It's Mental Illness. It’s Men. It's Misogyny.

Stabbings in Sydney. Punchings in New York. Pervasive sexual abuse among young adults. What crime and violence tell us about our culture.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

In Sydney, Australia, a man went on a stabbing rampage in a mall; 15 of the 18 people he killed or injured were women. In New York City, 14 women have reported being punched by random male strangers in the past month. Across the United States, rapidly-rising numbers of teenage girls and college-age women say they have been choked by a male partner during sex; one survey of 5,000 female college students in the midwest found that nearly two-thirds reported sexual strangulation.

Global feminist movements have been wildly successful. And still, women and girls face endemic violence from strangers, acquaintances, and loved ones alike — and then find our fear and even victimization ignored, shrugged off, denied, or mocked.

According to the father of the Sydney mall stabber, his son “wanted a girlfriend, and he’s got no social skills, and he was frustrated out of his brains.” He stabbed five women to death, as well as one man, a security guard and refugee from Pakistan who tried to protect victims from the attack. The killer even stabbed a baby girl.

The killer’s profile is familiar to anyone who has ever read about American mass shooters: Lonely, socially inept, struggling with mental health issues. Overwhelmingly, people who commit acts of mass violence are male. They often have histories of smaller-scale violent acts, often against women. This, though, isn’t treated as predictive, because overwhelmingly, people who commit acts of individual violence against women are male, too. Most of them do not turn into mass shooters or stabbers. They tend to attack their victims one at a time.

Men remain more likely than women to be violently victimized by a stranger. Women remain likelier to be killed or injured by someone they know. But perpetrators of violence against both men and women, strangers and not, are overwhelmingly male. And it is women, much more so than men, who are targeted because they are women.

That seems to be the case with the spate of punchings in New York City, as well as with the stabbings in Sydney. In both cities, men with mental health issues appear to have targeted women for random acts of violence. It’s easy to point to the mental health part of the equation and say that these are simply disturbed men and there is no rhyme or reason to their behavior. But there is some rhyme to it. They aren’t attacking any random passerby. They’re attacking female ones.

It’s misogyny. But it’s not just misogyny. The fact that men with serious mental health disorders seem to be targeting women for violence tells us much more than just “they’re crazy.” It tells us something important about the subtle and not-so-subtle messages we send to men about what they deserve and what women are for. The most violent and paranoid QAnon followers and MAGA proponents and abortion clinic terrorists and religious radicals are not representative of every single person who shares in some sliver of their broader belief system. But certain movements and ideologies tend to attract extremists and those who are tiptoeing along the edge of reality — and are routinely cited by those who have fallen over that edge. That tells us something not just about one violent person’s mental health, but about the ideologies that draw them in and motivate them to act.