So, people, have you read the news lately? Last week, there was a drifter in Colorado who got inside a school, took about seven girls hostage, raped some of them and killed one of them. Yesterday, there was a man who got inside a school in Pennsylvania, ordered all the boys out, lined all the girls up against the blackboard, tied them up and shot them all in the head, killing five of them. So there has been six school children killed in a week, and they were all girls, eh? What a coincidence.

The killer in Pennsylvania had apparently planned to sexually molest his victims, too, but got distracted when the police arrived. According to the Guardian, the man had admitted to having molested "children" about twenty years ago. The Guardian reports that state police commissioner Jeffrey Miller

Quote
said "we are never going to know exactly what he thought", or why he carried out the attack, but added that evidence of a sexual predilection for children may have influenced his feelings of anger.
Okay. Let's get this straight. State police commissioner Miller notes that the murderer, Charles Carl Roberts IV, showed evidence of "a sexual predilection for children" and as a result he murdered as many little girls as he could?

I assume police commissioner Miller meant that Roberts had a sexual predilection for young girls. Therefore, he murdered girls. Okay. Ten years ago, a former Scout master named Thomas Hamilton broke into a primary school gym in Dunblane, Scotland, and started shooting the children there. There were 29 children between five and six years old in there, apparently about equal numbers of boys and girls. Thomas Hamilton killed five of the boys and eleven of the girls. The only uninjured child was a boy, and the most severely injured of the children was a girl.

When the newspapers tried to explain why Hamilton would have done something so horrendous, the only explanation they came up with was that the man seemed to take an unnatural interest in little boys. Okay. Charles C. Roberts had a sexual predilection for little girls, so he needed to kill little girls. And Thomas Hamilton had a seuxal preference for little boys, so he needed to kill... primarily little girls?

In 1998, Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, opened fire on children in a school yard in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The two very young boys targeted females only, and they killed four school girls and a female teacher. When newspapers wrote about the case, no one tried to find an explanation for why the boys apparently wanted to kill only girls and women.

In 1989, a man named Marc Lépine entered a school in Montreal, Canada, and ordered the female students to line up against a wall. Before he took his own life, Lépine had killed fourteen students, all female.

(In mid-September 2006, another man opened fire in another Canadian college, killing one student.... Are you very surprised to hear that the murdered student was a young woman?)

About two weeks ago, I read in a Swedish newspaper that a male nurse somewhere in Europe was suspected of having killed "old people". When you read the article more carefully, you found that the man was suspected of having killed more than a hundred old women.

British GP Harold Shipman was arrested in 1998 and was found guilty in 2001 of having killed fifteen elderly female patients. He was suspected of having killed about 250 patients all in all, practically all of them old women. A possible motive, according to Wikipedia, was that Harold Shipman lost his own mother when he himself was 17 years old, and therefore he needed to relive(?) retaliate(?) his mother's death by killing other old women.

Okay, do you remember the guy who had a sexual predilection for young girls and therefore needed to kill young girls? Or the man who had a predilection for young boys and therefore needed to kill young girls? And now Harold Shipman who saw his own mother die and therefore needed to kill old women? What about the male nurse who was recently arrested for killing perhaps a hundred old women? Don't you think he saw his father die when he was young, so that, to relive or retaliate his father's death, he needed to kill old women? There was a guy in Sweden who attacked and killed two sleeping teenaged girls and a female nurse. This guy was fat, you know, so I guess he needed to kill girls and women because he was fat?

Two days ago, a man in Norway killed his three sisters, the youngest of them fourteen years old. Here in Sweden, the most-watched news program called the murders a "family tragedy".

If you pay attention, you will notice that the media as well as the police and politicians tend to use the expression "family tragedy" when a man has killed his wife, fiancée or girlfriend, or his ex-wife, ex-fiancée or ex-girlfriend, or another woman whom he considers his rightful property and whom he there considers himself entitled to kill, if she won't show him proper respect. If we are lucky, the woman will survive. In that case, the media, the police and politician will not call it a "family tragedy" but an instance of "domestic violence".

Two things make me so furious. The first thing is men's violence against women. The second thing is how almost everybody in society seems to do their level best to ignore this violence, or to ignore that this violence is directed specifically against girls and women. When we talk about family tragedies or domestic violence, when we say that a man murdered women because he had abnormal sexual desires or because he needed to relive his own mother's death or because he was just plain mad or because whatever, we are just ignoring the fact that at the heart of his deed was a hatred of women. Or a need to demonstrate his utter superiority towards women and his right to do with them as he pleased, including his right to kill them if he so desired.

When we refuse to see this hatred of women and this male flaunting of limitless power over women, we help to normalize this hatred and this treatment of women as utterly inferior beings, whose duty it is to meekly defer to men. Why could slavery persist in the American South for as long as it did? Not because all Southerners were slave owners. Not because most Southerners were slave owners. Not because all or most Southerners had this urge to flog black people or treat them as animals. No, it persisted for as long as it did because most Southerners quietly accepted it, never questioning it or really speaking up against it.

Please, people. Let's not think of violence against women as something inevitable, as something that can't be prevented, as something that should not be discussed in polite company because it is embarrassing for everybody or because it is too gross or unpleasant to bother delicate souls with.

The next time you read about a madman who kills girls or women, remember that he does not kill women primarily because he is mad. Remember that he kills women primarily because we have all made him feel it is all right and natural for him to hate women. Remember that ultimately, he thinks that he has our blessing to act on his hatred - and that is true even if he feels obliged to take his own life afterwards.

Ann