create a world where women can walk ANYWHERE, EVERYWHERE

Unknown Killers Mutilate City’s Beautiful Women

FROM ABC News
Updated 12:19 AM ET August 13, 2006

Norma Andrade used to pick up her daughter after work at an appliance factory, but one night in 2001 she couldn’t make it.

Seventeen-year-old Lillia was last seen alive crossing the street headed for the bus.

“I reported it to the police,” Andrade said. “They told me she’d probably gotten back with her boyfriend.”

Lillia’s body was found eight days later, strangled and mutilated.

In 1998, Esther Luna’s 15-year-old daughter Brenda disappeared.

“The police said maybe she’s with her boyfriend, or lazy,” Luna said.

Brenda’s body was found beaten, raped and stabbed.

Another woman’s daughter was last seen getting on a bus. Another’s was 16, raped and killed. Another’s was found dead with her head skinned.

Since 1993, there have been almost 400 murders of women in Juarez. At least 90 were similar—young factory workers, their bodies dumped in fields or the desert, sometimes in groups.

Actress and Mexican native Salma Hayek is one of the voices calling for action in Juarez. “They’re not just killing women,” Hayek said. “They are taking girls that are both 15 to 22 years old. They’re all pretty. And they are mutilating them, raping them and burning them. And then, whenever they wish, they throw the pieces in the desert.”

Investigations have seemed so incompetent to some of the victims’ mothers that some believe the police actually may have been involved.”The police is completely involved in this, and that’s why we don’t see anything go forward,” said one mother, Vicki Cavrero.

In many cases, the authorities did such a poor job identifying the victims that now an Argentinean forensics team of people who’ve traveled to the sites of mass murders all over the world are in Juarez trying to identify the victims. They’ve dug up mass graves of unidentified bodies, some from the city cemetery.

“A lot of these cases could have been solved if there would have been a proper investigation,” said Mercedes Doretta, a forensic anthropologist.

Evidence was either not collected or lost. Now, the prosecutor for the state of Chihuahua, Patricia Gonzalez, says she is re-opening more than 100 cases.

“I think we will resolve many of them,” she said.

But arrests and dramatic announcements have been made before and come to nothing, with suspects released.

Hayak believes Mexican police need forensic and investigative help from the United States. She argues that 15 years of unsolved murders is unacceptable.

“They are all poor women,” Hayek said. “I think that, unfortunately, around the world, these lives are not valued with the same strength as if it was somebody that, I don’t know, that was the daughter of somebody important. I mean, in America, a girl disappears, and rightly so, everybody gets shocked and offended and appalled. How about girls that disappear either as they were going to school or as they were going to work?

“They went to work for maybe $4 a week and they never made it back,” Hayak added. “I know a lot of the families of the victims, and sometimes they don’t even have money to bury them.”

Crimes of ‘honour’ (from bbc.co.uk website)

Honour killing is the murder of a woman accused of bringing shame upon her family.

Killing in the name of honour is often considered to be a private matter for the affected family. In recent years, more and more cases have reached the UK courts but many crimes still remain unresolved or even undetected.

So-called honour killing is usually committed by male family members against a female relative. In some communities mothers and sisters may also play a part. Some of the most common reasons for murdering a family member include: refusal to enter an arranged marriage, seeking a divorce – even from an abusive husband – or committing adultery.

In some cases, women who have been sexually assaulted or raped are then murdered for the ‘dishonour’ of having been a victim of an attack.

Honour killing is an ancient tribal custom and an allegation against a woman can be enough to defile a family’s honour and justify her murder.

Men who kill their wives, sisters or daughters argue that a life without honour is not worth living.

The United Nations Population Fund estimates that the annual worldwide total of killings might be as high as 5,000 women.

I was shocked to read this on the Washington Post and BBC and other major news sources:

“Saudi Arabia’s religious police stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress, according to Saudi newspapers.
In a rare criticism of the kingdom’s powerful “mutaween” police, the Saudi media has accused them of hindering attempts to save 15 girls who died in the fire on Monday.

About 800 pupils were inside the school in the holy city of Mecca when the tragedy occurred.

15 girls died in the blaze and more than 50 others were injured

According to the al-Eqtisadiah daily, firemen confronted police after they tried to keep the girls inside because they were not wearing the headscarves and abayas (black robes) required by the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islam.

One witness said he saw three policemen ‘beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya’.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1874471.stm

http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/mutawsc.htm

How dangerous a life these girls and women live.

What grieves me deeply is that a woman’s home may often be the place where she is least likely to safely walk…

“A Sundanese Christian woman at Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, looking for a daughter she hasn’t seen for 14 years. (Episcopal News Service photo by John Bullen)”

fr www.episopalchurch.org/imageshop

Murder often cause of pregnant women’s deaths
Study: 31 percent of injury related deaths were homicide

Reuters
Updated: 10:31 a.m. ET Feb. 24, 2005

WASHINGTON – Murder is a surprisingly common cause of death among pregnant women in the United States, U.S. government researchers reported Wednesday.

Black women are especially vulnerable to being killed while pregnant, the team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.

“Homicide is a leading cause of pregnancy-associated injury deaths,” Jeani Chang and colleagues wrote in the latest issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

They investigated the deaths of women who died while pregnant or within a year of being pregnant between 1991 and 1999 and found 1,993 that were caused by injury, compared with 4,200 that were directly related to pregnancy complications.

Car accidents first
Of the injury-related deaths, 617 or 31 percent were ruled homicide, making murder the second most common cause of injury-related death for pregnant women after car accidents.

The homicide rate for pregnant black women was more than triple that for white women, the researchers said.

Most of the murdered women, 56 percent, were shot to death while the rest were either stabbed or strangled.

“A study published in the March 2005 edition of the American Journal of Public Health found that homicide was a leading cause of death among pregnant women in the United States between 1991 and 1999. Data taken from the Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the pregnancy-associated homicide ratio was 1.7 per 100,000 live births.

A 2001 study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association said 20 percent of Maryland women who died during pregnancy were murdered. Researchers found the same trend in New York from 1987-1991 and in the Chicago area from 1986-1989. According to the CDC, approximately 324,000 pregnant women are hurt by an intimate partner or former partner each year.”

From: http://abcnews.go.com/US/LegalCenter/story?id=522184&page=1

1. nycagainstrape.org

Excerpt from the Quiz

6. Name three things that can be done to prevent rape.

The interesting thing about the answers people give to this question is that most responses will be an admonition to females about how females should alter their behavior to prevent rape. People will answer things like, “Never go out alone at night.” “Stay alert.” “Don’t linger on the streets.” “Don’t tease guys sexually.” “Always lock your windows and doors.” “Always park where there is good lighting.”

Very few of the answers will pertain to how male behavior should be changed despite some very obvious facts: Rape won’t stop until male behavior changes. Restricting girls’ freedom is unfair. Restricting girls’ freedom never has and never will stop rape. Almost every one of the suggestions above are based on false assumptions about rape, and, in reality, do very little to protect girls from rape. Finally, constantly telling girls what they should do to prevent rape sends the harmful message that females, and not males, are responsible if they get raped.

7. So try that question again. Name three things that can be done to prevent rape.

There are many, many things that can be done to prevent rape. Here are three:

A. Protest all degrading and discriminatory treatment of women and girls.
B. Make sure there is equality between boys and girls in the home and school. If, for example, girls have to do more housework than boys, it sends a message that girls are supposed to serve boys, and as the boys get older they think girls should serve them sexually too. Girls and boys must be treated equally.
C. Integrate male dominated institutions at the top. When women hold half the power, rape and rapists will no longer be condoned.

8. In the United States, families set a teenage girl’s curfew on an average of two hours earlier than a teenage boy’s curfew. Why?

The reason most often given…is to protect girls from sexual assault. In fact, just a generation ago, if a rapist was known to be loose, it was common for cities to put out a citywide order for all females to be in their homes after sunset.

These…are just one of many examples of how restrictions are imposed on females’ freedom because of rape, instead of imposing restrictions on males’ freedom. Restricting girls’ freedom more than boys’ freedom is unfair and harmful to girls. It sends the message to both boys and girls that boys can do what they want and girls have to pay the price. This message doesn’t prevent rape. In fact, it’s one of the attitudes which perpetuates rape. Besides, it doesn’t even make sense that girls should be at home earlier than boys. When you think about it, there are a number of late night dangers that affect boys much more frequently than girls, like deadly car crashes.

Copyright © Marie De Santis,
Women’s Justice Center,
www.justicewomen.com
rdjustice@monitor.net

What it has come to on American campuses – from U of Iowa website on safety