Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Had To Get This Off My Chest: or More Girls Killed

Roger, I hope I haven't painted Sweden as a country where girl children are killed in droves. That most certainly isn't true. I know of a total of about ten newborn babies killed here in Sweden, and I have done my best to know about all such cases in this country. Right now I don't have the exact figures here, which is why I have to say that I'm talking about circa ten cases where a baby was killed right after it was born. But I would say that those circa ten cases are all that we have seen here in Sweden since circa 1970, and the reason why I stop there is that I'm not aware of any publicized cases that happened before then. But if there have been about ten cases since 1970, that means that there have been much less than one murdered newborn infant per year during a circa 35-year period.

However, I also know that only one of those murdered babies was definitely a boy. His mother, who was caught, testified that she hadn't known the gender of the baby she had killed. She had had a towel ready to wrap the baby in as soon as it was born, and she claimed that she had deliberately wrapped the baby up so that she wouldn't have to look at it. Therefore she hadn't known about her baby's gender. I believe she was telling the truth. In any case, I find it interesting that she needed to explain, during her trial, that she didn't know that the baby she had killed was a boy. Would that be because she agreed that it is more horrible to kill a baby boy than it is to kill a baby girl?

Of the remaining eight cases of murdered newborns, one concerns a baby whose gender has never been disclosed, and all the other cases were girls. We are talking about a very small number of murdered infants, but the overwhelming majority of these children were girls.

Similarly, only a small number of children are actually murdered each year in Sweden. But when you tally the numbers up over a ten-year period, you find that in each age category - 0-1 years, 1-2, 2-3, 3-4 etc, the number of murdered girls exceed the number of murdered boys by, typically, a three to two margin. And that is true for children up to the age of eleven.

My impression is that when a small boy is violently and sensationally murdered here in Sweden - which happens very rarely, of course - that makes bigger headlines than when a small girl is killed during similar circumstances. As if the idea that anyone would kill an innocent little boy is more shocking than the idea that anyone would kill an innocent little girl. As if we are absolutely shocked that anyone would deliberately kill a little boy under any circumstances. When a little girl is killed, we are more apt to sigh, and say, like LabRat did:

Murdered little girls are murdered children, and we sigh and feel sad. But murdered little boys are an abomination, an attack on what we consider the most inviolable and holy. And we are more than sad: we are shocked and horrified, and we cry out that something must be done. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying we should not be as shocked as we are when little boys are murdered. I'm just saying that we should not consider it a random tragedy of nature when little girls are deliberately killed.

Everybody knows the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Bible. God orders Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and give him to God as a burnt offering. Abraham decides to obey, and takes Isaac to the appointed place, typically without discussing the matter with Isaac's mother, Sarah, first. But just as Abraham has lifted his knife and is about to kill Isaac, God intervenes and saves the boy. The lesson: A man is not allowed to kill his son in order to give him as an offering to God, because the life of a boy is too holy to be given away like that.

Like I said, everybody knows this story. But did you know that there is a somewhat similar Biblical story about a man and his daughter? You can read about it in Judges, chapter eleven. The man in question is Jephthah, and God has ordered him to lead an attack on Israel's enemies, the Ammonites. But Jephthah wants assurances from God that his attack is going to be successful. So he makes a deal with God: If God will grant him victory against the Ammonites, he will in turn sacrifice to God the first living thing that comes to greet him when he returns, victorious, from the battle against the Ammonites.

Jephthah has only one child, a daughter. We may compare this with Abraham, who already had another son when Sarah gave birth to Isaac. Abraham's firstborn son was Ishmael, whom Abraham had subsequently driven away along with his mother, Hagar. Jephthah, however, had only one child, a daughter. Perhaps typically, the Bible doesn't tell us the daughter's name.

Well, as you can imagine, after Jephthah has defeated the Ammonites, his daughter is the first living being who comes to greet him when he returns home. Consequently, Jephthah finds himself obliged to kill his daughter and to give her to God as a burnt offering. After giving his daughter a two months' reprieve, he then keeps his promise to God and kills his daughter and gives her to God as a burnt offering.

Two things may be noted here. God does not intervene. He does not tell Jephthah to spare his daughter's life. He does not tell the children of Israel that their daughters are too valuable to be killed and sacrificed to God.

Secondly, the Bible tells us that other young girls mourned Jephthah's daughter. They were sad that this random tragedy of nature had befallen her and killed her. But there were no protests, no desperate pleas to God to explain himself, no demands that God spek up and condemn the killings of girls. And Jephthah, who was shocked when he found that he had gotten himself into a situation where he would have to kill his own daughter, was not seen to mourn her afterwards. But then, you know, she was only a girl.

Ann

Ann, your quote of LabRat's
sums up my feelings. Would I personally feel any more or less shocked if the Amish children killed had been all boys? No. This is an absolutely horrific thing that has happened. It's a terrible thing that any person caught up in any way in any of these school shootings should have to endure this. And it's also a terrible thing that parents, who used to feel safe that school was a "safe" environment for their children, now don't feel quite as strongly about that anymore.

This sort of thing should not happen, period. I don't believe that it's always gender-related or -targeted; as has been said, often the killings are random. I don't think it's more or less horrific if the people killed or injured - adults or children - are all male or all female or a mixture of both. Ann, you may believe that the collective "we" of society is more willing to condone this violence against females than males, but every person I have ever talked to in regard to any of these killings seems to share the same abject horror about all of them that I do. This small sampling is obviously just a tiny cog in the larger wheel of society, but I do know that we are not alone.

Kathy

Classicalla,

With all respect for your experience as a nurse, everything I know suggests that you are wrong. All men are taught from an early age to hide and ignore physical pain, all societies in the world has this rite of passage that in order to be a man the boy most learn to endure pain.
It goes from my childhood when my mother got soap in my eyes(I should stop being a baby) to bruising your knee in athletics in school, (the crying girls get sympathy, the crying boy receives ridicule) When I did my military service(mandatory for men as it happens) flagging efforts were always invariable meet with “you run, shoot, whine like girls/women/pussies. And it works, being liked to females always spur men to greater exhortation.

Women IME are rewarded for giving in too their feelings, passivity, crying it solves the problem except when you trying to evade running lava or people that doesn’t care to play the gender game.

Tolerance to pain can be trained. Which was one of my greatest discovery’s in martial arts. In the beginning I could submit simply because a blow, hold, or lock were painful, but as one of my teacher cheerfully explained: pain doesn’t HURT. This is something most men and virtually no women IME understand, but pain consist in large part of apprehension not injury. People who lacks this experience invariable gives in to this fear.
But this is the paradox, the one that can accept most pain will receive less in a fight.

If one of my friends gave you a blow to the stomach chances are you wouldn’t be able to rise again, while I could take it and laugh about it. If we randomly picked a hundred men and a hundred women of equal body mass and performered the same experiement I have no doubt whatsoever which gender would tolerate it better.

Kathy, I don't think you can know how you would feel if the murdered Amish children had all been boys, for a simple reason. What happened to the Amish girls has never happened to boys in the U.S. or western Europe. Never has a murderer ordered all the girls in a school to leave, whereupon he ordered all the boys to line up against a wall, after which he shot them. Please note that we are talking about absolutely innocent victims, children who have not deliberately "drawn fire" to themselves by, for example, throwing stones at the murderer.

You say, nevertheless, that you would have felt the same if the Amish children had all been boys. Yes, perhaps you would. We are talking about a hypothetical, all but impossible case - a school killing that killed only boys, at least five boys, after the murderer first released the girls and then lined up the boys against a wall shot them. Perhaps the sheer newness of this atrocity wouldn't have affected you at all. Perhaps you wouldn't have asked yourself why on Earth a murderer would want to kill little boys who had done nothing to tease him or attack him. Yes, perhaps you would have reacted in exactly the same way if the murdered children had been boys only. However, I firmly believe that most people would have been more shocked at the killing of boys, because of the sheer unnaturalness of sparing the girls and shooting the boys. Yes, we know that such a thing is unnatural, because, quite simply, it never happens.

I have never said that all school killings always kill girls only, or that they always kill more girls than boys. I know that is not true, of course. But I will firmly insist that there has never been a school shooting or school killing that killed five boys and not a single girl, when boys and girls were available at this school in equal numbers. And there has never been a school shooting where the boys where lined up against a wall and shot. The Amish school killings was the third time that a school killing killed at least five females and not a single male, even though males and females were available at that school in equal numbers.

I note, too, that when the murdered children are very young, the female victims tend to far outnumber the male ones. In Japan a couple of years ago, a murderer attacked a primary school and murdered many more girls than boys. The Dunblane killing, of course, left five boys dead and eleven girls. If these deaths were completely random, they at least conformed to the "normal" pattern of killing many more girls than boys, when you are murdering children. Whatever Thomas Hamilton might have been, whatever he might have done, he was "normal" in the sense that, accidentally or not, he killed many more girls than boys when he went on his ramapage.

Ann

Ann said:
I would not be.

What I am more shocked at is realising that you actually believe this to be the case.

That anyone could look at that massacre in any different way whether it was boys or girls who were killed is something that would astound me. They were children. Yes, there are countries in the world still where boy-children are valued more highly than girl-children, but thankfully these days those are not many.

You've produced no convincing evidence, Ann, for your claims that there are systematic attempts to kill off women as a gender. Yes, some serial killers focus on women. Some serial killers focus on men. This is a very, very complex issue that requires a lot of research, in particular into the psychologies of serial killers, violence in general, why more men than women appear to be violent murders, and why when women commit these apparently 'male' crimes they're vilified more than male perpetrators are. I would be far more inclined to listen to a criminologist who has specialised in this area than to your selective arguments.

That's not what bothers me most, though. What bothers me most is your assertion, time and time again, that people in general - and that includes people here - would have been more shocked if the murdered children were boys, would have been more inclined to care if they were boys, would be more worried about murder and serial killers in general when the victims are male. That's just offensive, I'm sorry to say. Everyone who's commented here on the murders of those little girls couldn't have been more appalled, from what I see.

And when they say the gender of those killed doesn't matter, you draw conclusions from that which couldn't be further from the minds of those who said it. You said:

and then you quoted LabRat's post, in which she said:

You twist this and treat it as some sort of 'evidence' that boys' deaths would have been regretted more:

I'm sorry, but at that point you crossed the line into being offensive, not just to LabRat, but also to everyone else who feels exactly the same way, including KathyM, whose reaction you also tried to 'interpret'. You have the arrogance to believe that you can tell us what our feelings and reactions mean. You have the arrogance to assert that we would react differently, more strongly, if those killed had been boys; if it had been boys lined up against the wall while the girls had been ordered to leave.

You don't know how any of us would feel. You have no right to assert that our feelings would be any different, especially when people tell you otherwise. Please don't try to tell us that you know better than we do what our reactions would be.

I'm sure you'll come back to this thread with more assertions, more statistics and so on. Your choice. I think you'll find that those who've posted here are in sympathy with your arguments that, when women are being systematically targeted, that's something we should treat just as seriously as racially-motivated crime or anti-gay crime. What people aren't sympathetic to is your use of limited and selectively-chosen data to argue that there's in general a systematic campaign to murder women and that no-one is taking it seriously, and your implication that if we don't agree with you we're part of some conspiracy to pretend it's not happening.

Just as a point of information, and these statistics are only from the US: 20 seconds on Google found me the information that, in 2005, 79% of murder victims were male (from official US Bureau of Justice statistics). Men were also in the majority as victims of all forms of violent crime except sexual assault - and in the majority by multiples. This is not a selective use of statistics: this is from official FBI records for the whole of the US.

In fact, in the US the person most likely to be the victim of violent crime is a young black male (again, officially confirmed by the US Department of Justice). Should we be arguing that there are systematic attempts in the US to commit genocide among young black guys?

The only time women outnumber men in statistics related to violent crime is assaults by intimates - this term is used to mean spouses, partners, exes. In the US, this accounts for around 13% of all violent crime. Now, that is an area where you're right to argue that women are in the majority as victims, and even more so that too little attention is devoted to the subject.

You might, Ann, care to read this article from Feminista, an online feminist journal: Women as Victims of Violent Crime .

Apologies, by the way, for focusing on US statistics here; they're the most easy to find, and no doubt more reliable than statistics for the world as a whole, given different reporting methods for different countries and also, no doubt, different levels of reporting (for example, in countries where rape may be taken less seriously than other crimes). Though I just searched on google.co.uk and found statistics from the British Crime Survey which are strikingly similar to the US ones: it is young men, not women, who are the most likely to be victims of violent crime, including murder:

I repeat what I said before: there are many questions around the subjects of violent crime and serial killers, many times more complex than you've made them appear here. I think those broader questions need to be addressed.

I understand that you firmly believe what you're arguing. You state that frequently. However, merely believing something doesn't make it true, especially in the absence of compelling evidence for the sweeping assertions, and even more so in the presence of compelling evidence against them.

You'll win more sympathy for your arguments if you focus them in areas where they really do have some merit, such as the role of gender in domestic violence, in the makeup of serial killers and violent offenders, in the treatment of violent offenders and killers by the media and the general public.

And now that this post has got so long that I don't expect anyone will read it, I'll finish.


Wendy

I read it.

Thanks for posting the link to that article, Wendy. It was rather eye-opening.

Disclaimer: I haven't read all these posts. But I think I've gotten the gist of the discussion.

Ann, you want to know what honestly shocked me the most about this news? That when the crazy guy told the men & boys to leave, they actually left! They just walked off and left those girls to the mercy of a madman. To me, that seems very wrong.

Now, I realize that in this particular circumstance these were Amish people, and they've got a famous ethic of non-violence. I can understand where they get that, I respect the way they stick to their beliefs, and I'm hesitant to argue with that.

But it's very strongly ingrained in me that adults are to protect children, not abandon them. That men/boys are to protect women/girls. If necessary, even at the cost of their own lives. So this:

is precisely backward to me. I honestly don't know where you get that idea. I don't think I've ever met anyone who thought that way. I hope I never do.

Btw, if you're looking for a culture that actively de-values women, Western Civ isn't where you ought to start looking. I'm just sayin'.

PJ

Wendy, I did read your post - every word - and I thank you for expressing so well some of my own feelings on the subject.

Ann, perhaps I didn't make my point clear in my post. To me it doesn't matter whether they were all little girls or little boys or a mixture of both. What matters to me is that it was children, period.

And regarding this...
Yes, perhaps this has never occurred to boys anywhere in the entire world - I don't know. But you prefaced that with a statement about me.

Ann, you don't know me. You don't know anything about me. Is Kathy even my real name? Where do I live? What do I think? What do I feel?

I told you that to me it was equally heinous no matter the gender, and you still assert that you don't think I truly could know. Well, my feelings and thoughts are my own, and it is my choice whether or not to share them with others, and I deeply resent that you claim to know them. And for that I think you owe me - and every other person on these boards - an apology for presuming that you could know how any of us would think or act in any given situation.

Kathy

I'm sorry to have to come back to this thread, but I've been made aware of your distortion of my comments, Ann, and like others here, I can't let that stand.

Your conclusions on the statements from me and your interpretation of them, as quoted in Wendy's post, are quite simply so bizarrely out of tune with my actual opinion that they are nonsensical to me.

It is clear that, as I suspected earlier, you are intent of distorting any facts or information to suit your bias and just as equally intent on ignoring anything that inconvienently doesn't fit.

If you wish to be so blinded by your obsession that logic and fact have no place in your arguments, that's your choice. But please don't paste that mask on my face. It won't fit.

Let me be very clear:

When I hear about violence perpetuated on women or on boys I have exactly the same feelings of outrage, grief, sadness at the insanity and waste of it all. I feel the same desperate sympathy for the family of Anthony Walker (a young man attacked in a UK park last year and killed with an axe), as I feel for the Amish families who lost their children. Just as I feel horror and sympathy for the young husband whose wife, this week, hanged herself and their two young children at home.

Like others have said, what matters to me is that children have died violently. That anyone has died violently. That's a tragedy, no matter their gender, or whatever political point you want to hang on it. I'm sorry, but I don't share your opinion, Ann, that violence against one gender should envoke more sympathy or grief over another. Violence, in all its forms, is an abomination and all its victims deserving and worthy of grief.

If you don't believe the above, Ann, but believe that, somehow, violence against women should be considered a more outrageous act than violence against men...aren't you just as guilty of the same indifference you are accusing the world of havng when it comes to women? You're just guilty of that indifference and lack of care from the opposite direction, that's all.

Oh, and just as a side issue - when you say that nothing like the Amish killings has happened to boys in the US...actually, most of the victims of the Columbine killings - boys and girls - were killed in precisely the same way as the girls at the Amish school. They were hiding beneath desks in the school library as their two killers strode around the room, shooting them at point blank range at random, as the whim took them.


LabRat

Ann, you have a seriously strange take on this. See any tabloid when a GIRL or WOMAN has been killed, stabbed, raped, the gender of the victim always the first thing you see in the article. Male victims are often referred to by occupation. In fact if you read about murder and the sex isn’t mentioned isn’t the victim by default a man?
Despite violence against men being a far larger problem, violence against women gets most of the attention. Have you wondered why that is?
My conclusion is that the entire society implicitly consider violence against women worse. Men are taught that it’s their responsibility to see that violence against women doesn’t happen, trying to put it into perspective gives them a bad conscience, its simply unmanly to compare violence against men with that of women.

Now plenty of people have decried violence against children regardless of their sex. I know intellectually that little boys and little girls have the same value, but viscerally I consider violence against the latter worse. I honestly believe most people feels the same thing.

And concerning female abortion, I assure you utopia for a man isn’t one that there are hundred men too one woman, if anything it would be the opposite.

Actually, Arawn, speaking solely about my own personal feelings, I will respectfully have to disagree with you on the second half of your sentiment. Under most circumstances, a little boy is as defenseless as a little girl is against a sexual predator or a gunman/woman or any other perpetrator of violence, and so I don't differentiate between the two. It's all horrible.

Well perhaps there comes to a point were it's becomes immaterial just how much blood you taste in your mouth, yet if I was forced to chose boys or girls, it wouldn't be girls.

But thinking about it I guess that children below a certain age are just children, equally defenseless. It's strange though; a grown man can be just as impotent before the barrels of a shotgun as a child of five.

Wendy, I do believe that there are rules even for what crimes you can commit. Most criminals commit the kind of crimes that the surrounding society recognizes, and that the members of this society, criminal or not, have learnt to think of as a "normal" part of this society.

There are other crimes that the society in question does not recognize and does not expect. These are the kinds of crimes that the members of this society will condemn most harshly. Just a day or two before the Amish girl killings, there was a case in Norway where a man murdered his three sisters. Even though Swedish television and radio didn't say anything about the ethnic origin of the man and his sisters, I concluded right away that they were almost certainly Muslim immigrants, and that the murders were a kind of honour killings. This turned out to be true, of course. The reason why I could know that the sister-murderer was not an ethnic Norwegian is that it is unthinkable for a ethnic Scandinavian man to murder his sister, let alone his three sisters. It is simply not done. It is an inhuman thing to do. In the Western world there is an absolute taboo that unconditionally prevents a man from murdering his sister, let alone executing her, honour killing style. Because we have this absolute taboo against sister-killings in western Europe and North America, only immigrants who don't really try to fit in, particularly certain Muslim immigrants, ever commit this kind of crime here.

So there is a taboo against killing your own sister in Western society, but there is no taboo against killing your own wife. Wife-killing is severely frowned upon, of course. Nobody likes it or condones it. Everybody wants the wife-killer to be punished. But when we read in the newspaper that another woman has been killed by her husband, we don't feel that a yawning chasm has opened up under our feet. We don't feel that the world has turned upside down and nothing makes sense. We are not shocked. We are sad or angry, but not shocked, and we go about our daily lives as if nothing has happened. Because wife-killing, unlike sister-killing, is a "normal" sort of crime in the Western world. We expect wife-killings to happen on a regular basis. It's a part of the world we inhabit that they do.

I'll insist that some kind of crimes don't upset us deeply because we expect them to happen. This doesn't necessarily mean that we are consciously aware of what crimes we find "normal" (like wife-killings) and what crimes we find abominable and unthinkable (like sister-killings). But when we come across crimes that we instinctively, if not consciously, know are abominable, we tend to react very strongly.

What crimes are abominable? I'd say it's those crimes that don't happen in our society. And the reason why they don't happen is, quite simply, that are abominable, if only because everybody in this society believes that they are abominable.

The reason why I decided to try to find out if young Swedish girls are killed more often than young Swedish boys was, of course, that I already suspected that this was the case. Before I managed to get my hands on the actual murder statistics, I discussed this question with several other people. Practically all of them told me I must be wrong. Why would girls be killed more often than boys? That made no sense at all.

In other words, nobody I spoke to about my suspicions about gender inequality among murdered children had noticed this surplus of girls among young murder victims themselves. Later, when I could show them facts, I met two different reactions. One reaction was to tell me I was just plain wrong. It couldn't be true that girls were killed more often than boys! The other reaction was to say that even if I was right it didn't really matter, because why would this thing matter anyway?

I said that these people weren't aware of the surplus of girls among young murder victims. But really I think they were. They were aware of having seen, read and heard about murdered young girls on TV, on the radio and in newspapers. They were also very vaguely aware that they didn't see or hear or read about murdered boy children quite as often. But they didn't worry about the fact that little girls seemed to risk being murdered just because they are girls, and they didn't wonder about why the gender of girl children would put them at risk of being murdered at all. After all, child murders are rare in Sweden. And nobody had told Swedes in general to worry or wonder about the unequal gender rates among young murder victims, so they didn't worry or wonder. And they still don't.

However, when young boys do fall victim to spectacular crimes, these people who don't believe in gender inequality among young murder victims do get upset. Because when they are faced with the murder of a boy child, they recognize this as an abominable crime in our society. The cruel, deliberate killing of a young boy is like a grown man's deliberate killing of his own sister - it means the breaking of a taboo, and therefore it is unthinkable. But the cruel, deliberate killing of a young girl is like a man's deliberate killing of his wife - it is too bad that it happens, but people do, however reluctantly, accept the fact that it does happen here.

So yes, I believe that we do know that young girls are killed more often than young boys. (At least girls are killed more often than boys in Sweden, and I very firmly believe that this is true in other countries, too.) I believe that we subconsiously recognize this gender inequality among young murder victims, but that we don't want to worry about it or discuss it. The increased murder risk for young girls is a part of our lives and our societies, and there seems to be nothing we can do about it. And we can always take comfort in the undeniable fact that when it comes to adult people in Western society, men are killed far more often than women. I have never denied that this is the case. But I'll insist that many, perhaps most, of adult male murder victims frequent dangerous places and associate with criminal people. (Many of them don't, of course.) But the younger the children, the more innocent they are. The less they have done to "deserve" their fate in any way. The victims of the very worst and most prevalent mass murder in the world today, the hundreds of thousands of female fetuses that fall victim to gender-selective abortions around the world every year, have most certainly done nothing whatsoever to bring their deaths on themselves.

Because so many people are unwilling to discuss the murder of girls, there exist several strategies for how you avoid talking about this. You can, for example, talk about other things instead and claim that girl killings are uninteresting because many more adult men than girls are murdered. You can also say that whoever wants to discuss girl murders is suggesting that there is a worldwide conspiracy going on whose aim is to kill all women on the Earth. Clearly no such conspiracy exists. It is very obvious that every society that experiences a noticable shortage of females is going to suffer because of that. Clearly no government would want to see the female population in their country dwindle while the male population grows. No, the reason why the global "gender gap" is already growing, mostly because of the situation in China and India, is that more and more people want sons for themselves instead of daughters. And the reason why they want sons instead of daughters is the same as the reason why it is more "acceptable" to kill a little girl even in the Western world than it is to kill a little boy: It is because most people tend to regard boys as more valuable than girls.

(An interesting possibility as to why people find boys more valuable than girls might in fact be that boys are better than girls at being violent, and, by extension, better at using violence to protect their families. If we really prefer boys to girls because boys are better at being violent, then that might also explain, at least partly, why adult men - particularly young adult men - get murdered so often. Aggressive young men get themselves into dangerous situations where they in fact get murdered, and non-aggressive young men get picked on and attacked by aggressive men who want to show off their impressive skills at being violent.)

Let's return to the girl killings. They are certainly even more "normal" in, say, China and India than they are in the Western world. Even here, however, the murder of girls is a moderately "normal" crime. Killing a little girl is "normal" because we know that these things happen and some men are just crazy and we know it could have been worse - it could have been a little boy who was killed instead.

As for the school killings, there appear to be three categories of them. There are those which specifically target the murderer's personal enemies. There are those which are random. And there are those which specifically target girls. There has never been a school killing which has specifically targeted a large number of boys who have not been the murderer's personal enemies. When we see the first such school killing, particularly if it targets very young boys, I firmly believe that the shock that will resound around America and Europe will make the publicity around the Amish girl killings pale in comparison.

Ann

Ann, I stopped reading your latest post when I came to this:

I repeat what three of us have already said to you:

Do not put words in our mouths. Do not put feelings in our heads. Do not attempt to interpret our reactions.

You may say that's not what you're doing, but it is. Who is this we you cite in the paragraph I've quoted? It's sure as hell not me. Nor anyone else I know who's taken part in this debate.

I repeat, again from my earlier post (most of which you've simply ignored): it's clear that you believe very strongly all this stuff that you persist with arguing. Just because you believe it doesn't make it true, nor does it mean that those who disagree with you are wrong or blinkered or uncaring about women. You want to assert what you believe? Go right ahead. But do not assume that you can know how other people on these boards think, because you've now been told several times that you're wrong in your assumptions and that it's not appreciated. And, while it was offensive the first time, your repetition of it is unacceptable.


Wendy

Let me just state that you're just point-blank wrong here. Why? Because you assume that there's #1 all crime is the same and #2 that all criminals follow a rationality that we can understand. You have no proof of this and in fact there's plenty of proof from psychologists, criminal profilers, etc otherwise--on both counts. Serial crime for instance (which is tentatively what the Amish case is close to) comes from people who are profoundly disturbed and follow a logic that most of us can't understand.

What is the definition of a psychopath for example? A person having no concern for the feelings of others & a complete disregard for any sense of social obligation.

You maybe feel otherwise or disagree with this and argue that this person feels some tie to society (and thus, feels that killing women is right because by extension "we" think it's ok), but you just don't have the expertise to prove to me that you're right even though you express your beliefs as facts (as you do in the last line).

This logic points at some value judgement behind the curtains and it freaks me out because of it. This type of logic leads to ethnic profiling and stereotyping that only increases divisions between different ethnic groups and racial tensions in any country. You're virtually saying here that in Muslim communities its more permissible for such hideous things to occur while it isn't in Scandinavian society. Otherwise why mention Muslim at all? Are there no other communities, religious sects, etc where honor killings are performed?

Tha shallow assumption harms more than it helps, because it doesn't take into consideration that it isn't just "immigrants who don't try to fit in" or just "certain _Muslim_ individuals" that do this, but a _specific_ individual or a _specific_ religious sect. Don't tie horrible things to communities without examining individuals and context, it reveals more about your prejudices and stereotypes than it does about the communities.

Overall, I don't care for your generalizations, they seem really ignorant to me of the larger complexities of the various issues you touch upon. Most respected feminist scholars nowadays repudiate such constricted view on gender as being the only thing to look at in issues of discrimination. Gender never exists only as itself--it's always irrevocably entangled with issues of race and class. Your inability to see this, in itself reveals this much. It points to your lack of awareness of your own priviledged position.

alcyone said to Ann:
Well, if you interpret "such hideous things" as specifically "honor killings" then... well, sadly, that's very true. It's a part of their culture, whether we like it or not. It's *not* a notable part of traditional Scandanavian culture.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Christian, so I believe in original sin, which means we're *all* messed up. There are good and evil people throughout all races. No one genetic group has any monopoly on any part of the morality scale. So don't be calling me racist, k?)

Cultures, however, do vary -- and sometimes quite significantly. How do you reconcile one group of people, who believe intolerance is the only sin, with another group who see intolerance as a holy duty? It's not going to work very well. Some cultures are even *gasp* better than others. Not perfect, mind you (see above paragraph). But I certainly know which one I prefer.

And I should probably stop there

PJ

That paragraph got me thinking, Ann. What crimes are considered abominable?

Anyway... when prisoners are brought to court in Canada, their names are placed on a list that the police bring with them. Beside some of those names are the letters 'PC.' That designation tells the police that certain people are to be held in 'protective custody.' These people can not be transported or held in cells with the rest of the prison population.

Now, how does someone get designated as a 'PC' prisoner? It's because this person is in more danger from their fellow inmates. For example, a police officer that has been charged with a crime would be held in protective custody. Or a person who has a mental handicap would be held in protective custody.

But the reason I'm telling you this is because one of the groups of people who are held in protective custody is those who have committed a crime that is considered so horrible that they are in danger of being killed by their fellow inmates. And who are those people? Murderers? Not necessarily. After all, being convicted of murder generally makes you feared in prison. No, the people in most danger from their fellow inmates are those who abuse minors - male or female minors. It doesn't matter which. Those people, if they aren't held in protective custody, are at a high risk of being killed in prison.

Criminals have their own rules for deciding what crimes are the most abonimable. And it isn't those who commit the most 'shocking' crimes, it's those who commit crimes against minors. I've never heard of anyone saying: 'He doesn't need to be held in protective custody because he only abused a female.' No. It makes absolutely no difference to the criminals which gender of child you abuse. If you abused a minor and you're put in the general population, you might as well make peace with your god because you aren't getting out alive.

I don't think that because a crime shocks us that we necessarily consider it more abominable. For example, because I deal with crime every day in my job, I've grown a pretty thick skin when it comes to being shocked. In fact, in that way I'm quite jaded. I basically assume mankind (and I use that term to apply to both men and women) is capable of anything.

In spite of that when I watched the World Trade Center become a pile of rubish, I was shocked. On the other hand, when I saw the bombings in London a few years later, I wasn't shocked. Infuriated. Saddened. Angered. Yes. But it wasn't shocking to me. What made the fall of the World Trade Center shocking was that it was so dramatic. But I would consider both crimes equally abominable.

So I don't think you can say that society is more accepting of a crime because they aren't adequately shocked.

Anyway, as far as violence against women is concerned... In Ontario we have a zero tolerance policy concerning domestic violence. What that means is that if the police are called to a domestic and one of the parties (usually the woman) says that her partner hit her, the police MUST lay charges - even if the complainant doesn't want charges laid. And then, once the matter goes to court, the woman can not come in and ask that the charges be withdrawn. It is easier to get assault charges withdrawn against someone in a bar fight than a man who hits his wife.

In fact, the situation has gone so far that I saw a case once where a man was charged with 'assault with a weapon' (which is a more serious offence than just simple assault) for hitting his girlfriend with a pillow. So, at least as far as Ontario is concerned, violence against women is taken more seriously than violence against men.

Just my opinion.

ML

No, it's not. In fact Islam specifically prohibits that (if we're defining 'Muslim' as adhering to Islam--as it's usually done). I know a lot of Muslims that have gripes with this incredibly ignorant perception of their religion.

I mean after all, Ann quoted pieces from the Bible that seem less than nice in itself, but we hesitate to think of Christians in that way. And when some Christian person cites God as a reason for evil things, we don't all get paranoid over our churchgoing neighbors or start thinking of Christianity as a religion that fosters hate or intolerance (and actually, plenty of people are starting to see Christianity as that--also being wrong).

These horrible things are part of _specific_ religious sects or _specific_ individuals. It's extremism is similar to that of groups like those in Waco Texas for instance and the only reason it survives in large scales has a lot to do with international politics and governance.

Thus, I would _never_ say that it's part of Muslim culture as _a whole_. Culture is much more than that.

That's like saying that violence is part of American culture as a whole, which I hear a lot in the circles I move in. Is there a lot of violence in America? Yes. Is it part of our culture? No again, it's a superficial explanation of a larger phenomena.

That's like saying that all Japanese like rice and that Mexicans all like tacos. That stupid stereotyping is just that precisely because it fails to account for context.

And it's not just that these ridiculous statements fail to account for context. It's that they trivialize entire rich cultures and their history. Most dangerous of all, they move people away from understanding and towards value judgements. I don't need to tell you what comes next. History shows it well enough.

Thank you. I'm sure that's what the American government thought about Native Americans, what the Brittish thought about Indians, what the Spanish thought about the Mayas, Aztects and Incas (among others). You have just proven my point.

And I should probably stop here.
alcyone

Alcyone, when I described honor killings, I said:

Please note that I said "certain" Muslim immigrants. I would never suggest anything so ridiculous as the idea that all, or most, Muslims commit honour killings.

When I became convinced that there is a lot of violence against women in many Muslim countries, I decided to read the Koran myself. Okay, I have a confession to make. I didn't make it all the way through, because I got bored out of my skull. I tried again - and from the beginning again, stupid me - and the same thing happened: I managed to read about two thirds of the text, and then I had just had it. But I contacted an expert on Islam at the University of Lund in southern Sweden, and he told me that when it comes to Islam's views on women, I hadn't missed much when I hadn't read the last third of the Koran.

So here is my verdict on the Koran. It is not worse than the Bible. It is shorter than the Bible, and there is only one author, one voice, speaking in the Koran. So it is much less varied than the Bible. Interestingly, I found no real hatred of women in the Koran, which I certainly found in the Bible (e.g., in Ecclesiastes and in Ezekiel). Also, the Koran really emphasizes the idea that men and women are worth the same in the eyes of God, which the Bible only mentions (Gal. 3:28) but does not emphasize. On the other hand, the Koran offers us no real female heroines, of which there are several in the Bible (Deborah, Huldah, Ruth and the Apocrypohal Judith among others). And there is nothing even remotely like the sweetly erotic Song of Solomon in the Koran. Also, the Bible does not make it explicitly permissible for a man to beat his wife if she is disobedient, which the Koran does.

All in all, though, the Koran is not worse than the Bible when it comes to its views on women. Certainly in the first two thirds of it, there is no justification of honor killings of a man's sisters in the Koran. Even so, it is a fact that honor killings of female relatives are accepted among many people in many Muslim countries.

I would like to mention that I believe that honor killings, translated as the idea that a man can have a right to kill a female member of his family of whom he disapproves, may not be an exclusively Muslim tradition. Some years ago, I listened to a radio play on Swedish radio. The play was written by an Italian playwright, and the recording that I listened was made in 1955. So the play was at least that old, and quite possibly older. In that play, a man comes upon his wife when she is being unfaithful to him, and he kills her. Now here is the interesting part. The man is arrested, and he confesses his crime right away. But guess what happens? During his trial the court decides that the man will not be punished. Why not? Well, because he has been punished enough already, seeing that his wife had been unfaithful to him, and also the poor man had had to suffer through the trauma of killing her! In other words, the members of the court in this play are saying flat out that a man has a right to kill his wife if she has been unfaithful to him, and society should not punish the husband for his deed. Doesn't that mean that the (Italian?) society in this play accepted the idea of honor killings?

But believe me, Alcyone, the first time an ethnic Swede is arrested for killing his sister because of her lewd lifestyle, that is going to make people let out a collective gasp of horror in this country. Believe me.

And ML, I think you got it right when you tried to understand what I meant when I said that some crimes are abominable to us. They are abominable precisely because they are entirely new to us, so that we don't recognize them. That is what shocks us. So, people, consider the following scenario. An armed woman comes into a primary school and orders all of the girls to leave. She then murders five of the little boys. How would we react?

Because this crime would be so shockingly new to us, I think we would see it with a special clarity. In particular, I think we would conclude that the woman murdered the little boys because she harboured a horrible, inhuman and certainly unacceptably "unwomanly" hatred of little boys. I think she would scare many people very, very much. I think she would certainly scare us much more than the man who killed the five girls in the Amish school.

What do you think, the rest of you?

Ann

I would think it would receive an equal amount of publicity. It's not the sex of the child that matters - it's the fact that they're children. You should never hurt a child, I don't care if they are a boy, a girl or a hermaphrodite.

I would be equally shocked and saddened for everyone involved if that happened.