A Woman Was Lynched Today

This blog is an interesting idea but I was wondering something. What basis is the statement that these women were killed based their gender made on?


It's a question that was anticipated. It's not one that can be answered in a lot of cases but this isn't a court room.

There are clearly men killing women and girls, more of those than could just be by chance. I am taking the FBI statistics and the conclusions drawn from them at their word. There are enough of those murders and attacks to have a terrorizing effect on women and girls and to create widely accepted social conventions that there are places and times that women don’t have a right to go to places of public accommodation. The wisdom of avoiding danger is one thing, the assumption that women exercising their rights as human beings are to blame if they are attacked and killed is certainly another and it is not just. Any person of either gender should avoid known dangers, everyone should fight against injustice. The onus for these crimes has to be removed from victims and potential victims and placed where it belongs, on the criminals. Change the word “woman” to “African-American” or a number of other ethnic identities and see the effect.

It is clear that in these cases the fact that the murderer is a man and the victims are women indicate that the murderer believed he was entitled to kill the woman. Would he have killed a man? In most cases we don't know but we do know that he didn't choose to kill a man but did a woman. I firmly believe in some cases the man is acting out a role model learned from the culture or the media. In these cases it is specifically believed this is how a "real man" is supposed to act.

Is the fact that in some cases the victim knew her killer relevant? Why? A lot of victims of crimes of all sorts know the criminal. What does that matter? For a lot of these women there seems to be the assumption that even their own homes are places they had no right to expect to be safe. How many of them were blamed for “being involved with a man who was dangerous”. How many of them are killed by men with no record of violence before? Not safe in public and not safe in their homes. Under those conditions is there any place a woman has a right to expect to live safely?

This blog can't answer a lot of questions. This is a warning flag, it is a call for people who might have the ability to stop these crimes to make a more serious effort. And I most definitely include the media in that, the promotion and glamorization of violence against women is a contributing factor in some of these crimes and to the attitude too many people have about those crimes. Of course the people with the greatest ability to stop these crimes are the potential criminals themselves. If they can be inhibited from killing women, even if in only some cases, it’s worth risking errors. Waiting for infallible judgement which is never going to come is no reason to delay the attempt.