No troll, no MRA Open Thread for discussion of the murders of Angelia Magnum and Tjhisha Ball

Just chiming in to recommend freemage’s comment, especially the part about providing simple, easy-to-follow rule suggestions for media organizations. (I’d also limit the number of suggestions offered at one time – every media organization I’ve worked at is fairly conservative regarding rules changes.)

…I never heard about this. This is awful! 🙁 As soon as saw the words “sex worker” and “murder” listed, I knew this had to be very, very serious. The state the girls were discovered in my suspicions on what the police might be dealing with. Lust murderers choose sex workers because they’re counting on the police not to care about them.

It makes me both angry and sad to know that people are blaming these women for their deaths. No one deserves to die, especially not in the way they did. I just pray to God that the police will care enough to stop this man before he kills more. He’s taken too many lives already…

I have no words. Other than this: That they were sex workers DOESN’T MATTER. They were someone’s family. Someone’s daughter. They were women. They were human beings, and someone thought it was okay to throw them away like garbage. And almost no one cares, or think that they deserve what they got.

That’s true. But something else is also true. And people who think they don’t matter should reconsider.

If you don’t think the violent deaths of these women are important, then the person responsible will still be at large to attack other women. Either by not being apprehended at all or by getting trivial sentences on ridiculous plea deals or biased decisions by judges and juries because of the lackadaisical approach of police and prosecutors and probation panels.

And eventually you finish up with a genuine monster like Adrian Bayley in Australia. The last but one sentence he “served” for rape was trivial – and in that court process he had 16, SIXTEEN, rapes ‘taken into account’. And then he was let out early anyway, which meant he was free to rape and murder Jill Meagher. She was the quintessential ‘sympathetic’ rape/murder victim. Did her and her husband Tom no good at all, she’s dead and he’s lost his lovely, lively wife.

He wrote a really good piece saying that all those women Bayley had previously assaulted were women worthy of serious consideration as victims, but the offences had been discounted or treated as less serious because most of them were sex workers. If he’d been properly prosecuted, convicted and sentenced for those offences he’d still be in jail for many of those – but not all of them, because several of them had been committed when he was out on previous early release.

He would never have been free to murder Jill if all those other women had been treated as “real” victims.

People – police included – who dismiss or discount offences committed against sex workers as unimportant need to think about the future as well as the past victims of these violent men. They needn’t be the kind of monster from everyone’s worst nightmare like Bayley is, but being let go free because you dislike or disrespect the victims you know about is putting all women at risk. But if you let them roam free, what you’re really doing is just sitting on your hands waiting until the killer chooses a “sympathetic” victim like Jill Meagher. http://www.mamamia.com.au/news/tom-meagher-violence-against-women/

It would be tragic if we did not recognise that Bayley’s previous crimes were against prostitutes, and that the social normalisation of violence against a woman of a certain profession and our inability to deal with or talk about these issues, socially and legally, resulted in untold horror for those victims, and led to the brutal murder of my wife.

We cannot separate these cases from one another because doing so allows us to ignore the fact that all these crimes have exactly the same cause – violent men, and the silence of non-violent men.

I remember (I think about two years ago) a white woman’s body was found in a garbage bag in a dumpster, and the suspected murderer called her a sex worker and the media ran with it (Somewhere in the States, it was so long ago).

Here in Canada (and I am *not* saying that there is any shame or stigma that should be attached to being a sex worker) it seems that if one person calls you a sex worker, that’s what you are, that’s all it takes, and nothing that your family/friends say about it being untrue makes any difference. How often are we using the excuse that women are just sex workers to ignore any violence done to them regardless of facts? One of these women was an exotic dancer. She drove herself to work in her own vehicle. This did not happen because some opportunistic murderer saw prostitutes and grabbed them. No, sex work doesn’t matter, nor do degrees of sex work, but the assumed circumstances due to the ambiguity of the term “sex work” are (seemingly purposefully) being distorted for us. Just AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH! And I’m ranting and I swear there’s at least one point to that rant and I need a bath.

most of the few media outlets that reported the story are using their old mugshots

Even if that were the only pictures they had of these women, they should not have used them. It’s OK to have a story without a picture. Heck, have a picture of a funeral wreath, rather than mugshots of the victims!

We cannot separate these cases from one another because doing so allows us to ignore the fact that all these crimes have exactly the same cause – violent men, and the silence of non-violent men.

Possible trigger post, for violence towards and killing of women!

Very, VERY true, mildlymagnificent. However, I learned long ago – to my everlasting horror and dismay – that too many of the silent, “non-violent” men actually tacitly approve of the actions of the violent men. They would NEVER do the deeds themselves.

When I lived in Chicago, as a teenager, I had some male friends in their late teens-early twenties. This was during the mass murder horror trial of Richard Speck, who killed – after torturing and raping – eight nurses (or student nurses – I cannot remember). We were in the Student Union at the University of Chicago and I had gotten up to get something to eat. On my way back to our table, I overheard my “friends” – nice guys, every one – talking about how the women had obviously earned their treatment and that Speck had probably done the world a favor by clearing out the whores. I kept on walking. I remember feeling numb and totally freaked at the same time. Mind you, I was 15 or 16 and was just discovering guys.

And my male friends wonder why I have never trusted men-in-general. As long as there are “peaceful” men who vicariously approve of the actions of the Specks of the world, and they don’t usually say so to a woman’s face, Women.Are.Not.Safe!

So, I guess those sort of statements aren’t that unusual, despite how horrible they are. No one deserves to die, especially not in the ways that most victims of sexual homicides die.

No, Mnemosyne, sadly they are not unusual. And what scares me is that these are comments made by the NICE-seeming guys. Please understand that I am not trying to paint all men with one horror-brush, but there does seem to be a larger-than-I-am-comfortable-with community of men who seem nice, would never, themselves, harm anyone…but quietly approve of actions against women that are downright evil.

There have been more young First Nations girls vanishing up in Western Canada again recently. I wonder if the cops up there have an equivalent to that disgusting NHI nonsense.

Have just been reading a feminist criminology study from 1988 which critiqued an incredible amount of this kind of stuff, from mainstream criminologists saying that murder is “invited by engaging in prostitution”, I kid you not, to the Attorney General at the time Peter Sutcliffe was murdering and terrorising women all over Northern England saying that the “real tragedy” was that two of the thirteen women murdered were “decent girls”! Factor in race too, and here we are.