What is our Worth?

TW: Violence Against Women, Domestic Violence

There’s this opinion piece I’ve had in my mind for a while; since starting back at Salient really. But I’ve been hesitant. What does it mean to beat a dead horse? What does it mean to consistently see men in our headlines, when according to the UN, one woman or girl is killed every ten minutes by an intimate partner or family member?

The trigger for this was small: a few days ago, YouTube took down an AI channel which uploaded nothing but hyperrealistic videos of women, first begging for their lives, and then being shot. The channel had over a thousand subscribers. The videos were made with Google’s new AI software that was supposed to be safeguarded, but women’s suffering slipped under the radar.

On June 14, 2025, Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman was assassinated in a shooting at her home in Brooklyn Park. Not a random act, but part of a planned attack targeting Democratic legislators. 

On February 8, 2025, NDTV reported that nearly 100 women were enslaved in Georgia, tricked into what they thought were surrogacy jobs. Instead, they were injected with hormones, anesthetised, and had their eggs harvested once a month, their bodies treated as warehouses for profit. A “farm.” A farm of women.

What unites these stories—the politician killed in her kitchen, the women wired into egg-extraction machines, the AI avatars executed for clicks—isn’t simply violence. It is the sense that women’s worth is endlessly negotiable. That our suffering is a currency: traded for views, votes, profits.

It is easy to tell ourselves these are outliers. America has its gun problem. Georgia has its mafia problem. The internet has its radical weirdos. But what is the common denominator? That women, when reduced to symbols, are infinitely expendable.

And what about here, in Aotearoa? We have our own ledger. We average one woman a month killed by a current or former partner. Our Family Court is so clogged that survivors wait years for basic protections. We had the Roast Busters scandal; we had Grace Millane’s murder turned into a pornography of trial detail. Every country finds its own flavour of the same pattern.

We like to call ourselves world leaders in gender equity. In 1893 we became the first country in the world to give women the vote; we put Jacinda Ardern on international magazine covers. But what is the worth of a woman’s life here, when Māori women are three times more likely than pākehā to be killed by an intimate partner? When frontline women’s refuges operate on bake-sale budgets while Corrections pours millions into prison expansions? When a violent man can be bailed to the same street as his victim because there’s “nowhere else to put him”?

So when I ask “What is our worth?” I don’t mean as individuals—your mother, your girlfriend, your flatmate. I mean systemically. What is the value of a woman’s life, when companies can profit from making fake snuff porn of us, when gangs can extract our eggs like battery hens, when politicians are targeted and receive almost no media attention?

Worth is not abstract. It is measured in clicks, in court delays, in the speed of a police response. It is measured in the difference between how quickly Meta will pull down copyright infringement versus how slowly it removes videos of abuse. It is measured in the fact that Google can create AI capable of faking executions, but not one capable of spotting misogyny.

I keep circling back to politeness. The machinery of disbelief is greased by it. We excuse, we downplay, we say “this isn’t who we are.” And yet it is. It is who we are until we choose otherwise. Until women’s deaths and degradations are not just tragedies, but national emergencies. Until tech companies, courts, and parliaments are made to answer not just for their oversights, but for the premise they operate on: that women’s lives are optional margins in the spreadsheet.

What is our worth? If you take the headlines at face value, it is less than a vote, less than an ad impression, less than a clutch of harvested eggs. The only way to shift that balance is relentless attention. Refusing to let the horror pass as background noise. Naming it, over and over, until the cost of ignoring it outweighs the cost of change.

Because the dead horse is not dead. It is us. And every day, the world tells us what it thinks we’re worth. The only question is whether we keep agreeing.