Will naming and shaming curb violence against women?

“Five-year-old girl raped in New Delhi”.

Another headline like that and I think I will take Mars One founder Bas Lansdorp up on the one-way ticket to Mars offered a few weeks back.

I think half of the human population (women) would be interested in making the journey, too. Who could blame us for wanting to find a more hospitable environment than Earth, where a missing five-year-old goes unacknowledged by police until it's too late and a young woman can’t even hop on public transit after dusk safely.

From the saga of Rehtaeh Parsons, to Steubenville, to what feels like a litany of daily depravity coming out of New Delhi — things have gotten so bad that it’s hard not to think that sexual predators have some kind of unspoken moral limbo competition going on, a ‘how-low-can-you-go’ type contest.

If all these grisly stories weren't enough, women are additionally burdened by a world that all-too-often sees us as both victim and provocateur -- call it a perverse twist on the Madonna/whore dichotomy -- and wants to talk about what she was wearing, what she was drinking, the colour of her hair. Call me crazy but I think it's safe to assume the five-year-old in India wasn't sporting a micro-mini.

It's time we shifted the focus away from the length of women's skirts to where it more properly belongs -- to the length and breadth and depth of the male mind. Women -- good women -- have brought about tremendous change over several generations, working hard to achieve gender parity in the eyes of the law and society.

Men -- good men -- should give their sex a wholesale seismic shake and start doing a little naming and shaming among their own. They might just do some good. And the women of Earth will thank them for it.