'Young women must have sexual autonomy without shame'

A Twitter account, Counting Dead Women, run by campaigner Karen Ingala Smith began tweeting a list of every British woman killed by a man, or where a man is the principle suspect, since November 25 last year.

From 8am a woman's name, photograph and the date she was killed was shared every five minutes. With at least 90 women killed by men in the past year, the Twitter tributes ran all day.

READ MORE: Man found guilty of murdering British backpacker Grace Millane in New Zealand

They include women of all ages - from a teenager to an elderly woman killed by her son. It makes for devastating reading, the juxtaposition of these smiling faces set next to the brutality of their lives' ends. Women strangled, shot, dismembered by men they knew and men they had loved.

Among the list of women is Grace Millane, a 21-year-old murdered in New Zealand on the eve of her 22nd birthday, a young woman newly graduated and travelling the world. For anyone who has backpacked as a young person, you can so vividly remember it - that sense of everything new and out before you.

The three-week trial of her killer, Jesse Kempson, made international headlines. Of course: it is an international story about a beautiful, white, middle class young woman - a perfect package for any news editor.

New Zealand has reporting restrictions that mean the names of those on trial can be withheld. On sentencing, the judge in the case can make a decision about whether or not to lift the restrictions.

These don't apply to overseas media and so Kempson has been named and pictured by foreign news outlets.

Having the killer's privacy protected throughout proceedings leant a particularly skewed feel to the case. That is, skewed towards the accused and away from the victim - her life and her choices, her photographs and her name were on display. Not his.

And, of course, the story was a particularly perfect package for news outlets given its sexual element.

The defence case was that Grace, who had been strangled, died accidentally during a 'sex game gone wrong'. The jury had already heard about Kempson's appalling behaviour following Grace's death - that he took photographs of her after he had killed her, that he watched porn, that he bought a suitcase in which he would later bury her in the Waitakere Ranges, that he then went on a further Tinder date.

The defence case also meant that intimate details of Grace's life were shared in an attempt to build a picture of her as a young woman who would welcome the type of rough sex and strangulation that, Kempson's failed argument ran, accidentally lead to her death.

There has been much outcry about how the media reported on the trial with allegations that Ms Millane was being shamed in death, re-victimised by the trial. Some of this was quite right, other criticisms missed the mark.

Reporting on court cases is tightly restricted. To some extent the reporter is, as with everything, filtering proceedings by making a choice on what to cover and what not but these are usually details about whether to quote lawyers at length, or how much detail to go into over points of law.

It would not be possible to completely ignore the defence case, as some have suggested. To do so would amount to journalists make presumptions on an accused's innocence or guilt. Preventing the reporting of court proceedings entirely, which has also been suggested, would fly in opposition to having an open and transparent justice system.

In the past decade in the UK the "rough sex" defence has increased by 90 per cent. A website tracking this trend, We Can't Consent To This, says 59 women were killed during what was claimed to have been a consensual act. Some 18 cases have come to trial in the past five years using this defence and nearly half have been successful.

The issue then becomes about the 'sex game gone wrong' defence and whether a defence of accidental death should be allowed. If so, then what evidence should be permitted and what not? But, currently, whatever evidence is presented in court will be reported on.

Much of the coverage of the Grace Millane case was told straight, setting out the facts.

Some coverage was clearly designed to titillate readers. One newspaper used completely unnecessary screenshots from the dating websites the court was told Grace used.

Headlines were unclear, again designed to titillate and some of the post-trial coverage was outright offensive. A headline from the New Zealand Herald springs to mind – "The Girl Behind The Headlines: Boyfriends and hangovers."

With regards the trial coverage, there is a difference between setting out facts and slut-shaming a victim. From the criticism of the trial coverage, there seemed to be no distinction between the two.

While there is a debate to be had about flaws in the justice system, it is certainly a flaw of society that the default is to view it as shameful for a woman to enjoy sex and seek it out.

More broadly than the Grace Millane case, there is a narrative that it is shameful for women to be active and enthusiastic participants in their dating lives. This denies them sexual freedom and choice.

The media has a moral responsibility to cover such cases sensitively. The is a line between slut-shaming and setting out facts. When well-meaning commenters fail to make a distinction they risk becoming inadvertently complicit in that shaming, though that's tough to fit in a headline.