Everytime i crawl through terf blogs, i encounter unimaginable horrors. The latest is the word “femicide”, to refer to murder of women. Instead of, you know, homicide to refer to the murder of people.
Incase this isnt clear, terfs believe that femicide is the proper term to refer to the murder and deaths of women, and not homocide. The sheer idiocy and misogyny of this is astounding ! But who is going to tell them.
femicide refers specifically to the killing of women based on their sex. it takes .2 seconds to look it up.
Babe the term femicide wasn’t made up by the uwu scary terfs on tumblr dot com, it’s been in use since 1801 but popularised in the 1970s
“The killing of females by males because they are female”
“femminicidio“ is the official term the italian government and media use bc men murdering women is such an epidemic in this country. how about that for “unimaginable horrors”
wait until op learns about infanticide, patricide, matricide, fratricide, pesticide, and suicide LMAO
When men kill random women who are walking alone at night it is a hate crime. It is meant to make all women afraid. And a woman’s life was taken because she was a woman. That’s literally why it’s personal. Violence against women is rarely random, these are calculated hate crimes
Nobody wants to admit how many instances of women being murdered, raped, and abused should be counted as hate crimes because these women were targeted for murder, rape, and/or abuse because of being a woman, because if we admitted how many cases of femicide / rape / abuse really arehate crimes the numbers would be fucking staggering, and nobody wants to admit how disgustingly normal and common and out of control hate crimes against women are. Everyone wants to pretend it’s all just personal isolated conflicts, but these things are happening to women because they’re women, because the men who commit these crimes despise women, they see women as subhuman, and want to hurt women, and that’s why these are hate crimes.
And not only is male violence against women overwhelmingly normalized to the point people refuse to call it a hate crime, but communities literally depend on the marginalization of women to function, down to the family unit. And these acts of abuse against women, they serve to make all women afraid not just generally speaking, but specifically,afraid to leave their shitty husband/family, who may or may not commit abusive acts to that extent, because they remain aware lethal abuse is always possible. Afraid to own their lives, reject men and their abuse, because they’ve seen what the backlash for that is like.
All men benefit from women being hate crimed because the women in their lives see it and behave so as to try and avoid experiencing those same crimes.
“Will women always die? Let some men die too,” Dogan told police. “I killed him for my honor.”
Since it was not included in the article, I thought I would provide a rough translation of her historical defense on court;
“When men wear suits and look down they get their sentences lowered; I dont have a suit, my mom barely managed to find this shirt for me. I won’t lie, there is also the joy of being able to survive that i can’t conceal. I’ve walked the corridors of these courthouses countless times, my face covered in bruises, for a restraining order. I didn’t have any other choice. If he hadn’t died, I was going to. He wasn’t going to tell you he had decided to pimp me out, he wasn’t going to talk about his plans of putting me in the arms of other men, he wasn’t going to tell you about the beatings I endured just because the eggplants were slightly overcooked, because the curtains were dirty, because there were leftover crumbs on the table. He wasn’t going to mention how many times I was hospitalized. There is a picture of me taken in the teahouse. I’ve smiled a bit lopsidedly. Maybe he was going to show you that picture and tell you I looked like a dishonorable woman. He was going to tell you he ‘cleansed my honor’ as if he wasn’t planning to pimp me out. You were going to sentence him to 3-5 years and pardon him because i had dishonored him and see my lopsided smile as provocation and feel sad for him. However, honor is mine Mr. Judge, I won’t leave it to anyone else just because I signed a paper.”
her name is Çilem Doğan and she was sentenced to 15 years for this. the court initially wanted to give her life imprisonment. she was released on bail in june 2016 and has since become a symbol for the movement against femicide and violence against women in Turkey.
Jamie Read, 31, attacked his girlfriend so ferociously, she thought she was going to die. He had followed her home after drinking in a pub. In court last year, Ramsay Quaife, prosecuting, said: “All of a sudden, he grabbed her throat and squeezed her hard. The victim was barely able to breathe… She saw him take six steps back before lunging at her and kicking her in the face with the sole of his trainer. He repeated this twice more.”
Read admitted assault occasioning actual bodily harm. The judge, Recorder John Trevaskis, said Read wouldn’t receive rehabilitative help in prison and gave him a 16-month jail term suspended for two years. Read walked free from court.
Next month, on 7 June, as part of the Domestic Abuse Act (2021), non-fatal strangulation (NFS) and suffocation becomes a free-standing offence, punishable by up to five years in prison in England and Wales. Campaigners including the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) and We Can’t Consent To This – who challenged the defence where the perpetrator claims it happened as part of “rough sex gone wrong” – have long argued that NFS, if prosecuted at all, was frequently charged as common assault, receiving a sentence of a few months.
An estimated 20,000 strangulations a year are reported to women’s charities. “The vast majority are a way of exerting power, fear and control – but not fatal,” says CWJ’s Nogah Ofer. Prosecution is also impeded because it is often treated as a private matter, normalised by the increasing use of pornography. Yet NFS increases the odds of a woman being killed by a staggering seven times.
According to the Femicide Census, established by Karen Ingala Smith and Clarrie O’Callaghan, with whom the Observer has collaborated in a year-long campaign to better tackle femicide and violence against women and girls (VAWG), a woman is killed by strangulation every two weeks.
“The Femicide Census has consistently found that strangulation is the second most common method after stabbing that men use to kill women,” says O’Callaghan. “It’s long overdue that the criminal justice system catches up.”
In 2021, Anthony Williams, 70, “choked the living daylights” out of his wife, Ruth, 67. He received a five-year sentence after pleading guilty to manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility. The new NFS offence is a vital opportunity to put a brake on coercion, control, intimidation, violence and killing – all of which statistically impact on women far more than men.
However, while senior judges and the judicial colleges are in discussions with the Ministry of Justice, nationwide training for police, health workers and all those engaged in bringing a perpetrator to trial, so far, appears non-existent. “Women’s lives are at stake. The government should be seizing the initiative and ensuring that everyone involved is trained,” says Julia Drown, patron of the charity Advocacy After Fatal Domestic Abuse (AAFDA), and a member of small group of experts who have been lobbying for accelerated action.
Last year, Sam Pybus, 32, pleaded guilty to manslaughter after strangling Sophie Moss, 33, during what he alleged was consensual sex. He was jailed for four years and eight months – a sentence that triggered a public outcry but was upheld by the appeal court. A pathologist’s report found Moss’s injuries “do not suggest a very prolonged or very forceful strangulation”. Strangulation does not need to be prolonged or forceful to cause serious long-term damage.
Dr Catherine White is the foremost expert and researcher in strangulation in the UK. She is scathing about the lack of progress. The voluntary expert group of which she and Drown are a part has struggled for months to raise £7,000 to pay for two excellent half days of free training in NFS. Finally, NHS England provided the funds.
“Hopefully, we can ignite a fire in the belly for more training. But why are we volunteers doing this?” White says. “The Ministry of Justice should be knocking on my door, asking for training. The government says it is spending millions on VAWG but, when you look at the scale of the challenge, it’s peanuts.
“No one seems to be in overall control, driving forward a co-ordinated response. It feels like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The impact of strangulation, control and sexual violence is huge, yet the societal and government response is so lacking.”
Last year, White and colleagues published I Thought He Was Going to Kill Me, a three-year study of 204 adult cases of NFS as part of a sexual assault. Some 96.6% of the victims were female. In 27% of the cases, the woman had been strangled before by the same perpetrator. Over one in six had been strangled to the point where they lost consciousness.
It takes skill and training, often not found in GPs’ surgeries to detect the signs. One American study reported that “NFS might well be the equivalent of waterboarding – both leave few marks; both can be used repeatedly with impunity”.
White’s study reported that a male handshake has 80-100lbs per square inch (psi) of pressure. It takes 20psi to open a fizzy drink can. It takes only 4psi to occlude a jugular vein.
Strangulation is external pressure to the neck that cuts off air, or the flow of blood to the brain (choking is different, caused by an internal obstruction to the airwaves). For those who survive, symptoms include strokes, depression, memory loss, seizures, motor and speech disorders and paralysis. The connection of these symptoms to NFS is often not recognised.
White’s commitment to properly tackling NFS was triggered by taking a course at the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention, Texas, co-founded in 2011 by lawyers Gael Strack and Casey Gwinn. The institute now trains thousands of frontline workers every year across the US.
A medical assessment, vitally, has to include imaging (MRI and CT scan) and forensic documentation of internal and external injuries. This approach has helped the San Diego domestic violence homicide rate to drop by 90% since the 1980s.“Strangulation is much more common than we realised – but also so much more serious then we ever gave it credit for,” says trainer Cat Otway.
Forensic physician Dr Helena Thornton has worked at St Mary’s Sexual Assault and Referral Centre, Manchester, with White for 27 years and is registrar of the faculty of Forensic and Legal Medicine. The General Medical Council refuses to allow forensic and legal medicine to become a specialisation so, incredibly, there are no national guidelines on training, qualifications and exams. In addition, senior forensic clinicians are retiring and not being replaced – so who will give evidence in court?
“St Mary’s is commissioned by police and the NHS but, in a lot of areas, the service has been outsourced for the lowest price, as cheap as possible,” Thornton says. “In some parts of the country, you might see someone who has received only three days’ forensic training. The faculty sets out what to expect from good treatment.
“When I see a patient, questions have to be asked, such as did you black out? When you came round, had you wet or pooed yourself? If you lose control of your bowel, that isn’t fear. It means you are seconds away from death.
“It’s embarrassing so a woman is unlikely to volunteer that information. If you haven’t been properly trained, you’re not capturing the evidence.”
Alarmingly, if you have been strangled but not sexually assaulted, it will be extremely difficult to find the level of examination required. White would like to see a branch of Strack’s institute in the UK, but that, too, has proved a struggle. “Everyone thinks it’s a good idea but, like training, no one seems to have a budget. I’ve seen statements where it’s just said, ‘red mark on neck’. What the heck is that – a felt-tip pen? A bruise?
“That lack of information influences whether the police and the Crown Prosecution Service decide to continue with the case. When you see the unfairness of the system for patients, that’s what gives me the energy to keep on fighting.”
Over the past two years, a national conversation about VAWG has been prompted by lockdowns, rising rates of domestic abuse, the exposed criminality of some police, and the shocking deaths of Sarah Everard, Bibaa Henry, Nicole Smallman and Sabina Nessa, among many others. Still, as O’Callaghan and Ingala Smith have argued for years, little attention is paid to the misogyny that is VAWG’s root cause – and to prevention.
The three aims of the Observer’s End Femicide campaign, now concluding, are: name it (government is reluctant to use the gendered word “femicide”, a killing of a woman by a man). Secondly, know it, for example, by improving data on racially minoritised women; and thirdly, stop it.
The government has a number of initiatives, including a domestic abuse plan and a VAWG strategy, while investing small pots of money, for instance, in police training (£3.3m). However, weighed against the estimated cost of domestic abuse alone, £66bn a year, and the plummeting rates of conviction – 90% of cases of domestic abuse brought to the police in 2020 did not end in a charge or summons – so much more is required.
“It feels as if government is only scratching the surface of the transformation we need,” says Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women (EVAW) Coalition, representing over 120 women’s specialist services, activists and survivors. “Who is holding all these strains of work together? Who is accountable when policies fail?
“The hypocrisy of the government is that in the Queen’s speech there was a raft of alarming legislation that directly attacks women’s and survivors’ rights, such as scrapping the Human Rights Act, an essential tool in challenging failures by the state to protect women and girls.”
On 8 June, it’s the 10th anniversary of the government’s signing of the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, known as the Istanbul Convention (IC). The IC’s articles cover issues such as high-quality holistic services and appropriate funding and support for victims, overseen by a monitoring group. Once ratified, a government is legally bound to comply with the review process. The government has announced it will ratify in July but not yet include women with insecure immigrant status who have no recourse to public funds. (A pilot study is examining the experiences of migrant women.)
Hannana Siddiqui of Southall Black Sisters says she is “extremely concerned” about this two-tier system. “All women have a human right to protection from abuse.”
“While this reservation stands,” says Lisa Gormley who helped to draw up the IC, “women’s rights’ advocates will continue to call for justice and safety for all women and girls without discrimination, without limitations.”
“The convention is the gold standard in how you prevent and tackle VAWG,” Simon says. “It’s vital that there aren’t gaps in support. It’s a fundamental human right for all women to feel safe and free.”
South Africa: Lesbian Stabbed to Death for Rejecting Man’s Advances
South Africa: Lesbian Stabbed to Death for Rejecting Man’s Advances
Lesbian Pinky Shongwe, 32, from Umlazi [South Africa] was stabbed to death by a man who was making romantic advances which she rejected.
Shongwe’s body was discovered this week.
Police spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Nqobile Gwala said a case of murder was opened by Umlazi police for investigation after a 32-year-old female was allegedly stabbed. She said the victim left home to go to a local…
