Pop Quiz: How many Black female sex workers do you have to kill to get some national media coverage ? Apparently 5. Jarniece Hargrove. Ernestine Battle. Jackie Thorpe. Taraha Nicholson. Melody Wiggins. A sixth body has been found and 3 more are missing.
Family members of the victims confirm that up until recently, authorities simply weren't doing their best: Tynatta James, sister of Ernestine Battle said to an AP Reporter : ''I didn't really feel like they were doing all they could. I just feel like they recently started to get involved in the cases after the last lady.''
They’ll call a North Carolinian murderer a potential serial killer, but they won’t call it a potential hate crime on race, gender and sexuality lines. After all, if the last season of The Wire taught us nothing, it taught us that social concern rises when the headlines are about a serial killer instead of someone who is a murderer of the marginalized. See, because then it’s just another news cycle. This somewhat explains why these murders have been happening since 2005 and many of us are just hearing about this now.
These women being murdered are triple minorities who have survived God only knows, and people should be outraged that the authorities have not been swift in investigating these crimes. We also need to watch out for the stigmatizing and victim blaming inherent in the coverage of the crack smoking and sex work of the victims. The right for every woman — regardless of the social acceptability of her work — to live free from violence is at stake in this. I am sad that women’s lives are casualties of the increasingly hostile sexism and racism that is sweeping our country and my heart goes out to their families. But I am certain that activists will be meeting racism, misogyny and sexuality discrimination head on with an aggressive response.
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Thank you for posting on this story. I'm all about making connections so I will make a connection.
Lesson: when women offer men sex indiscriminately, they are targets for violence.* When women DO NOT offer men sex indiscriminately they are targets for violence.
And to ponder this further, this update just out of N. Cali:
The man accused of killing his ex-girlfriend and her male friend at the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge toll plaza insisted on pleading guilty today, saying, "I did it," and that he wanted to be executed.
The details of the crime are chilling. This was a calculated, premeditated killing. We can probably assume that the victim had the wherewithal to separate from this individual with good reason. She should have been safe, right? Beep. Wrong again. Two more people dead.
*the profile of the serial killer is male. And even in the unlikely event that the killer is female, these women were targeted for the same reason that I have written.
Unfortunately, more often than not, sex workers are not valued as human beings in our society. Have you heard of the Robert Pickton case in Vancouver? (The short version: it took Vancouver police about 20 years of simply ignoring the disappearance of prostitutes before they just did their job and tracked this guy down). The families of those women had the same issues with police non-response that these families are having now.
I hope that whoever killed/is killing these women is caught (and confined) quickly.
Note - trigger warning on the Wiki article on Pickton. Sorry!