Clik here to view.
As many men as women must be appalled by the threat of sexual predators. It's time they were part of the conversation
I tried to read the newspapers on the train yesterday morning but kept being tripped up by the details. I managed a few paragraphs about the death of 12-year-old Tia Sharp, before arriving at the detail that a sex toy with her blood on it had been found in the house the accused, Stuart Hazell, shared with her grandmother. The next story was about a newspaper entrepreneur, Eddy Shah, accused of six charges of raping a schoolgirl and ordering her into a threesome with a sex worker. The final story was about April Jones, the five-year-old killed in Wales, and told of one of her friends giving evidence to the court via videolink, while holding a teddy bear.
I flipped quickly to another paper, and found it dominated by the extraordinary story of three women, all missing for years, discovered in a house in Cleveland, Ohio, along with the daughter one of them gave birth to during captivity. I stared for a while at the comment from a neighbour of the alleged abductors, who said a woman had been seen crawling naked outside the house some time ago. My face remained expressionless, silent, while the tears began to flow. The man opposite me flickered a look of dismay and studied the carriage ceiling.
None of these cases have been resolved, and we don't know yet if any of the accused are guilty, but how many more of these stories can we take? A total of 589 alleged victims came forward as a result of Operation Yewtree, the investigation into Jimmy Savile's crimes; 13 men have now been arrested. The broadcaster Stuart Hall, whose case was separate to that investigation, pleaded guilty last week to 14 charges of indecently assaulting girls, one aged nine.
A comment piece by Joseph Harker this week imagined how news reports might look if writers focused on the race of white perpetrators as a factor in sexual violence cases in the way they do black and minority ethnic perpetrators. It demonstrated that focusing on race doesn't help us to get to the bottom of such cases.
But there is a defining characteristic of sexual violence perpetrators – they are predominantly male. We don't comment on this often, but in avoiding the subject we fail the victims, male and female. Last week it emerged that 140 people, almost all of them men, have alleged they suffered abuse at children's homes in North Wales over the course of three decades. Of the 84 people suspected of abuse, 75 are men. These last figures jibe with those reported by Cynthia Cockburn and Ann Oakley, in a piece on the culture of masculinity for this newspaper two years ago. "In 2009-2010," they wrote, "men were perpetrators in 91% of all violent incidents in England and Wales. The figures vary by type of incident: 81% for domestic violence, 86% for assault, 94% for wounding, 96% for mugging, 98% for robbery ... Of child sex offenders, 99% are male."
Feminists have tried to address this. When women have been targeted by male serial killers, for instance, and warned to stay indoors by police, feminists have called for men to be put under curfew instead. There has been a sustained attempt to stop people blaming the victims of sexual assault which has only been partially successful; a survey undertaken in 2010 for Haven, a service for rape victims, found a majority of women believed that, in certain circumstances, women should take responsibility if they'd been raped.
Last week a poll for the Independent found 76% of people – 74% of women and 78% of men – agreed with the statement "people accused of sexual assault should be given anonymity until they are proven guilty". It seemed an astonishing conclusion in light of Savile, and Stuart Hall respectively – one man who escaped justice because his crimes were never reported publicly, the other whose case was pursued to a guilty plea as a result.
This week the hashtag "#Killallmen" started trending on Twitter – a rhetorical scream of rage that was quickly, unsurprisingly, criticised in the strongest terms. People are right to be wary of anything that promotes an "us and them" mentality, not just because most men clearly abhor male violence, and an enormous number fall victim to it, but because if there's an us and them in this debate, it's between those who support and speak up for victims and those who, tacitly and otherwise, support perpetrators.
I'd love more men to get involved in this conversation, speaking out against the threat of male aggression we all live under, pushing the message that victims are not to blame, that issues surrounding consent must be taught in schools, that alleged perpetrators must be named – not to name and shame, but to name and protect, as rape campaigner Jill Saward put it this week. I'm sure there are many men who have felt just as appalled by these stories as I have. Let's hear more from them.
Twitter: @KiraCochrane
• For legal reasons, this article will not be open to comments