Epidemic kills hundreds and costs billions, but Boris Johnson will never hold a COBRA meeting to deal with it – Fleet Street Fox

The list of things that can kill you is endless. But how many of them do you sleep with?

You can trust a pillow so you don't choke on your fury. Your alarm clock will never rape you. But for about 8 million women and 5 million men, someone they trust and love has the potential to do both.

Yesterday to mark International Women's Day this Sunday, the former female shelter worker and now Birmingham Yardley MP Jess Phillips read a list of 113 names of women killed by men, or whose men are the main suspect. It included 4 women killed by their own son and one killed by his brother.

These included the case of Maggie Smyth, 29, missing for 6 days before police found body parts under the rubble in a pub where her ex-partner Christopher Taylor worked. Last September, he was sentenced to 24 years for his murder, as was his brother, who got 9 years for helping to dispose of his body. His leg was found in a nearby park by a dog walker. His head and left arm are still missing.

Last year, Jess read the names of 147 of these women. The previous year, 147 others. In 2017, she listed 125 dead women. And in 2016, the first IWD of which Jess was a member, she named 138 women killed in the previous 12 months.

Parliament has listened carefully to Jess each time. And since Jess got up for the first time to speak, more people have become victims domestic violence in every year.

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The names tell us a lot. There are British, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi names. There are names from Eastern Europe, China, the Netherlands, the Spanish-speaking world, Eritrea and Russia. There are names likely to be older women, younger women, white women, brunette women, mixed race women. Some were rich, some poor. They both had in common: they were women and now they are dead.

Domestic violence is a pandemic. In the UK, there are streets, offices, and schools on every street. It costs us around 66 billion a year, in hospital care, sick leave, police work, social workers, legal aid, court costs, prison costs, loss of economic output, cost of physical and emotional damage to entire families who need more care, and can provide less tax, thanks to their experience.

It hurts the children of those who are abused; the parents; future lovers, friends, neighbors, witnesses. This damages the abuser's families and friends, who may be separated, or come to excuse the behavior, which allows it to be repeated.

And if domestic violence were a virus, we would all be told how to avoid it.

Schools and nurseries which, this week, are teaching handwashing and elbow coughing, would teach first aid, mental health and spot the first symptoms. Workplaces currently cleaning the evacuated offices in depth would spend a day training their staff on the points to watch. Government ministers ordering us to isolate themselves would rather be looking for super-propagators of violence, and the chief doctor would describe a mental illness – which can kill the unlucky and destroy the well-being of the wealthy – as a "Not insignificant epidemic with huge social costs.

It is passed from person to person, but no amount of hand washing will keep it at bay. There are no masks, there is not enough toilet paper to protect you. But like colds, we got used to it, and unlike colds, most don't even notice it.

The taxman only notices it because he collects less tax. Vacation companies are seeing that they can charge more individual supplements. Insurance companies add it to their risk calculations as a way to charge more for divorced women living alone, and police count hours of "wasted" time dealing with overly frightened or too washed, to take into account advice that becomes useless as soon as they leave. It plunges countless children into poverty, and shorter lifespans and a lower level of achievement, yet it is still invisible.

In the UK, prostate cancer kills 10 times more men. With treatment, 95% can hope to survive. There is no such treatment for domestic violence. No government health campaign, no publication of warning signs, no press campaign to end this scourge once and for all.

Instead, we live in a country where, we learn today, a Labor government "intervened" in a police investigation into the alleged kidnapping and torture of a young girl. 19 years old. Shamsa ran away from her father and sent men after her to take her home. A court found that he then trafficked her out of the country and relatives said she was held against her will, drugged and in solitary confinement.

Shamsa would have enough trouble getting justice if she was another girl. But it is a princess, daughter of the sheikh who runs Dubai and who has residences throughout the UK, employs thousands of Britons, owns P&O Ferries, owns an airline with naming rights in a stadium. football and established a deep water port in the Thames on which our economy depends. So instead of going to jail, he goes to Ascot.

At the hearings he initiated to punish a stray woman and to which he was invited, he refused to testify in person. He claims in today's newspapers that "as head of government, I was unable to participate". However, nothing in English law prohibits it. A man accused of child abuse took advantage of his work to claim immunity even from being questioned.

Today's newspapers published his quote without emphasizing his lie. And almost every report in Jess' speech rounds off the number of women she named DOWN.

People are warning about complacency about the coronavirus. The fact that he is more likely to kill those who are already fragile does not mean that he should be allowed to. The fact that panic infects others is something the government wants to stop just as much as the bug itself. Every day, we are told, it is important enough to do something.

I wonder what our governments would do if we stopped using airlines that took us to places where abuse was more common. If we panic, buy pepper spray and rape alarms, if the stock markets were worried about China's inability to provide self-defense lessons to everyone who had used them. Or what Hollywood would do if we took against some of its stars.

How many more reports of domestic homosexual abuse would there be if we did not have a Prime Minister who called them "bumboy tankers"? How many more escaped women could we celebrate if the Prime Minister did not naturally call them "fickle", implied that they opened their "uplifted legs to be delighted", or that women born at home strangers are less welcome, less related, less, less, less.

Parliament has already heard that if more than 100 people die in a sporting event, an investigation will be opened. There is one less death in Grenfell and several fewer deaths in Hillsborough. But they were unique pieces that were as likely to kill men as women, so we tried to stop them.

In the 5 years that have passed since Jess Phillips got up to speak, the government has dedicated one to reviewing the strategy. He spent 3 others proposing, consulting and drafting a bill on domestic violence, and in the past 12 months, he has been repeatedly delayed by prorogations and general elections.

There is no way that a law cracking down on deaths from prostate cancer, or terrorist attacks, or another Grenfell, is delayed like that. It is a conflagration, a massacre, a disease, which is horrible and expensive and which is at the bottom of the list of tasks for successive governments. There is a “battle plan” for the coronavirus, but nothing like it for those who fear death or injury every day in their own homes.

Yet if we were to introduce not only this bill, but tougher measures – a national rehabilitation program, lessons on the national program, citizenship and visa requirements, laws that require employers and public office holders to deal with it – we could be a beacon that, for the first time in a long time, the whole planet admired.

Jess told the Commons: "A far greater response is made to almost all other epidemics than the epidemic of male violence against women … (she) was never seen as a model or a disease in our country or in the world that requires I recognize that the government has introduced the Domestic Violence Bill and we are all delighted to review it, but until we start hearing this list as s & It was a list in another circumstance and to act with the same level of horror, knowing that we would gain the same political advantage in fighting it as we would be terrorism, we'll never go anywhere. "

They listened to it, they spoke warm words, and then they spent more money and time on something else.

And so, next year there will be another list. Make sure your name is not there – talk to someone, ask for help. Don't bother asking Boris.

* Contact Women & # 39; s Aid online

WOMEN KILLED BY MEN, WHERE A MAN IS THE MAIN SUSPECT, IN THE UK IN 2019:

Julie Webb, Tracey Lovell, Libby Squire, Antoinette Donnegan, Dorothy Bowyer, Laureline Garcia-Bertaux, Giselle Marimon-Herrera, Allison Marimon-Herrera, Lala Kamara, Alice Morrow, Rachel Evans, Alison McKenzie, Janette Dunbavand, Barbara Heywood, Paula Meadows , Anna Reed, Sarah Fuller, Megan Newton, Leah Fray, Saima Riaz, Sammy-Lee Lodwig, Amy Parsons, Mihrican Mustafa, Henriett Szucs, Emma Faulds, Lauren Griffiths, Ellie Gould, Joanne Hamer, Mavis Long, Julia Rawson, Jayde Hall , Elizabeth McShane, Linda Treeby, Regen Tierney, Paige Gibson, Neomi Smith, Safie Xheta, Valerie Richardson, Lucy Rushton, Kelly Fauvrelle, Joanna Thompson, Ligita Kostiajeviene, Lesley Pearson, Carol Milne, Doreen Virgo, Diane Dyer, Kayleigh Hanks, Kelly -Anne Case, Dorothy Woolmer, Natalie Crichlow, Belinda Rose, Pamela Mellor, Linda Vilika, Lindsay Birbeck, Michelle Pearson, Michelle Simpsonson, Alice Farquharson, Laura Rakstelyte, Sandra Samuels, Marlene McCabe, Lana Nemceva, Bethany Fields, Serafima Mashaka , V Hudson era, Keeley Bunker, Emily Goodman, Cristina Ortiz-Lozano, Margaret Robertson, Arlene Williams, Sarah Hassell, Fatima Burathoki, Lesley Spearing, Niyat Berhane Teklemariam, Zoe Orton, Beatrice Yankson, Levi Ogden, Tsegereda Gebremariam, Nicola Stevenson, Mandeep Singh, Alison McBlaine, Katy Sprague, Saskia Jones, Lindsay de Feliz, Marion Price, Jolanta Jakubowska, Kayleigh Dunning, Nelly Myers, Angela Tarver, Amy Appleton, Sandra Seagrove, Vivienne Bryan, Stacey Cooper, Helen Almey, Magdalena Pacult, Katherine Bevan, Kelly Price, Beverley Denahy, Gian Kaur Bhandal, Margaret Grant, Kymberli Sweeney, Mary Haley, Cherith Van Der Ploeg, Ann Mowbray, Debbie Zurick, Li Qing Wang, Janice Woolford, Katrina Fletcher, Bhavini Pravin, Tatiana Koudriavtsev, Layla Arezo , Jasbir Kaur, Premm Monti and Frances Murray