Why femicide won’t end until we have a truly equal society

[niyad]

Why femicide won’t end until we have a truly equal society

The new census listing women killed by men aims to shed light on a dark subject. But femicide will not stop until we change the culture that supports it


Making a stand: hundreds of pairs red shoes in Palermo, representing the many victims of femicide. Photograph: Antonio Melita/Demotix/Corbis

Last week saw the launch of the Femicide Census, a list of murdered women that digs down into the internet like a terrible well. It was reported at length in this paper, in a piece that detailed what has changed since Karen Ingala Smith first started counting dead women in 2012, and contained tributes to some of the victims, pictured smiling and beautiful, looking off to the side of the photos, shy.

. . . . .

Patterns are already clear. There were more than 64,000 sexual offences recorded by police last year, Ingala Smith tells me, and 1.4 million domestic violence assaults against women. “When men kill women,” she wants to stress, “they are doing so in the context of a society in which men’s violence against women is entrenched and systemic. When misogyny, sexism and the objectification of women are so pervasive that they are all but inescapable, can a man killing a women ever not be a sexist act?”

An aside: since the launch, reports of the census have inevitably been pissed on with the question: “What about the men?” Like the commenter’s cliché “Not all men”, it’s a question noisily applied to derail feminist arguments, and sometimes it is worth answering and sometimes, well, no. This time, the what-about-the-menners are claiming that in concentrating solely on female victims the census is itself sexist. But when men kill their partners they have usually been abusing them for years. When women kill, they themselves have usually been abused. In the decade up to 2012, 93.9% of adults who were convicted of murder were men. So.

There is still a long way to go. Notably absent from the census are any details of the victims of abuse who kill themselves. Just as Ingala Smith took on that forbidding task in 2012, after suffering abuse herself Karen Blatchford (at the Twitter account @10womenaweek) is now attempting to collate suicidal women. Earlier this month 23-year-old Kylie Payne, who said she’d been raped by a fellow patient, was found hanging in a mental health unit. At the end of January, after 22-year-old Anita Kubicka left a suicide note on her voicemail, an inquest heard that her family believed her boyfriend had been monitoring her phone.

. . . .
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/22/femicide-census-equality-eva-wiseman

[Egnever]

1. Femicide

Never heard that before.

I doubt anything will ever change these numbers. Men have a strong capacity for violence, I am not sure there is any way to change that. The fact near the end that 93% of those convicted for murder were men points to the differences between us. I don't think it has as much to do with society, as I would bet those numbers hold up around the globe.

Kudos to those who try though.

[guillaumeb]

2. in a country that is always at war

how does that society remake itself?

How do I convince my fellow males that an attack on women is an attack on us (males) also?

How to convince males that violence against any female is violence against all females.

My mother, aunts, grandmothers, sisters, female cousins, daughters, wife are all women. Same for every male. What sort of culture approves of misogyny and what does it say about the males who practice it? Hatred, insecurity, lack of power, what?

The post deserves many responses.

[niyad]

3. I hope you are not holding your breath waiting for those many responses, or at least

those that actually deal with the article.

[guillaumeb]

4. no

my questions need an answer though.

As a pacifist since a teen, I feel that violence is never the answer. I know that my sentiments are not shared by a majority of Americans, or males in general, but violence directed outward always rebounds on the actor. It truly is the way of the world. Call it karma, or whatever. I belong to an anti-war group and even in that space some will insist that total pacifism does not always work.

My response is to ask the person speaking to give me one example of a war/violence leading to true peace. It does not happen. Never has, never will.

That said, I still hope for many responses to a question that must be asked.