A Woman Was Lynched Today

This Blog Is Being Restarted

2006-11-08T23:26:00.000-08:00

I took time off from most of my weekday blogging activities to work on the election. Between that and the problems with Blogger I have let my activities on this blog lapse. But the elections are over with good results and this blogs work has to start again. I will be switching to Blogger Beta which I am told has fewer problems.

One of the readers suggested that a sort of bulletin-board format would be best. I will post a new open thread for readers to post information every day. A day without any new information is a good day, the subject matter of this blog ensures that. But any information of a woman or girl being murdered must be posted, the wall of secrecy and concealment has to be broken. The extent of the war waged on women has to be documented.

2006-10-16T07:07:00.000-07:00

Nichole Aguirre-Caoyonan, 31 San Francisco, Killer convicted in her 2003 murder. Scroll down.

2006-10-16T06:59:00.000-07:00

Domestic Violence Awareness events planned

Arkansas:

In 2005, Hope Cottage gave shelter to 224 women and their children. From the beginning of 2006 through Aug. 31, 160 women and children have sought shelter.

“For years, we sheltered about 10 women and children a month, then it increased to 12, and then to 15 a month. Now we are averaging 18 every month,” Candlish said.

Thursday, Oct. 26 at 6:30 p.m. a candlelight vigil will be held on the courthouse lawn for women killed in Arkansas as a result of domestic violence. Candles will be provided.

2006-10-16T06:44:00.000-07:00

Michelle Gardner-Quinn, 21, Burlington VT

Thank You for Your Participation.

2006-10-13T06:26:00.000-07:00

Posting information on the comment threads about new cases of the gender based murder of women and girls here is the core of this blog's content. I would encourage everyone to read the comments and follow the links given by readers for more information. The comment threads are the best way to give me information about new cases too.

Having an unusually busy week, most of it away from my computer and not being able to post to this blog, I would like to thank those of you who have posted information on the comment threads. I'm looking into the possibility of posting from other computers in case another week like this one happens.

Please also ask people to post information here and to participate. All that is asked is that the information be from reliable sources, be focused on the victim and not the murderer and that sensational and unnecessary details not be listed.

A link is essential. Even just copying the whole http:// line in the address field to a newspaper or other online source and pasting that in the comment is worth doing.

These cases aren't easy to find even on the web, without the participation of readers a lot of this information will be lost. This blog needs readers and sources to work. Thank you for your participation.

2006-10-11T14:27:00.000-07:00

Nina Reiser, 31, Oakland, California

Sorry for the Pause

2006-10-11T05:30:00.000-07:00

Got sick, then my family got sick. But everyone's back in school, for now. And I'm not running a fever, finally. Hope you all managed to avoid it.

Response To A Question

2006-10-07T00:29:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-10-06T07:26:00.000-07:00

Dawn Roberts, 36,Granville, NY

Open Thread

2006-10-05T18:20:00.000-07:00

Please discuss or post information.

2006-10-05T06:31:00.000-07:00

Detra Rainey Simmons, 39, and her children, William Rainey, 16, Hakiem Rainey, 13, Malachia Robinson, 8, and Samenia Robinson,7 North Charlston, SC

2006-10-05T06:23:00.000-07:00

Luz Maria Franco-Fierro, community activist, 49, Douglas County, Colorado.

2006-10-05T02:16:00.000-07:00

Leslie Lamb, 36, of San Leandro. Her alledged killer is suspected of the torture murders of at least two other people. The news account indicates possible copy-cat of movie.

Please help write this blog.

2006-10-04T14:37:00.000-07:00

In the United States an average of four women a day are murdered because they are women. Four women a day.

If they were all murdered in one place it would be national news but these women are seldom murdered in the same place so it is a statistic. That isn’t acceptable. The lives of these women and girls are not numbers. The numbers don’t mention the fact that their central right was taken from them. To stop the campaign of terror that results from this it is necessary to call it what it is, lynching. These murders are lynching because the victims are murdered because of their gender just as other victims are murdered because of their race, ethnicity, religion or class. The cultural results of this include the terror women and girls live under because they are at greater risk.

Please post information and links about news stories giving the information of when these crimes happen. If the names of the victims and the places they lived are collected in one place then the statistic stops being just a number in a report. The country needs to have this epidemic of murder exposed in a way that is undeniable, unsensational, which protects the privacy and dignity of the victims, which doesn’t risk turning the murderers into celebrities or role models.

Please be certain that any information posted be based on reliable news sources with links or references given. The information should be about the victim, protecting her privacy and dignity.

Please do not include any details of the murders which could be seen as sensational or which you could imagine encouraging imitation. I am especially concerned with that aspect of this and will edit or delete any postings that I read which could violate these rules. I am certain to miss any of these so will ask you to be responsible for what you post.

I will also delete anything which is offensive or which could result in legal problems for myself.

Any measures necessary to further the purpose of this blog or those caused by my ability to manage it will be announced as they are enacted. This is something I've never done before so I am certain that many changes will be made over time.

The model of this blog is found in the anti-lynching campaign of the 19th and 20th centuries. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Walter Francis White, The NAACP and others documented the long and dirty war conducted against African-Americans, often at risk of their lives. At the NAACP headquarters in Atlanta a flag was too often placed outside the window of their office. It read “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday”. No one who saw that flag could ignore the fact that the terror campaign was ongoing and that real people were dying.

Don’t Say Tragedy, Call Selfish, Cowardly Hate Crimes What They Are

2006-10-04T10:32:00.000-07:00

The news readers keep saying that the murders of Naomi Rose Eversole, Marian Fisher, Lina Miller, Mary Liz Miller, and Anna Mae Stoltzfus, and the attempted murder of other, still endangered girls is a tragedy. It isn’t a tragedy. Tragedies are not planned in detail, they are not planned with everything including toilet paper for the comfort of the murderer taken into an Amish school from which adults and males are released before the murderer begins to carry out his plans. This was a hate crime planned and committed by a man who felt he was entitled to murder little girls he didn’t know. He felt that his gender entitled him to terrorize, humiliate and murder them.

This wasn’t a tragedy, this wasn’t a story set into motion for the entertainment or revenge of the gods, this was one man who believed his being born with a penis gave him the power of life and death over these girls. Maybe over all girls. He could have chosen any girls to murder. This man choosing to murder girls from what he would certainly have known was a pacifist sect is everything anyone needs to know about his sense of entitlement and his cowardice. His name and identity are useless except as a study in that particular type of cowardly, selfish man. After what there is to know about him has been collected and studied he deserves to be erased from the collective memory of the world.

Lynchings are not tragedies, they are crimes, sordid murders by self-centered cowards who believe that their gender, race, religion, ethnicity or class entitles them to murder other people. Knowing the murderers for what they are is all anyone needs to know about them. Using that knowledge of their taste in entertainment, their hobbies, their upbringing and their other pathologies in order to avoid producing more of these defective human beings is all that they are good for. None of this should be anything but a scientific study in pathology.

Dwelling on the names and lives of these cowards risks turning them into something they aren’t. While studying their psychological flaws the fact that they were selfish and cowardly should never be forgotten. People with mental illness can sometimes be selfish slime too. Normal people might see them memorialized on TV as examples of evil, potential killers will see them as heros to be emulated or topped. Ignoring that possibility even as the programs talk about the “copy-cat” nature of a lot of these crimes is a crime in itself. It is the same crime the neighbors of Kitty Genovese committed when they ignored her as she was being murdered. It is cynical indifference. It is time to put an end to sensation murder used as profit driven entertainment and entertainment posing as news. It is part of the problem in the age of TV and video.

Call these crimes what they are. Don’t memorialize the criminals. Don’t instruct their admirers and fellow degenerates.

MURDER

2006-10-03T19:58:00.000-07:00

Every day four women die in this country as a result of domestic violence, the euphemism for murders and assaults by husbands and boyfriends. That's approximately 1,400 women a year, according to the FBI. The number of women who have been murdered by their intimate partners is greater than the number of soldiers killed in the Vietnam War.

Source: National Organization For Women

A Woman Was Lynched Today

2006-10-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in the United States today, tomorrow or soon a woman or girl will be murdered because she is a woman or girl. The murderer or murderers are almost always men or boys who hate women and who enjoy hurting them, terrorizing them and killing them.

This campaign of terror has to be fought and stopped. To do that the fact of the continuing campaign of terror against women and girls has to be exposed in its full and disgusting ubiquity.

This is part of a long and difficult campaign. It certainly isn't the beginning, exposing violence against women has been an ongoing struggle. Like the anti-lynching campaign which the NAACP was a part of, the simple fact that every week women are murdered because they are women must be documented and that fact has to be constantly put before the public. That is what this blog is for, it is a list of incidents. It will not give details of incidents but will name victims, it will respect the privacy and dignity of the victims of these crimes.