: a murder of unimaginable barbarism, carried out with a medieval weapon, leaving behind the ultimate symbol of vulnerability – a motherless child seized, literally, from death.

Nothing else will do, as a talking point; getting beaten to death behind closed doors, as 27 victims of domestic violence have been in London this year, is a bit too pedestrian. The figure is up threefold from nine last year, but the lone MP talking about it is Harriet Harman, banging on windows like a voice from the past, calling: “Guys, we used to take this seriously. Remember when violence against women was a thing?”

It’s not because it’s a timeless crime. All murders are timeless, in essence – young men killing each other over imagined slights, men killing women in private loathing; any murder, taken singly, could be in any country in any century, and only remarked upon to say that human nature is dark and immutable. So why is there more violence against women in some eras and places than in others? Only by looking at it collectively – deciding what is acceptable – will anything change.

Some answers are practical: funding must be restored to refuges. Others are abstract: taking misogyny seriously and not, as Cressida Dick essayed earlier this month, trying to bump it down your to-do list in favour of more consequential hatreds. There is no hatred more consequential than this, in crime-fighting, or indeed, human terms.