Recently in Violence Against Women Category

N.B. Boot is British for 'trunk'.

In my country, the UK, a woman has been found alive in the boot of her car, after having been locked inside for eleven days. She was discovered on boxing day, so she was locked in there for the whole of Christmas, too.

A man has appeared in court, accused of attempted murder.

I wonder just what had possessed him to do this? It doesn't seem to have been a racist attack, because it sounds like the two were both black south africans. The story will come out in time, but I'm willing to bet he was an ex-partner. This is one of the most shocking recent cases of violence against women that I've heard of, so even though it's a UK story, it deserves posting here.

via.

The Vday movement is one of my favorite movements to support. I have been involved with the Vagina Monologues for a couple of years now and as a person who has suffered through violence it's a relief to know Eve Ensler and all Vagina Worriors have set out to end violence against women.

As I was snooping around the internet I came across a website that is actually trying to put an end to the Vday movement. This not only shocked me, but more than anything it hurt me. Apparently the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute has posted a pamphlet that "exposes" the Vagina Monologues.

The "facts" published in the pamphlet seem to have been written by a person who has not seen the play and even further does not understand that violence effects about 1 in 3 American women. I tried reading the entire pamphlet, but it was annoyingly misleading. It was basically just painful to read. Some untrue claims that really bugged me were:

Vday does not raise money to help end violence against women

Vday does not raise awareness about violence against women

These are only two of the fallacies this website claims about the Vagina Monologues. There are more that make even less sense. At the University of North Texas, our FMLA organization has produced this play for the past 8 or 9 years and every year we donate 100% of the money we raise to organizations that directly help ending violence against women. The entire purpose of the play is to raise awareness of the horrible abuse happening to so many women in America and across the globe. It also reclaims vagina as a word that is not taboo or shameful to say and as a word that should be celebrated. It is painful to know that there are people out there who are so ignorant as to make these false claims about the Vday movement.

All I can say is keep the movement alive and if you have the opportunity to get involved...do it! There are campuses and community organizations all over the country that put on the production. This year Eve has decided to highlight to women of the DRC. They are experiencing an unheard of amount of violence. I am happy to know that our production at UNT will help so many women in the North Texas area and abroad. Visit the Vday website to learn more.

Don't forget to find out where a local production of the Vagina Monologues is going to be and go see it! Bring your friends! End violence against women!

Hi all! I am going to be making some items with part of the money going to charity. I wanted to do specifically anti-FGM (Female Genital Mutilation). I looked a little online (such as Stop FGM/C), but wanted to know if some of you had any other suggestions or personal experiences with other charities as well.

Please make sure there is no animal use/exploitation involved in these charities as well.

Thanks for the input!

PamelaVee

Great news!

Last night Congress passed H.R. 7311, which reauthorizes (through 2011) the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, and enhances measures to combat trafficking in persons.

I know (from a past feministing blog entry by Jennifer Podkul at Ayuda) that there was some controversy about the effects this law would have on prosecuting crimes of human trafficking. My initial reading of the reauthorization language doesn’t lead me to believe that would still be the case, since the “force, fraud or coercion” language wasn’t stricken from the bill, it was just slightly reworded (feel free to chime in if my reading is incorrect here).

For additional information on the bill check out the Feminist Law Professor blog, and the statement by Equality Now.

My boyfriend and I were talking about the ridiculousness that is the "man rule" and he pulled up a facebook group called "Man Laws." The second rule is to always respect women, though after looking at the 100-some laws, it seems that only raping/beating a woman is considered disrespectful. I have this knack for finding things that make me angry, and boy did I find a whopper this time. The discussion topic was "Funny Sex positions/acts." via.

I was not expecting to find anything close to what I found.

Most of the posters decided to post names of sex acts, then what they involved. They all involved either rape, violence, or both. They include such things as switching out who is having sex with a woman from behind without her knowing, ejaculating on her face and punching her in both eyes or nose, telling her you have a sexual disease while doing her from behind an trying to hold on, defecating in her vagina, and ejaculating in her eye an kicking her in the shins. These aren't thing you actually do, (hopefully) they are just "jokes."

But why? What's so funny? They were all puns it seems, which is the humor behind them, but why is any of this actually funny? How do rape jokes not disrepect women? Do you seriously have to rape/beat a woman in order to disrepect her? Is everything else seriously a-okay? Do people even realize that what these are are rape jokes? Just more proof that rape culture actually exists, and is flourishing on facebook.

Trigger Warning

A terribly tragic story was in the SF Gate yesterday morning.

To summarize, a 24-year-old ex-beauty queen with a husband and two young children went to a Halloween party, where she lost her purse. A young man offered his phone to her, to call her own phone, and spent the rest of the night harassing her, "joking" that he now had her phone number. He somehow convinced her to let him drive her home, but instead circled around for hours, saying he would only drop her off if she revealed personal information, like her email address and myspace account. He proceeded to harass her over the phone and internet in the following weeks, and was seen a few times outside her home. On November 24, he came into her home after her husband had left, and just as the woman had passed her children through a window to police officers outside, the stalker shot 10 rounds, hitting her with three. He shot himself in the head, and the woman died at the hospital.

Besides being a heart-wrenchingly tragic event that brings up numerous issues that should be discussed through a feminist lense, one thing I found particularly disturbing was the number of victim blaming commenters. Head exploding comments, like "I think there is a 50/50 fault here. I would not have painted Mrs. Nguyen like some holy saint" and "Vietnamese girls that are/were involved in the beauty paegant crap are attention hungers."

One comment line-of-reasoning that has come up over and over on this thread questions why this "hot" girl was out without her husband in the first place. Was she looking for an affair? Why did she get into his car? Why didn't she call the police? Change her phone number? Keep her husband around for protection in the following weeks?

First: can you imagine this line of questioning had the victim been a man? Second, and I think this should go without saying: this woman did not get murdered because she went out and partied without her husband, she did not get murdered because she didn't change her phone number, and she did not get murdered because she got into the wrong car. She got murdered because a murdering fuckhead murdered her. Period.

I can't even begin to go into all of the things wrong with this article. Read to the bottom to see how the media creates a sensationalized headline instead of calling it what it is: violence against women.

Established in 1991 by the Parliament of Canada, this day marks the anniversary of the Montréal Massacre of December 6, 1989, in which 14 women students at the École Polytechnique were systematically killed and 13 other students wounded by a lone gunman Marc Lépine, a 25-year-old Quebecker and child-abuse survivor who, as an adult, was described by acquaintances as a moody loner. Lépine had sought to join the Canadian Armed Forces, but was rejected. He had also studied for admission to the École Polytechnique, but was not accepted -- a decision he blamed on "affirmative action" policies promoted by feminists and their sympathizers. As a revenge he walked into the college, separated the men for the women, and shot at the women in the classroom in a violent act of misogyny

Sexual assault in Peel alone has increased by 20% in the last two years. Of the victims of sexual assault 90% of the victims are women. Statistics Canada indicates that in 2004, 62 womyn were homocide victims and the majority of the men caught were either their partners or had had an intimate relationship with them at some point. And the number of womyn homocide victims is increasing every year.Misogyny, male terrorism,femicide- all words used to explain how endemic violence against womyn is in our society. 

On Thursday December the 4th, the Peel Committee against Woman Abuse is hosting a candlelight vigil to remember the womyn killed almost two decades ago and to remember the countless number of womyn around the world who are victims of violence on a daily basis most of whom have few to no allies advocating on their behalf.

http://pcawa.org/wnp1.php

For any womyn living in Toronto or the Peel region, if you want to stand alongside other womyn to remember these horrific deaths, do come out.

I love my feminism class. It has opened me up to my new favorite identity that I've discovered about myself...my feminism side. That said, today in class I gave a presentation on Vaginal Rejuvenation (no thanks to my partner who showed up an hour late with nothing to contribute to the project). My presentation focused on the comparison between voluntary vaginal reconstruction surgery anf Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Africa and the Middle-East. In fact we watched a case in Africa where a young girl is having an FGM performed on her, and all we were thinking is this is awful and how can this be happening? But then I had to wonder don't we do the same thing in our society but with baby boys when we circumsize them? The only difference is that the young girls lose their entire clitoris and labia leaving only a hole. But besides that it's almost the same thing, removing a part of the sexual organs of a young child without anything given for the pain...and it is socially accepted!! Any thoughts on this??

My friend, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of MD, brought this to my attention. Has anyone seen this? It is so vile and disgusting, I don't know where to begin. How is this even legal?

I think the people behind this deserve a "fuck you" for an entire year's worth of Fridays...plus some.