Bridget Phillipson, Minister for Women and Equalities, is accusing the political right of weaponising violence against women and girls (VAWG). This is a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black.
What Bridgett fails to see is that VAWG can be so easily weaponised by demagogues on the left and the right because of societal gynocentrism rather than misogyny. Because we care more about the safety and well being of women and girls, we can be more easily motivated to react or even overreact to the risks posed by migrants or supposed misogyny among boys.
It was perhaps always so. Stories of women being raped have been an effective way to rile up the population in support of war. Similarly, race-based lynchings would often start with a false accusation of rape. Take, for example, the lonely and brutal death of Emmet Till, who was abducted and murdered following a false accusation made by Carolyn Bryant Donham. Evil acts are sometimes framed in terms of empathy for female victims.
Let’s look at Bridgett’s oeuvre first. Like her predecessor, she has a background in a women’s advocacy organisation, in this case Wearside Women in Need. The funding of this organisation is a little opaque but in 2025 its income was £2,363,501. £46.02 (0.2%)came from donations and legacies and £1,164, 592 (49%) came from a Government grant. It is not clear to where the other 51% comes from. It is also clear that its income has been growing much faster than the wider UK economy, nearly doubling since 2021, and at least half of that comes from the taxpayer.
Bridget uses alarmist language around VAWG but seldom provides empirical data. The acronym is usually preceded by amplifying words such as ‘epidemic’, ‘crisis’ or ‘national emergency’. The problem is that these terms are not defined or backed by empirical data. Most violent crime has been in decline since the 1990’s (here), while that doesn’t mean we should settle for that, it might be better to ask what factors led to that decline and it wasn’t anti-misogyny training for boys.
The tactics of Reform and some figures on the right of the Conservative Party are not too dissimilar. Again, they utilise our natural tendency to be more concerned for the safety of women and girls, but rather than weaponising it against men and masculinity in general, they hone in on migrants, particularly illegal migrants. While there may be some groups who are more violent than average, the overall effect on our crime statistics is likely to be small.
Why has the Labour Party chosen this moment to weaponise VAWG and demonise boys? In part, it is because polling suggests Labour is in trouble with young female voters. It is also because Labour is divided on trans issues (here) and the Party has come to be associated with trans rights and the problems with men in women’s spaces, even though this culture flourished and grew under the Conservative administration. There is also the problem of women who are unhappy about migrants in their vicinity and what they see as a ‘see no evil’ approach to grooming gangs.
In this kind of situation, what you need is a bogeyman to rally the divided troops. That bogeyman or more accurately bogeymen are the manosphere, the supposed epidemic of VAWG and the supposed problem with misogyny among boys. In short, Labour is demonising the one group who can’t fight back to appease its divided and angry feminist supporters. One day, Labour will pay a price for this; those boys will come of age and they will be unlikely to forget the hectoring misandry of Labour feminists.
Once again, that VAWG can be so easily weaponised by demagogues, for the feminist or right-wing, should tell us something. The prevailing social landscape is not misogynist, far from it; rather it is gynocentric and strongly so.
