Back to the Future, Part 16: It Sure Helps To Be White If You Go Missing, Or, The Case of Gabby Petitio

Back to the Future, Part 16: A Young White Woman Goes Missing and We All Go Nuts--The Case of Gabby Petitio

As a mother and grandmother, I can't imagine the pain of losing a child, much less if that child went missing under mysterious circumstances. No attention would be too much--I would want all eyes, everywhere, searching for my child.

But the frenzy over the disappearance (and likely death) of Gabby Petitio while traveling in Wyoming is about more than one missing woman, no matter how precious she may be to her family and friends. 

Since the report on her disappearance was filed on 11 September 2021, Petitio's story has occupied hours of TV and radio time, but the obsessive and relentless coverage has been driven by newer media outlets. Petitio has become the focus of hundreds of posts on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook, her story broadcast by and for the "true crime community" on multiple podcasts and the subject of hundreds of YouTube videos (as of this moment, 1,850 YouTube videos, to be precise).

The overwhelming public interest in Petitio's disappearance serves as one more reminder of the inequities in American life. What about the hundreds of other women who have gone missing from Wyoming? Women who were not young, white, "petite," blonde, and blue-eyed? 

As only one example of all these other missing persons: according to Missing & Murdered Indigenous People, a report recently published (January 2021) by the University of Wyoming's Survey and Analysis Center, "Between 2011 and September 2020, 710 Indigenous persons were reported missing [in 22 of 23 counties in Wyoming]. Some Indigenous people were reported missing more than once during the time period, resulting in a total of 1,254 missing person records for Indigenous people." Of these 710 missing persons, "[e]ighty-five percent were juvenile, and 57% were female."

Meanwhile, nationwide, "In 2016 [the most recent annual figure available], 5,712 Indigenous women and girls were reported missing to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), an electronic clearinghouse of crime data used by criminal justice agencies. . . ."

How many of these missing persons have you heard about? 

I am reposting here an edited version of an op-ed commentary I wrote sixteen years ago, "Missing Woman Would Be Bigger News If She Were Blond," published in The [Tacoma-Seattle] News Tribune, 7 August 2005. Insight 4. In the column, I was limited to 800 words. In 2014, I posted a longer version on my personal web page, but I removed it two years ago in a refresh of my website. I am publishing here my longer version of that 2005 op-ed.

 Who Cares about LaToyia Figueroa?

The photo of LaToyia Figueroa
that first drew my attention
when published in the New Tribune

Nicole. JonBenet. Amber. Chandra. Elisabeth. Laci. Natalee. We are on a first-name basis with all of them. Say their names, and their faces appear before our eyes. Young, female, pretty, blonde—mostly blonde, anyway—and mostly dead. We like them dead. And then there’s LaToyia Figueroa.

While the disappearance of Natalee Holloway in Aruba has occupied the mainstream media for the last two months—breathless, round-the-clock coverage on the all-news channels and, at the very moment that I sit here writing, some 257,000 hits in .05 seconds on Google—where is LaToyia Figueroa? Her story seems to have all the elements we find so irresistible: She’s young (just 24), very pretty, pregnant (5 months), and she has disappeared. Vanished without a trace.

LaToyia is not blonde, though neither was Chandra Levy or Laci Peterson. But Latoyia is not white. Since her disappearance on July 18, there have been no screaming headlines, no hourly updates on Fox or MSNBC, no Larry King Live interviews with members her distraught family, no FBI rushing to the scene, no Katie Couric or Stone Phillips or Dateline. It wasn’t until 9 days after her disappearance that CNN finally mentioned the story. And then, in the bottom right corner of the third page of our Friday News Tribune, was the brief wire-service story that caught my eye: “Family Calls Attention to Missing Woman.”

According to the reporter who wrote the story for the Knight Ridder news service, the people who know and love LaToyia “can’t understand why it took so long to get her disappearance into public view,” but I don’t believe that claim for a minute. I think LaToyia’s family and friends know exactly why no hordes of reporters have descended on her Philadelphia neighborhood in the now-familiar feeding frenzy that is regularly triggered by the disappearance—and possible rape, torture, mutilation, murder, or other unspeakable torment—of a pretty, young woman, whose smiling face will be imprinted in our hearts and dreams forever.

The police say that it is “rare that a minority missing persons case has attracted so much attention.” They are undoubtedly correct—LaToyia Figueroa is not a “missing person,” she is a “minority missing person,” and that’s exactly why no one much cares where she is. That’s why on-line references to Natalee Holloway mount up at the rate of thousands a day; meanwhile, 11 days and counting after her disappearance, I found only 539 references to LaToyia when I Googled her name, many of the posts arguing about whether she is Latina or African-American. My point exactly.

Leave it to Tucker Carlson to defend us all against racism—“there’s another dynamic involved here,” he claimed on the 27 July edition of his MSNBC show, The Situation. That other “dynamic”? Well, when “someone” (“not just a black person or a Hispanic person,” he was quick to say) lives in a “tough neighborhood,” such things are to be expected. A case like LaToyia’s isn’t news because “it’s like planes that land safely aren’t news.” A young white woman disappears, and it’s news, it’s the equivalent of the crash of a Boeing jumbo jet with hundreds of passengers on board. A young woman of color disappears, and it’s the same old same old, another uneventful arrival of a cheap Southwest hop from L.A.

Carlson and his crew even managed to find humor in the whole thing, suggesting that the case hadn’t gotten much national attention because, after all, if you were a reporter, where would you rather “vacation,” Aruba or west Philly? At that point, the show’s transcript indicates “LAUGHTER.”

Despite Tucker Carlson’s denial, this is racism. But it’s not only racism. It’s not just the absence of Latoyia Figueroa’s story, it’s the presence of all those other stories and what they reveal about our obsession with sexualized brutality, cruelty, and violence, and about our voyeuristic fascination with the torture, torment, and mutilation of the bodies of young women. We fetishize their stories. We revel in the lurid details.

The struggle for power, domination, and control has always played itself out on women’s bodies. We can look as far back as Homer’s account of the Trojan War—the clash of civilizations inscribed on the body of one woman, Helen of Troy. And we have only to look around us today—whether it’s the systematic rape of women in Darfur, the burqaed women of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, or a U.S. pharmacist refusing to fill a woman’s prescription for birth control pills, we see political, racial, social, economic, and religious ideologies using women’s bodies for their battlegrounds.

And, as comforting as it might be to think so, our pleasure in these battles is not just confined to rap music and Grand Theft Auto. It’s where you might least expect it: in our churches and in our schools and in our great books. I could never understand why saints’ tales were so popular in the Middle Ages until I read a few, and there it was. Every kind of sexual perversion, twisted torment, and painful death enacted on the bodies (but not the souls, it goes without saying) of one beautiful young woman after another. We were all introduced to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales at some point in high school, but my college students are horrified at the stories he collects in his Legend of Good Women. Dido, betrayed and abandoned. Lucrece, raped. Philomela raped and mutilated, her tongue cut out to prevent her from naming her attacker. All of Chaucer’s “good” women suffer, and they all die, either at the hands of the men who have assaulted them or by their own hands, to save the honor of their fathers and husbands. As one surprised student blurted out recently in class, “Is Chaucer saying that the only good woman is a dead woman?”

And all of those beautiful Renaissance love sonnets? I’ll be teaching them again this fall. There are thousands of them, addressed to Stella, Delia, Diana, Phyllis, Chloris, Cynthia, and countless other idealized young women, all of whom are beautiful and most of whom are blonde. Although these poems are all addressed to women, they’re not really about women, but about the lovers themselves, who anatomize their beloveds, describing in lingering detail their eyes, noses, lips, thighs, breasts, even their nipples. The women in these poems are not unique, thinking, feeling, desiring persons—they are body parts, examined and displayed for the reader’s enjoyment.

And so the women in our music videos, on our television screens, and at our favorite multiplex. Female bodies displayed, exploited, abused, assaulted, and served up for our entertainment.

And so the stories of Nicole, JonBenet, Amber, Chandra, Elisabeth, Laci, and Natalee. Their terrible stories are commodified for our pleasure, neatly packaged up like one of Chaucer’s legends of “good” women. We enjoy all the lurid details. We are transfixed by the agony of their mothers and fathers. We greedily consume the graphic accounts of their sufferings and deaths, and we are moved by how much we care. The candlelight vigils, the flower-and-teddy-bear memorials, the prayers we say as the cameras record how much we care. And then the apotheosis, as each martyred young woman joins our pantheon of angels and saints. We promise that we will never forget them, and we don’t, not really, until the next young, pretty, blonde, white woman disappears.

Our stories reveal our values. They tell us what—and who—is important. The story of Natalee Holloway tells us a lot about what we value in women. We like our women lost, weak, threatened, endangered, fearful, exploited, controlled, silent, and, to be honest, dead. We prefer these dead women to be young and pretty and blonde.

We don’t want to pay attention to women who are too fat or too old or too unattractive. We don’t much care about poor women, who cost us money and have too many children, and we don’t want to have to think too much about homeless women. We’d rather not train women as soldiers, arm them with M-16s, and send them into combat, unless we can rescue them, like we did Jessica Lynch—who is young, pretty, and blonde, and whose shattered body, while not dead, still made a good story. We don’t much appreciate women if they are too powerful or successful or demanding or loud. We don’t much like them gay, unless they’re funny like Ellen or hot like the women on The L Word. We don’t think much about women who are working hard, making ends meet, struggling through life. And we don’t pay much attention at all to the more than 22,000 missing women in the United States who aren’t Natalee Holloway.

Nearly 9,000 of the women missing in the United States at this very moment are women of color.

One of them is Latoyia Figueroa.

Update, 2006: LaToyia Figueroa was reported missing on 18 July 2005. A month later, on 20 August, Stephen Poaches, the father of LaToyia Figueroa's unborn child, was arrested; on 17 October 2006, he was convicted of two counts of murder and is currently incarcerated in the State Correction Institution—Houtzdale (PA). The lack of news coverage in LaToyia Figueroa's case sparked a controversy, dubbed the "missing white women syndrome," commonly attributed to PBS news commentator Gwen Ifill.

In March 2014, a Google search for "LaToyia Figueroa" produces 8,360 results. A search for "Natalee Holloway" produces more than 4 million hits.

For the most recent statistics on missing persons in the United States, with information about the age, sex, and race of those reported missing, see the 2020 NCIC [National Crime Information Center] Missing Person database (click here). 

 

Back to the Future, Part 13: Men Killing Women, New and Improved!

Back to the Future, Part 13: More Intimate Partner Violence! What a Surprise!

First, I hate the anodyne phrase "intimate partner violence." Because we wouldn't want to offend anyone's tender sensibilities by saying "men slaughtering wives, girlfriends, and children," now would we?

"Domestic Violence" is better than "Intimate Partner Violence--
but does it say enough?

And second, such acts of domestic terrorism (a phrase I first heard Gloria Steinem use to describe men killing women several years ago) are so commonplace that they are frequently overlooked in the media. For example, today the Huffington Post reports on the deadly slaughter of his wife and two daughters by a Phoenix man. (He also killed a family friend while he was murdering his family.) The death of his oldest daughter was particularly gruesome--instead of shooting her, as he had his wife and five-year-old daughter, he clubbed the seven-year-old to death. (Police found the youngest daughter, three, hiding under a bed.)

While this horrific murder merited an article in today's Huffington Post, the story did not appear in The New York Times, but a quick Google search shows that it was reported in the Washington Post two days ago, and on NBC, ABC, and CNN. 

But what did appear in today's New York Times was this story: "Murders by Intimate Partners Are on the Rise, Study Shows."

Yup. Rather than less frequently, horrific slaughter like the one in Phoenix is happening MORE frequently: "Homicides by intimate partners are increasing, driven primarily by gun violence after almost four decades of decline." 

Just a few facts: "The number of victims rose to 2,237 in 2017, a 19 percent increase from the 1,875 killed in 2014." Yes, men are killed too, but the "majority of the victims in 2017 were women, a total of 1,527." 

And, "gun-related domestic killings increased by 26 percent from 2010 to 2017. . . . In 2017, 926 of the 1,527 women murdered by partners were killed with guns. In 2014, it was 752 of 1,321 women."

The Times article refers to the findings of Emma E. Fridel and James Alan Fox, "Gender Differences in Patterns and Trends in U.S. Homicide, 1976–2017" (in Violence and Gender 6 [March 2019]).

Interestingly, it was the Huffington Post that first reported on this new study. And adds these gems to what appears in the Times story: "Domestic violence groups often repeat the statistic that three women a day are killed by domestic violence. But according to Fox’s most recent data, it is four."

And: "Nearly half of all women who are murdered die at the hands of their partners. Only 5 percent of men suffer the same fate."

And: "Every 16 hours, according to one estimate, a woman is fatally shot by her boyfriend, husband or ex."

The House of Representatives recently voted to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, which had expired in February of this year.

Reauthorization of the act is opposed by the NRA. 

The Senate has yet to act.

Here's my modest proposal.

For more in the "Back to the Future" series of blog posts, click on the label, below. The label "domestic terrorism" will take you to more posts on men killing women.

Back to the Future, Part 11: Gilead Redux

Back to the Future, Part 11: Home, The Most Dangerous Place for Women (or, Gilead Redux)

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has just issued a stunning new report, a Global Study on Homicide: Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls.*

In the press-release announcing the publication, the UNODC begins with a statement that is shocking but, upon reflection, is not at all surprising: "Home," the study says, is "the most dangerous place for women." 

Why? Because 58% of all murders of women and girls occur at the hands of their intimate partners or family members. To put this in terms that are painfully stark, every hour of every day, some six women are killed "by people they know." 

In other words, "137 women across the world are killed by a member of their own family every day. More than a third (30,000) of the women intentionally killed in 2017 were killed by their current or former intimate partner ̶ someone they would normally expect to trust" (Gender-Related Killing, 10).

And, even more painfully stark,  "little progress has been made in preventing such murders." In fact, the "annual number of female deaths worldwide resulting from intimate partner/family-related homicide . . . seems be on the increase" (10).

The study also examines other forms of "femicide": "gender-related killings perpetrated outside the family sphere." Such gender-related killings include systematic killings of women in armed conflicts, gender-based killing of aboriginal/indigenous women, killing of female sex workers, killings as a result of sexual orientation and/or gender identity, among others (30-38).

UNODC, Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls, p. 7

Globally, 1 of every 5 homicides is "perpetrated by an intimate partner or family member." But, 

women and girls make up the vast majority of those deaths. Victim/perpetrator disaggregations reveal a large disparity in the shares attributable to male and female victims of homicides committed by intimate partners or family members: 36 per cent male versus 64 per cent female victims. Women also bear the greatest burden in terms of intimate partner violence. The disparity between the shares of male and female victims of homicide perpetrated exclusively by an intimate partner is substantially larger than of victims of homicide perpetrated by intimate partners or family members: roughly 82 per cent female victims versus 18 per cent male victims. (11)

UNODC, Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls, p. 11

As if all this isn't enough, here's one last cheerful note: "While the killing of a person tends to be recorded by the police more effectively than other crimes, it is well evidenced that violence against women is poorly reported to the police and that a large share of it remains hidden." And, of course, "[v]iolence against women is almost universally underreported" (42-43). 

The problem is global--many of the graphs in the report show statistics for specific countries all around the world. While none of the charts and/or graphs gives statistics for the United States, the situation in homes in the United States is no different than in other countries; as the CDC reported earlier this year, “[o]ver half of all female homicides (55.3%) are Intimate Partner Violence related." 

So, happy holidays?

*As the UNODC notes, "not all female homicides are gender related. Therefore, only a specific, if considerable, share can be labelled 'gender-related killings of women and girls,' i.e. 'femicide'" (9).

For more fun stories on the state of affairs for women and girls, click on the label "Back to the Future," below.

Back to the Future, Part 9: The 10 Most Dangerous Countries for Women

Back to the Future, Part 9: The 10 Most Dangerous Countries for Women 

It's been a while since I've had the heart to post another in this series of "back to the future" pieces. I guess I am just so tired of winning . . . 

But, hey, looks like the MAGA crowd will have to work a bit harder because we're not yet Number 1!

The Thompson Reuters Foundation, "the philanthropic arm of Thomas Reuters, the world's biggest news and information provider," has just published its most recent poll of "The World's Most Dangerous Countries for Women." (The first Reuters poll of the most dangerous countries for women was published in 2011.)

Great news! The United States made the list!!!! But, darn, just barely--we're number ten on the list, last place: "The United States ranked as the 10th most dangerous country for women, the only Western nation to appear in the top 10."

Here is the list, beginning with the worst and ending with the least (?) worst: 1. India; 2. Afghanistan; 3. Syria; 4. Somalia; 5. Saudi Arabia; 6. Pakistan; 7. Democratic Republic of Congo; 8. Yemen; 9. Nigeria; 10. United States.

Criteria for ranking: healthcare; discrimination; cultural traditions; sexual violence; non-sexual violence; trafficking.

Good to know: we tied for third place Syria on the "key area" of sexual violence, but we were only in sixth place when it came to non-sexual violence. 

So we'll just have to keep trying harder to make America great again for women! Because we need to be Number 1!

And the way things are going these days, if the poll is taken seven years from now, we should be in the Republic of Gilead territory, no problem.

By the way, the reactions to the publication of the story are almost as disheartening as the poll itself. The comments at ProPublica are profanity-laden, utterly sickening comparisons of Trump and Bill Clinton--at the time I last looked, there was no reckoning at all with the Reuters poll or story. Meanwhile, over at Jezebel, most of the comments are more-or-less, "Well, we can't accept this poll because clearly Country X is worse for women than the U.S." What an argument.

In her report on the Reuters poll for Fortune, Natasha Bach notes, "The U.S.’s poor standing in this survey arrives just a week after a UN report found the U.S. to be the most unequal country in the developed world, with 40 million people living in poverty." (To read the U.N. document, "Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights on His Mission to the United States of America," click here.)

Welcome to America, 28 June, 2018.

(For the previous eight posts on "back to the future," click on the label, below.)

Update, 29 January 2022: The Thomson Reuters poll from 2018 is no longer accessible online (or at least the link I had provided to it is no longer working). Reports about the poll from many sources are still widely available, however, so I have now linked to the Thomson Reuters fact sheet about the poll. Here also is a United Nations report, from the same time-frame--a press release with a summary of findings (here) and the report itself, "Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls" (here).

Back to the Future, Part 6: Making America Even Greater for Women

Here's a Way to Fix Domestic Violence--Stop Reporting It

This year's Crime in the United States report, the first one to be produced under the auspices of the Trump administration's Department of Justice, claims to be new and improved--or, rather, it says that it has been "streamlined and updated."

Crime statistics no longer reported in the
Crime in the United States report

To that end, "UCR [Uniform Crime Reporting] staff have strategically trimmed the amount of tables and refined the presentation of data in this year’s publication."

Well, that's one way of framing what's happened in the newly released 2016 Crime in the United States report. 

Another way of framing what's happened: we just don't give a shit about some aspects of crime any more.

As senior political reporter Clare Malone and crime analyst Jeff Asher report in FiveThirtyEight, (27 October 2017) the most recent CUS "contains close to 70 percent fewer data tables than the 2015 version did, a removal that could affect analysts’ understanding of crime trends in the country. The removal comes after consecutive years in which violent crime rose nationally, and it limits access to high-quality crime data that could help inform solutions."

Among the missing data tables that "could" (ha!) affect understanding of crime in the United States are those that include "information on arrests" and "the circumstances of homicides (such as the relationships between victims and perpetrators)."

So why does this contribute to the ongoing effort to make America greater for women?

There were 15 tables of homicide data in the 2015 report, for example. The 2016 report, "streamlined and updated," or, more rhetorically calculated, "trimmed . . . and refined," has only 6 homicide data tables. Oh, excuse me--to be more accurate, "strategically trimmed."

What's missing?

Notably, Data Table 10 from the 2015 report: "Murder Circumstances by Relationship." Actually, this data, the relationship of victims to offenders, is included as Table 10 in every CIUS report from 2000 until 2015; before 2000, the information is a bit harder to find, but "Murder Circumstances by Relationship" is consistently provided as Table 2.12 in the reports from 1995 to 2000 (the 1995 Crime in the United States is the earliest available report online). 

Why is the loss of this table so important?

Because the table focused on who was murdered--and the relationship of the victim to the offender. Was the victim the perpetrator's husband, wife, mother, father, son, daughter, brother, sister, "other family," acquaintance, friend, boyfriend, or girlfriend?

These categories included exes and step relationships. "Acquaintance" included same-sex relationships.

This means that, for the most extreme outcome of acts of domestic violence, it is no longer possible to say how many women were murdered by their spouses, partners, dates, or friends.

Similarly, Data Table 2 is also missing. For twenty years, from 1995 until 2015, you could see the age, the race, and the ethnicity of homicide victims. How many girls aged 9 to 12 were murdered in 2015, for example? There were 20 girls between the ages of 9 and 12 murdered in that year. How many women aged 25 to 29 were murdered? That number was 338.

But how many girls and women in those age groups were murdered in 2016? Who knows? Who cares? They've been "strategically trimmed" out of the data. The data is now more "refined."

It is important to note that, while the annual report has changed from one year to another in previous years, the proposed changes were reviewed. Before being made, changes went through the Criminal Justice Advisory Policy Process, overseen by an Advisory Policy Board. This year's changes did not go through that regular process. 

Meanwhile, in his "Message" prefacing the 2016 report, FBI Director Chris Wray writes, "Information that is accurate, accessible, and complete enhances and informs conversations about policing."

But information that is suppressed, elided, erased, disappeared--oh, excuse me, "streamlined," "trimmed"--even strategically trimmed--and "refined"--also diminishes and misleads. It obscures. It obfuscates. It denies.

Men killing women? Husbands killing wives (and children)? Boyfriends killing an ex? Problem solved. 

The 2016 Crime in the United States report was published 25 September 2017. 

Ironically (or not), October is Domestic Violence Prevention Month.

(For previous entries in the "Back to the Future" series, click here, here, here, here, and/or here!)

American Women and Domestic Terrorism, Part 2

The Deadly War on Women Continues

Almost a year ago, I wrote about violence against American women--domestic terrorism--and its horrific and unrelenting toll. As Gloria Steinem noted in stark terms on 11 May 2016,

Domestic violence in this country has killed since 9/11 — if you take the number of [Americans] who were killed in 9/11 and in two wars in Iraq, and in the 14-year war in Afghanistan — more women have been murdered by their husbands and boyfriends in the United States in that period of time than [the number of Americans who] have been killed in all of those incidences of terrorism and wars.” 

And now here we are, almost a year later, once more forced to face the facts.

On Monday, 10 April 2017, a school shooter opened fire at North Park Elementary School in San Bernardino, California--the same city where, in 2015, another mass shooting occurred.

When it was all over, four people had been shot, including two children. The shooter died, along with one woman and an eight-year-old boy.

There was no continuing "breaking news" coverage on the cable news networks as there had been in 2015. The president of the United States made no public statement. Anderson Cooper didn't jet to the scene. And, as Michael Calderone notes in the Huffington Post, even major newspapers didn't consider the story all that newsworthy: "The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal didn’t run front page stories on it." (The story that was front-page-worthy was the viral video of a United Airlines passenger being forcibly removed from an airplane.)

School shootings are usually followed by days, if not weeks, of blaring news accounts, but not this one. It's now Friday, just four days after the shooting, and the story has virtually  disappeared. 

Why? Because this horrific school shooting was deemed to be "just" another story of domestic violence. A pissed-off man who shoots his wife and then himself--and who shoots two small children in the process, killing one of them. Too routine to be worth news coverage

This wasn't the act of some "radical Islamic terrorist." Just an ordinary kind of terrorist--the kind that lives in our homes and wreaks deadly vengeance on women and children.

And as Steinem noted, it occurs all too often, and it kills far more people than the kind of terroism we all seem much more worried about

Politifact, fact-checking the numbers, reports that, in the decade between 2005 and 2015, a total of 24 Americans were killed by terrorist attacks "on U. S. soil"--in the same ten years, 280,024 Americans were killed by guns. 

But, more relevant to the story here, three women are killed every single day by their intimate partners. 

In 2014, according to FBI data, 1,613 women were murdered by men in single victim/single offender incidents: 

• For homicides in which the victim to offender relationship could be identified, 93 percent of female victims (1,388 out of 1,495) were murdered by a male they knew.
• Thirteen times as many females were murdered by a male they knew (1,388 victims) than were killed by male strangers (107 victims).
• For victims who knew their offenders, 63 percent (870) of female homicide victims were wives or intimate acquaintances of their killers.
• There were 239 women shot and killed by either their husband or intimate acquaintance during the course of an argument. 

(For this data, see "When Men Murder Women" (2016), published by the Violence Prevention Center.)

In 2015, in just one state--California--91 women were murdered, their deaths the result of domestic violence. (During the same year, the murders of 27 men were also attributed to domestic violence.) If you're one of those people always yelling "fake news," take a look at the source of the evidence--it's reported in Table 25 of "Homicide in California" (2015), a publication of the California Department of Justice.

In that year, "only" 39 of of 358 mass shootings nationwide were related to domestic violence, as reported in the New York Times, but they were "among the deadliest," accounting for 145 of the 462 total deaths as a result of mass shootings in that year.

In just the first month of 2016--January 2016, as Melissa Jeltsen reported in The Huffington Post--112 people were killed in intimate partner violence. 

And on average, there are 11 murder-suicides, like the one in San Bernardino, every single solitary week--most of them involving a man who kills his wife or girlfriend with a gun.. 

As reported in Mass Shootings in the United States: 2009-2016,* published on 11 April 2017, just a day after the San Bernardino shootings, there have been 156 mass shootings in the United States during this eight-year period. And "the majority of mass shootings in the United States are related to domestic or family violence":

In at least 54 percent of mass shootings (85), the perpetrator shot a current or former intimate partner or family member. These domestic violence mass shootings resulted in 422 victims being killed—more than 40 percent (181) of whom were children. A majority of these cases—56—also ended with the perpetrators killing themselves.

Forty percent of the fatalities in domestic violence shootings are children.

The biggest threat to women is not some crazy-eyed Muslim terrorist who wants to destroy the United States and impose Sharia law on those of us who survive the conquest. 

The biggest threat to women has always been, and remains, men--their husbands, boyfriends, fathers, brothers, sons, dates, exes, colleagues, neighbors, acquaintances, the guys in their yoga class, the man in the Safeway store . . . 

*As of January 2021, this resource has been updated--it is now titled Mass Shootings in America 2009-2019. To access this report, with its current data, click here.

Mary Richardson, Suffragette, "Vandal," and Fascist

Mary Raleigh Richardson (died 7 November 1961)

I've posted many times here about women's long fight to gain the vote and about women who participated in that fight--some of them compelled to acts of violence. Mary Richardson is one of the most complex and complicated figures in the suffrage movement.

A surveillance photograph
of Mary Richardson,
taken in 1913 by Scotland Yard

Born in England in 1882, Richardson was raised in Ontario, Canada, by her Canadian mother and grandfather, returning to Britain when she was sixteen. Her life at the end of the nineteenth century seemed conventional enough--in 1898, for example, she was studying art, and then she traveled to Paris and to Italy. Once she completed her education, she moved to Bloomsbury and began a career as a journalist. 

But after witnessing the violence of the Black Friday Protests of 18 November 1910, Richardson found her life transformed, and she joined the Women's Social and Political Union, the militant suffrage group founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and dedicated to "deeds not words."

In 1912, the WSPU began a campaign of arson, directed by Pankhurst's daughter Christabel--the group attempted to destroy homes of members of parliament, then escalated their campaign to include setting fire to railway stations and other public facilities, cutting telephone lines, and destroying the contents of mailboxes.

Mary Richardson was committed to this increasingly militant--and violent--campaign, which she regarded as "a holy crusade." As biographer Hilda Kean describes the physical sufferings borne by Richardson as a result of her participation in these acts of politically motivated violence:  

She was arrested nine times, serving several sentences in Holloway prison for assaulting the police, breaking windows, and arson. She was frequently attacked while campaigning for the suffrage cause: her shoulder blade was broken and her clothing torn to shreds when she presented a petition to George V in Bristol in 1913. She campaigned with the socialist Sylvia Pankhurst in east London and was arrested and then imprisoned with her after a rally in Bromley by Bow in July 1913. 

Mary Richardson was one of the first two women to be force fed, under the "Cat and Mouse Act" in 1913, having been arrested at the scene of an arson attack. She suffered extensive bruising and poor health as a result, writing about this experience as "torture." When released in 1914 after a long period of forcible feeding, she declared, "The worst fight on record since the movement began is now raging in Holloway."  

However, Mary Richardson's most infamous act of political protest was not on a private home or a public building but on a work of art: on 10 March 1914 she slashed a painting in the National Gallery, Diego Velázquez's nude portrait of Venus, Venus at her Toilet, now known as the Rokeby Venus (so-called because the painting was first brought to England and hung at Rokeby Park, Yorkshire, before being acquired by the National Gallery in 1906). 

The Rokeby Venus after
Richardson's attack,
photo published in The Times, 1914

Richardson was not the first suffragette to attack a work of art as an act of political protest. Five years earlier, in 1909, a suffrage poster demanding "Votes for Women" had been stuck onto a Royal Academy exhibit of a portrait of Herbert Henry Asquith, the Prime Minister (the portrait itself was behind glass, the poster stuck to the glass). 

In 1912, the Royal Academy had decided to close its annual winter exhibition early because of the WSPU campaign--the Academy noted that its decision was made in order to "safeguard the valuable pictures now on loan." The next year, in April of 1913, a group of women had broken the glass protecting a number of paintings at the Manchester Art Gallery, damaging more than a dozen works, including paintings by Edward Burne-Jones, Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 

Two months later, in June 1913, a group of suffragettes attempted to disrupt the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition by holding a meeting in one of the galleries, and the Academy took precautions by instituting security measures, locking cupboards, gates and doors. But they suffered during the next year's exhibition: on 4 May 1914, the suffragette "Mary Wood" (Mary Aldham) broke the glass protecting John Singer Sargent's  portrait of the author Henry James and slashed the painting three times with a meat cleaver while crying "Votes for women!" Further attacks followed: despite precautions, Gertrude Mary Ansell attacked the Royal Academy portrait of the duke of Wellington on 12 May, and Mary Spencer attacked George Clausen's Primavera on 26 May.  

But Mary Richardson's slashing of the nude Venus remains the most notorious of these acts of artistic vandalism. As Richardson described her act and its motivations to The Times,

I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas. Mrs Pankhurst seeks to procure justice for womanhood, and for this she is being slowly murdered by a Government of Iscariot politicians. If there is an outcry against my deed, let every one remember that such an outcry is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs Pankhurst and other beautiful living women, and that until the public cease to countenance human destruction the stones cast against me for the destruction of this picture are each an evidence against them of artistic as well as moral and political humbug and hypocrisy. ("Miss Richardson's Statement, The Times, 11 March 1914)

While Richardson's attack may be the most infamous, it was not the last act of vandalism against art undertaken by the suffragettes to gain attention to their cause. According to Rowena Clausen, some fourteen incidents were to follow, with suffragettes attacking works they found especially offensive: paintings of nude women and portraits of powerful men.

After this spate of violence against works of art, many museums closed their doors to unaccompanied women. (For Helena Bonett's "‘Deeds not words’: Suffragettes and the Summer Exhibition," posted at the Royal Academy's website, click here.)

The restored Rokeby Venus

Like many suffragettes, including the Pankhursts, Richardson suspended her political activities during the war and returned to writing, publishing a novel, Matilda and Marcus (1915), and two volumes of poetry, Symbol Songs (1916) and Wilderness Love Songs (1917). A third book of poetry, Cornish Headlands, was published after the end of the war, in 1920.

After some women women gained the right to vote in 1918 as a result of the Representation of the People Act,* and as a result of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919, which removed limits on jobs because of sex, Richardson stood for parliament, in 1922 as a candidate, for the Labour party,  in 1924 as an independent socialist, and in 1931, again as a Labour candidate. She was never elected.

In 1934 she joined the British Union of Fascists, becoming the "organizing secretary" for the "women's section." She spoke for the party and wrote for the press on its behalf. But by 1935 she left the party. She would later try to explain her attraction to the fascist party: "I was first attracted to the Blackshirts because I saw in them the courage, the action, the loyalty, the gift of service, and the ability to serve which I had known in the suffrage movement."

It was this, her year as a fascist supporter and party member--more than her participation in acts of violence and vandalism--that seems to have damaged Richardson's reputation and memory beyond repair. When she eventually published her autobiography, Laugh a Defiance, in 1953, she omitted any account of this part of her political career. 

In her entry on Richardson in the Dictionary of National Biography, Hilda Kean notes that Richardson not only gave numerous accounts and varying interpretations of her career throughout her life, but that she maintained "total silence on her fascist activities." (If you don't have access to the DNB, Kean provides a version of her biographical entry here.)

Here, for example, is Richardson's later rationale for her political act of artistic vandalism: 

Law and its application reflected public opinion. Values were stressed from a financial point of view and not the human. I felt I must make my protest from the financial point of view, therefore, as well as letting it be seen as a symbolic act. I had to draw the parallel between the public’s indifference to Mrs. Pankhurst’s slow destruction and the destruction of some financially valuable object. A painting came to mind. Yes, yes--the Venus Velasquez had painted, hanging in the National Gallery. It was highly prized for its worth in cash. If I could damage it, I reasoned, I could draw my parallel. The fact that I had disliked the painting would make it easier for me to do what was in my mind. 

Richardson's autobiography is long out of print. No used copies are available (at the time of writing) on Amazon, and the book is unavailable through Google Books, Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg. (See update, below). You can get a copy through Inter-Library Loan, however--here's a link to the book on WorldCat.

*The 1918 act eliminated almost all property requirements for men, allowing them to vote at age 21. The act did not eliminate all property requirements for women, nor did it grant them the right to vote until they reached the age of 30. This discrepancy was enacted deliberately to insure that women did not become the majority of the electorate--since so many men had died during the war, fears were that extending the suffrage to women on equal terms would place them in an "unfair" position. For equal enfranchisement, women had to wait another decade, until the passage of the 1928 Equal Franchise Act.

Update, February 2018: In honor of the centenary of some British women at last gaining the right to vote (the 1918 Representation of the People Act, 6 February 1918), the BBC's History Extra podcast has produced two excellent shows: "The Suffragettes" and "The Pankhursts." Enjoy!

Update, 15 January 2024: Laugh a Defiance is now available through the Internet Archive (click here).

American Women and Domestic Terrorism

The Deadly War on Women

I was doing a little baking this afternoon, and while I was making my son's favorite cookies (Martha Stewart's Double-Chocolate Chunk cookies, if you're interested), I was catching up on my podcasts.

And so it was that I listened to Gloria Steinem in conversation with Tom Ashbrook, an On Point episode broadcast earlier this week. The starting point for the discussion was Steinem's new documentary series, Woman (airing on the Viceland channel), but the talk ranged widely--though it maintained its focus on women's status in the world, particularly as victims of violence.

(For some reason, the mere discussion of this topic--that, globally, women are the victims of extraordinary levels of violence, enrages some people. The comments section at the On Point website is brutal . . . Apparently the idea that global violence against women is linked to political, social, and economic instability cannot be tolerated.)

One of the very first posts I wrote on this site was about Gloria Steinem (to see that earlier piece, click here.) What prompted me to write today was a comment she made in this recent conversation with Ashbrook--she noted that, in the U.S., since 9/11, more women have been killed by their husbands or boyfriends--domestic terrorists--than "all the Americans who were killed by 9/11 or in Afghanistan and Iraq."

I had heard her make this statement before--but it struck me particularly hard as I was standing in my kitchen making cookies. 

As it turns out, the statement seems to date back to 2014--and as shocking as it may sound, it has been fact-checked and proved to be true:

James A. Fox, a Northeastern University criminology professor, found that from 2002-12, the number of women killed by intimate partners was 15,462. A tally from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics showed 10,470 women killed in intimate partner homicides from 2002-10.

Fewer than 3,000 Americans died in the terrorist attacks on Sept.11, 2001. (There were 2,978 victims, but that includes people from 90 countries.) American deaths tied to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq total 6,838, according the Pentagon. Together, there were about 9,838 deaths.

In her 2015 Boston Globe story, headlined "In This War on Women, the Death Toll Mounts," columnist Renée Graham makes a similar point, using comparable statistics, adding:

We fret about terrorism and mass murders in public places, though violence against women claims far more victims while receiving a fraction of the attention. It cuts across race, class, religion, and every other demographic line, and is as much a repulsive trait of our national character as racism. With each lethal encounter, there are just as many imperishable scars — children dead or orphaned, families and friends shattered. Every day these women are dying among us; we owe them more than makeshift memorials and weary resignation.

And here is a direct quotation from Steinem, from an 11 May 2016 interview on PRI's The Takeaway:

Domestic violence in this country has killed since 9/11 — if you take the number of [Americans] who were killed in 9/11 and in two wars in Iraq, and in the 14-year war in Afghanistan — more women have been murdered by their husbands and boyfriends in the United States in that period of time than [the number of Americans who] have been killed in all of those incidences of terrorism and wars,” Steinem says. “We are not exempt here by any means. If all of us could raise one generation of children without violence, we don’t know what might be possible.

The Martha Stewart double-chocolate cookies are really good. But I sorta lost my appetite.

Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes: Victims of Violence

Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes (murdered 30 September 1888)

Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were murdered in Whitechapel, London, on 30 September 1888. 

Elizabeth Stride,
photo from 1872

Elizabeth Gustafsdotter was born in 1843 in Torslanda, Sweden, the daughter of Gustaf Ericsson and Beata Carlsdotter. She arrived in London in 1865 and married John Stride in 1869. He died of tuberculosis in 1884. 

Catherine Eddowes was born in the West Midlands city of Wolverhampton in 1842, the daughter of George Eddowes and Catherine Evans Eddowes. She arrived in London with Thomas Conway, and after separating from him in 1880, she began living with a new partner, John Kelly.

Stride's body was found at 1:00 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, 30 September 1888, Eddowes's less than an hour later, at 1:45 a.m.

Many of the women I've written about this year have been assaulted, tortured, and killed--but they were regarded as having suffered "for their faith," and they are now known as saints.

Catherine Eddowes,
photo from 1883

Far more women--nameless, numberless--have been victimized and forgotten. Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes would probably be included among those countless nameless, faceless, and unremembered murdered women, except for the fact that they are the third and fourth victims of "Jack the Ripper."

Update, 31 May 2020: The pandemic lockdown has given me lots of time to read--and so I've finally picked up Hallie Rubenhold's terrific new book, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. 

Update, 4 October 2021: Hallie Rubenhold has just begun posting episodes for a new podcast series, Bad Women: Ripper Retold, which I cannot recommend enough! In the first episode, "The Ripper Myth," she reveals the outrage of the "ripperologists" and their community over her book, The Five, and the abuse and scorn heaped upon her for daring to focus her narrative on, gasp, the lives of the victims!!!!! It's an excellent series, narrated by an engaging and knowledgeable historian. (I am listening via Overcast, but it seems to be available on all podcasting services.)

Beatrice Cenci: Murder and Memory

Beatrice Cenci (born 6 February 1577)

In 1599, the twenty-two-year-old Beatrice Cenci was executed in Rome. Along with her stepmother, she was beheaded for her involvement in the murder of her father, Francesco Cenci; her elder brother was executed by quartering (another brother was forced to witness the execution of his family, but he was too young to be executed).

A "portrait" of Beatrice Cenci,
attributed to Elisabetta Sirani

There is no dispute about what had led to Francesco Cenci's murder by members of his own family--he was a violent man who had long brutalized the members of his household. His behavior was well known--he had been investigated, arrested, tried, and even convicted for various crimes of sexual violence.

In 1595, Francesco Cenci had left Rome, taking his second wife, Lucrezia, and Beatrice to a remote castle north of Rome, where he imprisoned the two women. 

Evidence shows that, by 1597, the two women were plotting against Francesco--but their plan was to escape from him, not to murder him. Beatrice desperately appealed for help to her brother and other influential relatives, detailing the women's plight, but her father learned of her accusations. His response was to whip Beatrice--and there is some evidence that he may also have raped her.

While the exact depth of Francesco Cenci's depravity is subject to debate, Beatrice's role in the conspiracy to murder her father is clear. At first she denied her guilt, a denial she persisted in even after torture. But eventually she confessed, as did her stepmother and brothers. Despite protest by the people of Rome, and an appeal for mercy to Pope Clement VII, the executions were carried out on 11 September 1599.

And then the "legend" of Beatrice Cenci began. Her life--and death--have been the subject of many retellings, most famously in Percy Bysshe Shelley's nineteenth-century verse drama The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts. (To read Shelley's play, click here.) There are lyric poems, novels, operas, and films. 

For those interested in the story of Beatrice Cenci, I recommend Belinda Jack's Beatrice's Spell: The Enduring Legend of Beatrice Cenci.

The origins of the image of Beatrice Cenci, reproduced above, are mysterious, and Jack notes that it wasn't until "some point" in the eighteenth century that this "portrait 'became' Beatrice." The portrait was at once time attributed to Guido Reni (1575-1642), but is now widely believed to have been painted by Elisabetta Sirani. It hangs in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome.

This plaque in Rome commemorates Beatrice Cenci's death: "From here, where the prison of Corte Savella once stood, on 11 September 1599 Beatrice Cenci was taken to the scaffold, an exemplary victim of an unjust justice."