Sunday, October 08, 2006

A Woman Was Lynched Today

Posted by olvlzl

Some of you will know that a new blog was begun this week. It has a name that was deliberately chosen to be provocative and to have historical significance. But the name isn't really what's important, the purpose of the blog is.

It is a place where the names of women and girls believed to have been murdered because of their gender will be taken out of the inside pages of regional newspapers and put in one place where they can't be ignored. A lot of you will be as surprised as I was to discover that according to crime statistics in the United States there are an average of four women murdered every day whose deaths are believed to be largely on account of their gender. Accounting for the size of the population, that is a number similar to the number of lynchings in the worst year for which statistics are maintained. This is a crisis that has been ignored for too long.

We need people to post links to these stories on the threads of the blog so they can be read and posted separately. The judgment calls on those have already drawn challenges but I'm not going to wait for infallible judgment that isn't going to come. This is an emergency that needs to be uncovered and seen for what it is.

Please look at the blog, post links to cases that I won't be able to find with the limited time available. Please make suggestions of how the basic purpose of the blog can be better served. It is a very simple purpose, to list the names and locations of victims with links to reports in reliable sources.

One of the things you may have noticed in reports of these kinds of crimes is that the murderer is often the focus of the reports. At times there are pictures of the murderers along with extensive biographical information about him but not their victims. Here the focus is on the victims.