Women at Risk
“I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me,” wrote George Sodini in a blog that he kept while preparing for this week’s shooting in a Pennsylvania gym in which he killed three women, wounded nine others and then killed himself.
We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter.
Back in the fall of 2006, a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five.
I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.
According to police accounts, Sodini walked into a dance-aerobics class of about 30 women who were being led by a pregnant instructor. He turned out the lights and opened fire. The instructor was among the wounded.
We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.
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This case cries out for and examination of womens human rights. Will women ever be given amnesty?
ReplyDeleteWhy are there no human rights standards for torture and murder of women as a sex?
All these crimes are done to women as women by men as men. Serial rapists and serial murders are almost always men targeting women exclusively.
Why are these crimes not seen as sexual inequality violations? Wherever law requires equality as applied to women, it means if men don't need it, women don't get it. You can see this in the recent closing of shelters because it didn't service men.
It mobilizes the idea that the way to get things for women is to get them for men. Men don't need effective laws against rape, battering, murder, so not having such laws isn't an inequality it's just a difference.
Abuses to women are subjected to equality law at all. The lack of law violates our human rights.
We need a womens' model of human rights - predicated on womens' distinctive experiences of violation and the denial of those violations - this would make human rights an honest term.
Women need effective legal guarantees of personal-security and sexual integrity to have equality.
If you doubt what I am saying then tell me why women make up 1/2 the population, 3/4 of the work force, but make only 1/10th of our male counterparts, only own 1/100th of property and are more likely to be owned? Why do we not have an equal voice in public deliberations and in the government? Why when these things happen virtually nothing is done about it?