Murder. Shock. Public outcry. Gossip. Conjectures. Arrest. Media circus. Facebook trials. Begin the blame game. A vigil, a street protest – at which only a handful attend.

Terrible weather this weekend, flooded streets from torrential rain.

Shift of focus. Forgetfulness – until the next dead one.

So the cycle goes: when the lights of public spectacle are turned off, only those directly involved remain, having to bear the unimaginable pain that tragedy has brought upon them. And, perhaps, from an emotional standpoint, being left alone is the better option; the sensationalism of those who want to take a cheap ride on their sorrow, the faux solidarity of those whose only intention is to sell themselves or whatever they are selling on the back of the victims only accrues the loneliness and grief.

The inanities spawned by self-appointed experts seizing upon the occasion to give us a piece of their ‘illuminated’ mind, which we haven’t asked for, is cringy, to say the least. What’s more, the attention they crave, and are accorded, shifts the focus from the real issues to who’s saying what – as if the validity of what is said rests with who said it and not on the soundness of the argument made. 

The murder in Paola is textbook femicide. That should at least please those who believe in the thaumaturgical effect of correct terminology. As it should humour enough those who are in a permanent police-bashing mode, to note the inadequacy and inertness of the force to respond to domestic violence. It’s open season even on the law courts, though it’s hard to fathom by which convoluted logic adherents of the ‘rule of law’ expect the government to ‘correct’ the courts in their presumed deficiencies when vouchsafing the independence of the courts from the government is supposedly so sacred for the safeguarding of the rule of law.

It’s a circus and it would have all been hilarious had it not been that a woman’s life was tragically taken away from her. 

But when all public attention veers elsewhere, as it has done so many times before, then what?

There had barely been an arraignment related to the murder in Paola that the media were reporting about some domestic dispute in court related to a ‘single mother’ on ‘social services’ with a child from ‘unknown father’ and who, apparently, had been living with the child’s father all along.

The witch syndrome (oh, wicked daughters of Eve!) hasn’t faded with modernism, it has just changed shape

Now the reporting of this ‘news’, the news value of which is really of very little value in the larger scheme of ailments that afflict our country, in reality should ring all the alarm bells to anyone who is really interested in the narrative that makes women particularly vulnerable to violence.

At face value, the story is all about abuse of social assistance and fraud to the state. Beyond that, however, it is the perpetuating of a narrative that people on social assistance (especially women who are single parents, “getting themselves blow-drys, doing their nails and smoking cigarettes”) are leeching the state, that they are just a crafty bunch trying to graft the national coffers filled by our taxes.

True: there are a number of people on social assistance that abuse the system, the same as there are a number of businesses that employ all their wits to avoid paying tax. That, however, doesn’t automatically make a tax evader out of every businessperson. The majority of single mothers receiving social assistance do not have another option to get by. Given the opportunity they would rather earn a more decent living and have their independence.

Then there is the question of ‘unknown fathers’. Here again, there is abuse of the system but that is not the rule. The possibility of registering a child with an ‘unknown father’ has given many women a way to sever relations with abusive men, to deny them a claim on their child and, consequently, a claim on their lives.

One might argue that failing to register the father can be accommodating to a man who does not want to attend to his fatherly responsibilities. That might be true to a certain point but many women who refuse to legitimise the fatherhood of their child consider that they would rather fend for themselves than have to endure the presence of a man whose conduct towards them was either abusive (in different forms that abuse manifests itself) or who they deem to be, for some reason or another, a toxic presence in their life.

Such genuine cases rarely make it to the news. Fraud and sleaze make much more exciting reading than the daily labours of a woman who has to make it through life with whatever it throws at her.

The problem, though, is that when we allow certain narratives that somehow give the impression that abuse of the system is so rampant when, in reality, it is not, rather than solving abuse we end up demonising those with a genuine claim.

What’s more, even when reporting cases of abuse, the onus of the crime somehow often shifts onto the woman, as in the case of the story reported above, as if a man who lives with a woman who has his child and for which he didn’t claim paternity isn’t equally abusing from the generosity of the state.

As long as women will remain the target of social narratives that demonise them they will always remain more vulnerable to violence of all types because they are perceived as somehow intrinsically evil. The witch syndrome (oh, wicked daughters of Eve!) hasn’t faded with modernism, it has just changed shape.

And while it is true that there needs to be a police force that is better equipped to attend to domestic violence and it is true that we need better services to protect vulnerable women, it is also true that, despite all the changes institutions can undergo, women will never be safe from violence unless the narrative that justifies violence against them is rooted out completely.