Oscar Pistorius’s sentence is doubled and that should give hope to us all – for that’s how bad things are

I didn’t expect it to happen. Back in September 2014, listening with dismay when a female judge, Thokozile Masipa, found Oscar Pistorius not guilty of the murder of Reeva Steenkamp, I didn’t ever expect to see justice done.

Three years later, it’s a different story. In December 2015 a South African appeals court replaced Pistorius’s manslaughter conviction with one of murder, and now, on the eve of the international day for the elimination of violence against women, the athlete’s prison sentence has been more than doubled to 13 years.

Is 13 years enough? Ultimately that’s a meaningless question. Nothing will change what happened on the night of Valentine’s Day 2013, when Pistorius shot Steenkamp four times through a locked toilet door. As Zoe Williams wrote, no loss of freedom can be ever comparable to the loss of a life, but that is not the only reason why sentencing matters. “Imprisonment,” wrote Williams, “has another purpose, beyond the individual: the justice system is what we use to announce to one another how seriously we take a crime.”

Three years ago the killing of Reeva Steenkamp appeared, in the eyes of the South African law, to be less important than certain types of property theft. She was dead and gone, and the only story worth hearing seemed to be that of her killer, frequently portrayed as the tragic hero led astray.

Steenkamp, often referred to only as “Pistorius’s dead girlfriend”, was reduced to a plot device in what became as one headline put it, “the rise and fall of the Blade Runner”. Dead women can’t think or feel, so the only subjectivity that mattered was that of Pistorius. “The accused,” said Masipa, “is the only person who can say what his state of mind was at the time he fired the shots that killed the deceased”. No one can say how Steenkamp was feeling back then. It’s not difficult to imagine it, though.

It’s testimony to the determination of Steenkamp’s family and supporters that her murderer finally faces a sentence that goes some way to reflecting the value of his victim’s life. While many still wish to see this as the Oscar Pistorius Show – the Mirror, for instance, is currently reporting on “How Oscar Pistorius went from Olympic and Paralympic icon to world's most famous murderer” – more and more of us are unwilling to make this all about him.

Male violence isn’t original. A man who shoots his girlfriend through a locked door isn’t some modern-day Hamlet. He’s an entitled, boorish bully, raised in a world where male aggression is normalised, lacking the courage to question his own hate.

When Oscar Pistorius won medals, he did something no one else could do; when he murdered Steenkamp, he became just another everyday monster. There are millions of men like him. The true heroes are the women who dare to speak out about abuse, just as Steenkamp had been planning to, about a previous relationship.

There is no happy ending to this new story. Reeva Steenkamp remains dead and during the course of today, an estimated three women will have been killed by their male partners in the US alone. Here in the UK, male violence has been responsible for the deaths of more than 900 women over a six-year period. A World Health Organisation study finds that 30 per cent of all women globally experience intimate partner violence, while almost half of all female murder victims die at the hands of partners or family members (for men it is less than 6 per cent).

These figures are staggering, each one representing a human being with passions, hopes and dreams. No court or prison sentence can repair the damage. There will be no justice until we have created a world in which all women are able to love freely, safely and without fear.

Nonetheless, at the start of the UN’s 16 days of activism against gender-based violence, we can treat the doubling of Pistorius’s sentence as a sign that men who kill women cannot hide behind self-glorifying narratives forever.

Women across the world – sisters of Steenkamp and the millions of others who die at men’s hands – will not stand for it. To men who might murder we say, your reign of terror will not last. We will not stop until you do.