Earlier this week George Sodini walked into a health club in Pennsylvania and killed three women and injured nine more. The chilling blog he left behind makes it clear that the killings were motivated not only by his hatred of women, but issues with his family, loneliness and an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness.
“Women just don’t like me. There are 30 million desirable women in the US (my estimate) and I cannot find one. Not one of them finds me attractive.”
While we are rarely given such direct insight into why men kill women, his sentiments are shared by far too many men throughout the world. Patriarchy depends on controlling women’s lives and when they cannot be controlled their lives have no value and they must be killed. And the result is that there is not a country in the world where women’s lives are free from the tyranny of men’s quest for power.
In Guatemala where women’s lives are often seen as inferior, the number of femicides has escalated greatly in recent years.
In Mexico, women have been killed in Juarez with impunity for many years, with authorities simply looking the other way. In a report from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs we learn that,
The intrinsic value of a victim of femicide is usually questioned following her death. Members of the media and the community alike try to categorize these women as either “good girls”, fitting the archetype of a good daughter or worker, or as fallen women, usually described as prostitutes, sluts, or barmaids. By putting emphasis on the identity of the women, onlookers seem to be placing a higher value on the lives of “well-behaved women” as well as providing a twisted justification for overlooking or minimize the crimes at hand. For instance, in 1995, the then-governor of Chihuahua, Francisco Barrio, advised parents to keep an eye on their daughters and not allow them to go out at night. The implication was that good girls did not “go out” at night and since the unfortunate victims typically disappeared during the night, it followed that by objective standards they were found to not be very good girls. Likewise, when speaking to the family members of the murdered women, the police often explained the disappearance of the victims by pointing out “how common it [was] for women to lead double lives.”
And in Iraq and other countries, women are routinely killed to maintain the ‘honor’ of men. The list goes on, but the point is this: femicide is a global pandemic. It manifests itself in different ways in different places, but the cause of all these murders shares a common root and that is the cultural impunity of male power and control. In short, patriarchy.
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Perhaps one of the most powerful tools for ending femicide is to make it visible and call it out for what it is. In this country, all too often the murders of white women receive far more attention than the murders of women of color. Via Essential Presence comes this awesome billboard from a group called MOMS designed to bring attention to the nine black women who have gone missing or have been murdered in North Carolina in the last four years.
According to WITN,
Missing or Murdered Sisters or MOMS for short put up a billboard on Sunset Avenue in Rocky Mount. The billboard switches to a different image every 8 seconds with several being about the missing or murdered woman in the area. Over the past four years 5 black woman have been found dead, one is still unidentified. Three other woman are missing.
We thank these wonderful women for making sure these deaths are not simply disappeared. H/t to Gender Across Borders for bringing our attention to this inspiring campaign.
