The trial, partial conviction and eventual sentencing of Oscar Pistorius have used up a lot of the international supply of newsprint and ink. And the vast majority of it has been expended on Pistorius rather than the woman he killed.
Would we in Britain have known or cared about Reeva Steenkamp if she had been shot by someone else? Given those front-page photographs immediately after her death, she might have made a candy shot somewhere, but there would never have been this international interest.
But when it came to the court case, shouldn't that have been about Steenkamp? How did we allow Pistorius to make it all about him, his histrionics, his vomiting in court, how he was a broken man? It was theatre.
And now that it's all over, bar the appeals, some commentators are seeking to draw conclusions from a single case about violence against women in South Africa and about the country's justice system.
What nonsense.
Do we look at our own court cases and make such generalisations? Do we have any real notion of the levels of violence, particularly against women, in this country?
I was struck today by a small single-column photograph of a woman with a bandaged head at the foot of today's Daily Mirror.
Inside was a first-person account of how a Liverpool taxi driver had attacked his wife with an axe and a Stanley knife last September, imprisoning her for three days before driving her to hospital and torching their family home. He admitted a number of offences, including causing grievous bodily harm, when he appeared in court by video link this week and will be sentenced in December. The judge has told him that it is almost inevitable that he will go to jail for a long time.
The story, by John Stiggle, is told in detail on pages 6 and 7. It also appears on pages 4 and 5 of today's Liverpool Echo, which is part of the Trinity Mirror stable.
Would we in Britain have known or cared about Reeva Steenkamp if she had been shot by someone else? Given those front-page photographs immediately after her death, she might have made a candy shot somewhere, but there would never have been this international interest.
But when it came to the court case, shouldn't that have been about Steenkamp? How did we allow Pistorius to make it all about him, his histrionics, his vomiting in court, how he was a broken man? It was theatre.
And now that it's all over, bar the appeals, some commentators are seeking to draw conclusions from a single case about violence against women in South Africa and about the country's justice system.
What nonsense.
Do we look at our own court cases and make such generalisations? Do we have any real notion of the levels of violence, particularly against women, in this country?
I was struck today by a small single-column photograph of a woman with a bandaged head at the foot of today's Daily Mirror.
Inside was a first-person account of how a Liverpool taxi driver had attacked his wife with an axe and a Stanley knife last September, imprisoning her for three days before driving her to hospital and torching their family home. He admitted a number of offences, including causing grievous bodily harm, when he appeared in court by video link this week and will be sentenced in December. The judge has told him that it is almost inevitable that he will go to jail for a long time.
The story, by John Stiggle, is told in detail on pages 6 and 7. It also appears on pages 4 and 5 of today's Liverpool Echo, which is part of the Trinity Mirror stable.
Daily Mirror,
pages 6-7
Liverpool Echo,
pages 4-5
The troubling thing is that June Churchill's ordeal has reached the national press chiefly because of the link between the two newspapers. No other paper picked it up from the court hearing.
June Churchill is not a frail old lady or a pretty teenager, so she isn't marketable. She doesn't fit the stereotype of a weak, cowed woman: even after the battering she suffered at the hands of her husband she was strong enough to see off raiders who went into her florists' shop and threatened her with a gun last December
The three-day siege may have been unusual, but there is sadly nothing unusual about women suffering this sort of treatment. The Churchills are a middle-aged white couple, but injuries inflicted on Asian women in particular in the name of family honour are equally - and often more - horrendous.
Individual cases tend not to be reported because they are so common, and when something is common it isn't news - until someone comes along, as Andrew Norfolk of the Times did with the Rotherham sex abuse scandal - and starts joining the dots and produces statistics that appal.
Karen Ingala Smith has been joining dots on women murdered by men over the past three years. On average a woman is killed by a man every three days.
Smith is a strident feminist who gives no quarter to those who say "what about
men killed by men, men killed by women or women killed by women".
Her beef is that male violence is so routine that it needs shouting from the rooftops. SubScribe has noted her work in the past, but the cases of Reeva Steenkamp and June Churchill make it feel timely to point it up again.
Please look at her blog Counting Dead Women.
June Churchill is not a frail old lady or a pretty teenager, so she isn't marketable. She doesn't fit the stereotype of a weak, cowed woman: even after the battering she suffered at the hands of her husband she was strong enough to see off raiders who went into her florists' shop and threatened her with a gun last December
The three-day siege may have been unusual, but there is sadly nothing unusual about women suffering this sort of treatment. The Churchills are a middle-aged white couple, but injuries inflicted on Asian women in particular in the name of family honour are equally - and often more - horrendous.
Individual cases tend not to be reported because they are so common, and when something is common it isn't news - until someone comes along, as Andrew Norfolk of the Times did with the Rotherham sex abuse scandal - and starts joining the dots and produces statistics that appal.
Karen Ingala Smith has been joining dots on women murdered by men over the past three years. On average a woman is killed by a man every three days.
Smith is a strident feminist who gives no quarter to those who say "what about
men killed by men, men killed by women or women killed by women".
Her beef is that male violence is so routine that it needs shouting from the rooftops. SubScribe has noted her work in the past, but the cases of Reeva Steenkamp and June Churchill make it feel timely to point it up again.
Please look at her blog Counting Dead Women.
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