Equalogy

Posts Tagged ‘Bob Herbert’

Feminist columnist Antonia Zerbisias for The Star says there’s not enough outrage when it comes to violence against women.  Her point, and it’s a great one, is that these incidents like the recent health club shooting fade after a couple of days and rarely do we view these attacks on women in connection with all the other ones.

The numbers, in case you were wondering, go like this:

“[From 2000-06] when 4,588 U.S. soldiers and police officers were killed by hostiles or by accident, more than 8,000 women – nearly twice as many – were shot, stabbed, strangled, or beaten to death by the intimate males in their lives. In Canada, compared to the 101 Canadian soldiers and police officers killed, more than 500 women – nearly five times as many – met the same fate.”

These numbers come from Brian Vallee’s book War on Women published in 2007.

This is the point where Antonia calls for more outrage than the 75 people who showed up to mourn the deaths and the few feminist bloggers who called the shooting a hate crime.

While it may be hard for some to believe that the lack of outrage is due to the fact that the victims were women, check out what NYT columnist Bob Herbert had to say:

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.

Both Bob and Atonia agree that it is the media’s constant parade of misogyny (in music, television, etc) and news reports about rape and violence against women that take away our shock when shootings are gender-based.  We fail to see the significance of femicide when it’s already being sold to us in the form of video games and rap lyrics.

Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female.

A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count. – From Herbert