What’s Wrong With Our Men? And What Can We Do About It?

Editor’s note: Visit the state’s Family Violence Program Resources page for a directory of shelters and support services. The National Domestic Violence Hotline can be reached at 800-799-SAFE (7233) or by texting “START” to 88788. If you or someone you know is in crisis, there is help available. Call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Last week, there was a tragedy on the Rice University campus. 

A bright, ambitious student was found dead in her dorm room on the first day of class for the semester. Police said Andrea Rodriguez Avila, a junior from the suburbs of Baltimore, appeared to be in a romantic relationship with the man — not a student — whose body was found next to hers. He was killed by an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Rice University’s police department said a note left by the suspect indicated the two had a “troubled” relationship.

Another murder-suicide.

According to the Rice Thresher, the university’s student newspaper, Andrea had transferred to the Houston school in the spring from the Community College of Baltimore County, where she served as president of an honor society. On the day she died — Monday, Aug. 26 — the paper reported that she was on the student association’s agenda to be considered for appointment as deputy parliamentarian at Rice. By all public accounts, she was thoughtful and a good listener, brave and supportive. Photos showed her smiling in maroon, thick-framed glasses with glossy black hair that shone cherry-red where the sun hit it.

This story is, in a word, devastating. It’s also desperately common in our state.

On Tuesday of the same week — one day later — a 21-year-old student at Houston Community College, Muna Pandey, was found dead in her apartment. (A 51-year-old man was arrested on a capital murder charge.)

The next day, Wednesday, I was scanning through our intrepid local state news outlets and, well, noticing a pattern: “Hewitt man accused of brutally assaulting girlfriend,” “SAPD: Man shoots two women, including pregnant victim, inside car,” and “Affidavit: Waco man assaulted girlfriend’s child for playing in cat litter.”

I’ve spent a career reading, and sometimes writing, those headlines. 

Men killing women. Men killing teens in front of their mothers. Men killing children. It’s been a while since I had done this, but I thought, as I have so many times before: How could readers possibly be aware of the enormity of this problem? Those stories are from one week.

The number of women killed by a male partner with a firearm has nearly doubled in the last decade.

And they left me feeling, more than usual, like we’re stuck rewriting the same headlines, with no sign of them slowing down and no real sense that there’s anything to be done about it. And I’m not sure it has to be this way. 

***

First, let’s talk about the scope of the problem. 

The deadliest mass shooting in Texas history involved a man firing more than 450 rounds at attendees during the Sunday service of the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs in 2017. The assailant had served in the Air Force for five years before he was dismissed with a bad conduct discharge in 2014, per The Texas Tribune. The Air Force was ordered to pay $230 million to survivors for failing to report to the FBI that he’d been found guilty of assaulting his wife and stepson, which would have prevented him from buying the rifle he used to murder 26 people and injure 22 more before killing himself.

Compared to nationwide averages, violent crime in Texas isn’t great. According to the Austin American-Statesman, the state had a violent crime rate of 431.9 per 100,000 people in 2022, compared to the country’s average of 380.7 per 100,000 people, according to FBI data. There were 129,852 offenses reported in Texas by 1,072 law enforcement agencies in 2022. Of those, 100,943 offenders were male. The location of those crimes? The most — 67,577 — happened at a residence. Then highways and alleys, parking lots, stores, and hotels. According to the nonprofit Texas Advocacy Project, one in three Texans will experience domestic violence in their lifetime, and girls and young women between the ages of 16 and 24 experience the highest rate of all.

The latest available data from the Texas Council on Family Violence (circa 2022) noted that 216 Texans were killed by their intimate partners across 63 counties that year — a 33% uptick in cases from 2018 and part of a “staggering” long-term increase. That number includes 179 women, 37 men, and six LGBTQIA+ victims, all ranging in age from 13 to 89. Ten children were killed and two were injured that year. And the perpetrators? Overwhelmingly men. Of the 216, most women were killed by their boyfriends, then husbands, then ex-boyfriends, then ex-husbands, then male stalkers.

And even though those deaths involved stabbings, strangulation and asphyxiation, drowning, arson, and more — about 129 were women killed by men using a firearm. In fact, the number of women killed by a male partner with a firearm has nearly doubled in the last decade, per the Texas Council on Family Violence.

Studies show that natural disasters — the kind Texas is seeing more and more of — increase family and intimate partner violence. Calls to law enforcement have only grown after years of COVID-19 lockdowns and winter storms. In Houston, they doubled between 2019 and 2022. Again, after Hurricane Beryl, a Houston-area domestic violence organization told Houston Chronicle it received an uptick in calls.

Then there are man-made disasters. Homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant women — more than hypertension, hemorrhage, and sepsis — according to researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. A study published earlier this year in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons found people who were pregnant or postpartum at the time of their deaths were 14% more likely to be killed by an intimate partner than those who weren’t. And it’s worse for those living in states like Texas with almost no access to abortion.  

“Research and policies to reduce violence against pregnant people must also consider the important role that abortion access plays in protecting safety,” the study concludes. 

(If you need the Not All Men Caveat, please consider this it, and let’s move on: Some men are fucking great. Most aren’t murderers, assaulters, or rapists. OK, that’s done.)

The MeToo movement — and its reckoning on gender-based violence of both the sexual and nonsexual kind — reached a fever pitch in 2017. But it’s 2024, and I often still think about that viral tweet from a few years ago: “Being a straight woman is wild because you have to date your only natural predator.”

Have you, like vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, been wondering why so many women are single and childless well into their 30s and onward? Hard to imagine that this isn’t related.

It’s happening every single day in our state. 

Sarah Nejdl told The Barbed Wire that she provides free transportation to crisis centers across Texas through the organization Families to Freedom, which she founded. Each year, she and her team serve more than 1,000 victims and children across 86 counties. Their services include “car rides to domestic violence shelters across Texas, road trips to family homes in other states, multi-state bus tickets, and fuel assistance to relocate far away.”

To date, in 2024, Nejdl said her organization has transported 815 adults and 734 children on 970 trips to safety. “By year’s end, we’ll exceed 1,100 adult victims — easily,” Nejdl said. “There’s a large population in the U.S. that is suffering because of, and after, domestic abuse.”

“It’s the equivalent land mass size of the state of Washington and the equivalent population of the state of New York,” said Nejdl, who noted that recent years saw demand increases in both Houston and Dallas, with a general annual uptick in the summer.

It would be easy for the average person to dismiss this as not their problem — as in, well, I don’t know anyone who would do anything like that. Even with the kind of reporting I do, I have fallen prey to this line of thinking myself. But, in my experience, it’s only a matter of time before that illusion gets shattered.

Two weeks before Andrea Rodriguez Avila was killed at Rice, I got a text from an old colleague. An extraordinarily beloved former coworker of mine — of whom I was incredibly fond and believed to be a shining example of a person in a content and joy-filled marriage — shot his wife and then himself outside of Waco. John Werner, 67, killed his 65-year-old wife, Karen Werner, and then called 911 before turning the weapon on himself. Even while writing this, I can still hear John’s voice sitting at the cubicle behind me, calling his wife before leaving the office each day. “Karen!” he’d exclaim happily every time, as if there was no one in the world he would rather have been speaking to. 

My colleagues and I, as journalists, tried to gather information to make sense of it: There was a suicide note. Was there a sudden change in medication? Was his wife severely sick? I called the sheriff with whom I’d spoken dozens of times before, but there was nothing he could say to help. I started crying on the phone — it was the first time I’d cried in front of a source in a long time. And I’m just a former colleague. Some of my friends knew the couple for 40 years. It has been shocking, and horrifying, and disorienting. 

For many of these cases, we will never actually know what happened. 

***

We do know the problem exists. But how do we talk about it? Not particularly well.

Take, for example, the backlash that actress and producer Blake Lively has received for the press surrounding the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s novel, “It Ends With Us.” The movie is about a woman experiencing intimate partner violence, but many have said the trailer didn’t appropriately disclose that facet of the storyline — and Lively was accused of promoting the film like “the sequel to Barbie.” In a promotional video on the film’s Instagram, Lively encouraged women to: “Grab your girls and wear your florals!” Even trauma therapists weighed in.

As journalists, I’m not sure we do much better.

When I first started reporting for The Waco Tribune-Herald about 10 years ago, arrests related to domestic violence were so prevalent that we weren’t quite sure how to approach them. Here’s how I understood the issue: Cover all of them and there’s no room for anything else, cover none and you’re burying the problem. Cover only the egregious ones and you’re sensationalizing. Do one, long enterprise story about the scope of the violence in a specific community? Nobody reads it. To put it plainly: a lot of outlets still haven’t quite figured this out. 

Homicides, though? That we all know how to do — but mostly as one-offs. A murder-suicide on Austin Avenue in 2013. A murder-suicide near West in 2014. A murder-suicide on Stone Creek Ridge Drive. I learned in 2015 that some law enforcement officers consider beating deaths one of the worst ways to go, whether from intimate partner violence or not. I spent a lot of time on the phone and at crime scenes with officers and victims’ loved ones trying to understand why, but I never quite did. And we didn’t really contextualize them outside of the end-of-year homicide reviews — just one long string of an example here, an example there. New ones popped up all the time.

What we cover are usually the most egregious, most celebrity-centric cases. And we tend to suggest, whether we mean to or not, that they’re isolated instances — as opposed to what they actually are: Part of a larger pattern of misogyny in our culture. (More on that later.)

“I don’t think the American population thinks about domestic violence or violence against women until there is some sort of news splash — a murder-suicide or a celebrity,” Nejdl — the Families to Freedom founder — told The Barbed Wire_, in a phone interview on Tuesday from her car. Nejdl had just returned, once again, from driving a survivor of intimate partner violence to a safe location.

“When the Johnny Depp case was happening, people were watching,” Nejdl said. But “when the court case ended, so did that discussion.” Whether people look away because it’s too hard to bear witness or the problem seems insurmountable, they do. And there is still a lot of victim-blaming — a lot of well-meaning people who still believe that victims of intimate partner violence must have brought it on themselves. Must not have walked away quickly enough. 

“Every single day, women are escaping abuse,” Nejdl said. “Every single day, multiple victims are leaving abuse. Every single day. And we don’t have a news story on the news every single day saying, ‘Five people left their abusers.’”

To be clear, some outlets have compiled lists of resources and kept up with current legislation. (This month, a new law goes into effect to address funding for domestic violence shelters.) Others, like the San Antonio Express-News, have done innovative, thoughtful work to contextualize, analyze, and provide humanity in its reporting on gender-based violence. Take The Dallas Morning News, which has been meticulously and thoroughly documenting the homicides in Northeast Texas each year to “show the toll of violent crime.” According to the newspaper, 246 people were killed by homicides in Dallas in 2023. (The stories are individual, but they’re displayed in the context of each other.) 

Here’s what that looks like:

Awareness and education — especially resources — are paramount to keeping people paying attention. But the press alone can’t solve this problem.

***

Gendered violence is in all of our systems — our legislatures, police departments, courts, schools, and churches. It is perpetrated by people we know, or thought we knew, and by people who write laws and are sworn to uphold them. Some of us have written extensively about these problems — but reporting on something and changing it are different things.

Proposed legal and press solutions have been wide-ranging, from more comprehensive depictions of gender-based violence to reforms in the criminal justice and judicial arenas, along with mental health care reform and maternal health access. But we are long overdue for a conversation about how we can help readers understand the relationship between sexism, misogyny, harassment, sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and homicides.

In May 2024, Dr. Nicole Cross wrote for Spectrum News about an alarming pattern of women being attacked by men, seemingly randomly, in New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Cross put it: “The question many are asking is why? What would provoke a man to randomly punch a woman in the face?”

This is the same question I was asking myself last week — and nearly every morning I look through the kind of local headlines I’ve curated above. As psychotherapist and men’s health expert Dr. Brad Thomas told Cross: “Men feel entitled in a lot of ways to treat women disrespectfully and also this idea of toxic masculinity.”

“There are all of these gender roles that men are supposed to fit a certain mode or stereotype, and this fuels this idea that they can show up in these aggressive ways that are hurtful and harmful to women without caring about the consequences,” he added.

To that end, the journalist Liz Plank has been a particularly adept speaker on this issue, specifically since publishing “For The Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity,” which provides actionable steps for how to be a man in the modern world. The book is insightful, deeply researched, and serves as a guide for all of us trying to wade into these complex waters. But especially men. 

Plank has since gone viral for podcast clips, social media posts, news hits, and bylines about how we can rethink masculinity — and how men can apply it in their daily lives. She also deftly addresses why a woman should be involved in the conversation in the first place.

The question of raising boys differently has also been well-made by author Ruth Whippman, who spoke to Salon about her book “Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity.” It makes the case for raising a new generation of boys with compassion and emotional intelligence by taking a sober look at the rates of depression and loneliness in men and the rising academic gaps between the genders, among other data. 

“Patriarchy harms men and boys, as well as women,” Whippman told the site. “We’re all trapped in this system together. It’s central to the feminist project to support men and boys.”

In case some readers missed it, one particular debate took off online in this area a few months ago when women answered a simple question — would you rather be stuck alone in a forest with a bear or a man? — with a resounding: “BEAR.”

“I don’t pick bears because of my ignorance about bears, I pick bears because of my knowledge of men,” one woman wrote on TikTok. “At least if I got attacked by a bear, people would believe me,” said another. “It’s a hypothetical question and men still won’t take no for an answer,” said yet another.

“The bear experiment shouldn’t make men mad, it should make them pause,” Plank wrote in April. “If women are strong enough to brave a bear alone in the woods, then surely men can muster up the courage to talk about the reason why.”

And for folks who do want to effect change, there are what Nejdl called “bite-sized” approaches to handling societal problems.

“Maybe you can’t solve cancer, but you can walk a mile and make a donation,” Nejdl told The Barbed Wire. “Maybe you can’t solve homelessness, but you can show up and feed people for 30 minutes. With victims and survivors, it’s a lot harder. Shelters do not want someone just showing up to offer help. But what is bite-sized and what is possible would be fundraising and awareness. We are all starving for funds.”

Victim’s services agencies are starved, she emphasized, from a decrease in donations as well as a decrease in available federal funding. 

“It’s a very scary time right now,” Nejdl said. “If you want to impact change, help us out.”

Editor’s Note: We’re still thinking about this problem — and how journalism can better address it. Have an idea? The Barbed Wire welcomes your suggestions and stories.