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

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

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

Actually, Ann, domestic violence is not being ignored like it used to be. If it was, we wouldn't be hearing about these things. In the past, this type of thing was just swept under the rug. That was 'private matter' and was just not spoken of. The police would rarely do anything, and women died. That still happens, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be.

As for violence against women by men in general... We have a long way to go. Many more men have to realize that this just isn't acceptable behaviour, but how is that going to happen when there are still countries that sweep it under the rug and cover it up as if never happened. I mean there are some countries where a man can murder his wife or sister or mother and absolutely nothing will be done.

And you want to hear something else that's absolutely outrageous? Today, those lovely Amish people are trying to bury their dead. And a bunch of idiotic people are protesting the funeral! There's never an excuse for that - ever! Let these people grieve in peace.

I heard a bit about the amish shootings on the radio either yesterday or today, but didn't catch all of it. What's the story on that? And why would people protest the funerals?

I hadn't heard about the protesting, but someone else sent me a link . Looks like it's the same idiots that protest military funerals. They're protesting because the PA Governor, who has spoken out against their church, is attending the funeral. Considering that they said they'll stop their protests on this funeral if they're given airtime, it's no wonder none of the other news sites don't have anything (yet).

How tasteless and disrespectful can people get?!?

Thanks for the info.

Just one more question.

If a white guy went into a school and ordered all the white students out and ordered the black ones to line up against the wall, would anyone start discussing this man's sexual preferences? Would they speculate he had killed the black students because he was angry at God?

For that matter, if a black guy had entered a school and started selectively shooting as many white students as he could, is it even remotely possible that we would explain his actions by saying that this guy was just one big stark raving loony?

We have no problem calling a hate crime a hate crime if a person from one ethnic group selectively attacks members of another group. Would anyone ever say that a Muslim Arab had killed a number of Jews because he was heartbroken because his girlfriend had broken up with him? Or because his father used to beat himup when he was a kid?

I'm just saying that when men are selectively killing women, that is a hate crime too, and it should be described as such. After all, either it's a hate crime, or else it's just natural for men to want to kill women. Or else, perhaps, this male violence against women is just what the doctor ordered to remind all of us, men and women, that the most fundamental foundation of society is the idea that men should rule and women must obey, otherwise we'll kill them. Which interpretation do you prefer? I know what I think. This is a hate crime, it should be recognized as such and it should be punished and relentlessly fought against as such.

Ann

You mention the Marc Lépine case. His hatred against paricularly women was not ignored at all!

From here :

Julie

You are right about the Marc Lépine case, because in his case his hatred against women was too obvious to ignore. But I wonder. How much of the outrage against Lépin's deadly misogyny is left today? How many people are saying, today, that the recent case in Pennsylvania shows that we must do something against this prevailing violence against women? Judging from what I have seen so far, the girl murders have prompted people to talk mostly about the Amish community. Just remember, people, that if the Pennsylvania murderer had been driven primarily by a hatred against the Amish, why did he order all the little Amish boys out before he started shooting the girls?

Ann

Just today, Metro here in Malmö had the following headline:

Deadly violence against women increased sharply this summer

Well, the headline referred to deadly violence against women in Sweden in general, not specifically violence against women in Malmö. (I don't remember any gynecides in Malmö this summer, in fact.) But I was just saying....

Earlier this year a serial rapist was caught in northern Sweden. Everybody was shocked, because this man was such a pillar of his community. Neighbourly, friendly, helpful, active in many local organisations, popular among children, a father of two himself.... He had raped seven women between 1999 and 2006, and his attacks got more and more violent. He bit an ear off his last victim, a 51-year-old woman, and left her to die, but fortunately she was found and her life could be saved. And you know, like I said, this guy was like a pillar of society. So likable. So normal.

Ann

If you're referring to the Amish killings, Ann, that wasn't speculation. The man left suicide notes which said he was angry with God and hated himself.

Again, it was clearly stated that his act had nothing to do with the fact that his victims were Amish. He seems to have chosen that particular school simply because it was convenient - only half a mile or so from his own house and because he knew he could find young girls there.

I'm presuming that the reason no one is discussing the Amish killings in the context of wholesale violence against women is because, quite clearly, it's not the context. The killer, according to his own notes, was clearly motivated by a specific incident in his past to target young girls.

I have to say that you seem to have some other data wrong in your original post, also.

There has never been any suggestion from official sources that Thomas Hamilton chose his victims by gender. Or, indeed that he chose them at all. Eyewitness accounts have him entering the school and spraying the room with gunfire as soon as he walked in, firing indiscriminately at anything that moved. From the Public Enquiry Report into the Dunblane Shooting:

The mother theory relating to Harold Shipman is speculation, of course. One that I had actually never heard until I read your post. It could very well be true. However, what might equally be true and what seems to be the most widely held theory on his motives that I've heard is that he was motivated by nothing more than greed (he wasn't caught until he forged the will of one of his victims naming himself as beneficiary to her estate) and the power trip not only of watching his victims die, but also of observing the grief of relatives and the chaos of the immediate aftermath - watching emergency services running around etc. This, too, is only speculation, but one that fits less cosily into your conclusions, of course. In fact, we'll never know what motivated Shipman because he killed himself in prison without ever telling us.

I think it's really a little pointless to speculate on the motives of such killers. Anything and everything could be the truth there and you can pretty much find any 'facts' in the media or on the web to support any theory you care to make them fit. Unless it comes from the horse's mouth, as data it's really fairly useless.

I'm also a little dubious about your data collection methods. Which do seem to be a little selective. There are plenty of incidents of violence against males out there. Here in the UK, for example, statistically young males are more likely to be the victims of random violence than women. I think it's a mistake to rely on the media for any meaningful data on such a subject. They have their own agenda in focusing more on violence against women than men. I think this is a much more complex matter than your post suggests and that you'd have to really delve into the statistical information on both male and female violence and do some deep, solid research before you could reach anywhere near a meaningful conclusion in either direction. You may well find that your conclusions are actually correct. Equally, you could find that they aren't. But I don't think you can tell either way based on the kind of speculative, anacdotal data you have in your post.

Really though, I have to say that, personally, I don't care whether those kids in the Amish school were girls or boys. They were children, who didn't deserve their fate. It was a tragedy and an atrocity, whatever their gender.

LabRat

My point is, LabRat, that men are killing women. Yes, men are killing men, too, to be sure. Jews are killing Jews, blacks are killing blacks, whites are killing whites, and homosexual people are killing other homosexuals.

However, when non-Jews are killing Jews (or in some cases vice versa), or whites are killing blacks (or vice versa), or heterosexual people are killing homosexuals, we tend to call that hate crimes. Why don't we call it a hate crime when men are killing women?

Is it unnecessary to discuss these things? LabRat, do you honestly think that it is unnecessary or even undesirable to discuss the fact that so many of the "random" killings of people, particularly schoolchildren, mostly kill girls?

As for that Dunblane incident, are you truly telling me that it was sheer coincidence that Thomas Hamilton killed more than twice as many girls than boys, and that the most severely injured child was a girl while the only uninjured child was a boy? Yes, it may well have been reported that the killings were completely random. So do you believe that they were?

Am I crossing a line when I'm saying that we should be worried about the fact that men are using so much violence on women? Am I wrong to say that we should pay attention to the fact that the little Amish children who were killed were all girls? Am I out of line when I say that men unleash their rage specifically on girls or women when they go on a rampage, and that there is something deeply worrying about the fact that not only females but often especially helpless females (very young girls, old women) become the preferred targets when men want to vent their fury?

Today I saw an article about race crimes in Russia. Recently two nine-year-old children were attacked in separate incidents, one of them killed and the other one severely injured, in what was described as racist attacks. Guess what? The children who were attacked were both girls. I'm sure that was sheer coincidence. Then again, we all know that racist crimes are hate crimes, and as such, they are particularly vile and dangerous and should be specifically targeted by the legal system as well as by society in general. Of course, we stubbornly refuse to call gynecide committed by men by the same name, and therefore we don't have to worry about these crimes. I'm sure men's violence against women are a kind of random acts of nature, like hurricanes or flashes of lightning, and they are equally unnecessary to discuss.

Ann

I suppose all violence committed by one person against another is a "hate" crime. Nevertheless, in North American women do seem to be more often the innocent victims than men are. And, on the flip side, most of the perpetrators are men.

Why is this?

Because men are genetically wired to be more violent than women? (and please, I'm not saying all men are violent or that no women are - Stephen Lewis may be a saint while Kelly Ellard is not ).

Because as far as we have come in the last hundred years, North America is still not culturally and economically a society in which women are equal to men?

Because North American pop culture, that great teacher of us all , still too often portrays women as consumer goods - status symbols and then ultimately replaceable, disposable goods (Lois Lane, anyone )

Because girls are more likely to have been conditioned to be less assertive than boys and so are more likely to become victims of violence?

Because our North American economy is so competitve than many men are marginalized and displace their feelings of humilaition through actions against women, whether that be in misogynist pop lyrics or sexual assault or serial murders or...

Because in a lot of ways woman enable men to do these things - many women turn a blind eye, or cheer on those cultural activities that marginalize women?

Because many religions regard women as not equal to men?

Because most women are physically weaker than men and rogue (avoiding the term "loony" here ) males are subconsciously selecting the 'sure thing' (like schoolyard bullies)

Because guns are phallic symbols and well, if you're feeling sexually inadequate or impotent...?

or a combination of all of the above plus things i haven't even mentioned? And the horror continues.

... so to bring this back to a really very trivial, but mbs related topic --and thus Lois Lane is a lot more important than just a woman in Clark Kent's life.

Still, why is that men who are pyscholgically unstable are statistically far more likely to act out in the terrifying ways we've seen at Dawson or in Pennsylvannia than women?

c (who is reminded, too, of that old statistical guideline:
Once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence, thrice is a pattern )

TOC, I would like to say that I love your passion and this board would loose about a third of it’s appeal without you, so please don’t hit me too hard.

Are you aware that men’s violence against other men far outstrips men’s violence against women? If anything women gets preferential treatment.
I have yet hear a man boast about kicking the crap out of a woman, but other men many times. It’s perfectly acceptable. I don’t know a man that haven’t taken a beating.
In fact, by singling out women victims aren’t you saying that male victims of violence are less important?

This is about bullies, bullies pick their victims from those who are weaker and guess what women are generally weaker then men. It doesn’t necessarily imply misogyny.

And this is what happens in all catastrophe situations, men are conditioned to be decisive, endure pain and their bodies can take more punishment then women, consequently they tend to survive to a greater degree.

Now you might claim it’s discrimination that this sick twisted man didn’t care to molest little boys to the same degree as little girls, but I think that is overstating the case.

Just to touch on the Amish killings a bit. Sorry to get off the tangent of motives and patterns.

But do you know what's really humbling?

The fact that the Amish community is so forgiving, and is reaching out to the shooter's family, comforting them and forgiving the shooter. If only the rest of the world could be so nice.

If the evidence were clear in that direction, then I'd agree wholeheartedly with you, Ann. I'm a feminist. In my previous role as a professor, I specialised in discrimination against women. I'm the last person who'd want to argue that any kind of systematic persecution of women isn't happening.

But I don't see a widespread pattern of women being targeted by male killers. Sure, it happens sometimes. It happened this week. But your data-collection is indeed selective, as LabRat points out.

You addressed this to LabRat, but I'll answer:
Yes, I do believe that it was coincidence. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest otherwise. Did you actually read the Dunblane report LabRat pointed you to? Eyewitnesses described the shootings as completely random. Please, drop the blinkers and look at the facts of this one.

If the fact that twice as many girls as boys were murdered in Dunblane primary school is supposed to be indicative of a deliberate intent to rid the world of women, then what do you make of the Columbine High School massacre ? Twelve pupils murdered by two other pupils; eight were boys and four were girls. Is this evidence of systematic men-against-men violence?

I can be selective to, if I want, and I could choose to look at the Beltway sniper attacks of 2002. Fifteen people shot: nine men and six women. Twelve fatalities, eight men and four women. Snipers don't shoot randomly; they line up their shots. So they knew who they were shooting at, unlike Hamilton, who fired indiscriminately.

I don't see a pattern of violent men trying to eradicate the world of women, Ann, though I agree with you that some serial killers have followed that pattern. You don't mention Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper - in his case the motive was sexual violence. You don't mention Fred West , at whose house in 1994 the bodies - some dismembered - of several young women recorded as missing were discovered. The motive, again, was sexual violence. Though, in West's case, his wife Rose was also complicit.

I do see gender-related patterns that cause me grave concern and that need to be researched and prevented, but those are different patterns.

• The vast majority of murderers, especially serial killers, are men. So why is that? Why are men more likely to be violent than women, and what can be done to combat that?
• The majority of violent crime is committed by men. Again, why is that?
• When women are found guilty of horrendous crimes, they're treated as far, far worse pariahs than men, it seems. Just look at the media reaction in general to Myra Hindley and Karla Homolka , for example. Both committed the murders they were convicted of in association with men - if their version of events is true, in fact they were acting under pressure. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not; but they get the worst of the hate and desire for vengeance directed at them. How many people who recognised those two names could name their male co-accuseds?

So those are the facts that trouble me, Ann. Violence in general. Serial killers in general. That most of them are men. Concentrating selectively on the victims is, I think, looking at the problem in the wrong direction.

Yes, the murders this week are appalling and utterly horrific, and in this case the murderer was motivated by an incident in his past to choose to murder little girls. And that's very sad and very horrible. But the evidence is that it's not part of a typical pattern, and that each case of a serial killer is different. Some are motivated by sexual factors, and in those cases the victims could still be women or men - there've been serial killings for homophobic reasons. Some are motivated by anger against someone in the murderer's past. And sometimes, such as at Dunblane and apparently in Columbine, the victims are random.


Wendy

Both Wendy and Labrat are beginning to convince me that there is no specific problem of male violence against women.

Yes. I am in awe of this - I'm not so sure I could have acted in the same way. The community's compasssion and quiet dignity has been inspiring.

c.

That was not the point of my post, Ann, and I don't believe at any point I claimed you couldn't post your opinion. Of course you can. Just as I have the right to post saying I disagree with your conclusions and pointing out that you have some of your facts wrong, surely?

My point had nothing to do with your right to post a pov. The point I was making was simply this: If I wanted to trawl through the net I could find dozens of reports on random violence against males and I could then produce almost exactly the same post as you did, word for word. The only difference would be that it would prove the opposite conclusion to yours. It's simply that easy to find facts to 'prove' your pov and in essence, therefore, such data means very little in proving anything.

I have no problems with you voicing your opinion. What I have doubts about is the value of the data you're using to support your pov. I'm not claiming there is no such thing as random violence against women. Or that such violence isn't a problem. I do think that you don't do yourself or your opinion justice by using such anacdotal, speculative data. That doesn't give me confidence in your conclusions and I'd be much more impressed if your 'research' was based on something more solid than what you've presented so far.

Out the line? Of course not. Wrong? Absolutely! It is simply not a fact that in every single case of random violence involves men attacking women. Have you heard of the Columbine shootings? Just one example that utterly disproves your statement above. It is this kind of sweeping generalisation that bothers me about your conclusions. Yes, there is a problem in our world with violence against women. I've been known to be incensed by many of them. For example, one of the thing which is truly guaranteed to infuriate me is when a serial rapist is one the loose and the police response is usually to suggest that all women stay indoors after dark until he is caught. (Here's a thought: why not impose an after dark curfew on men till he's caught? After all, it's a man causing the problem, not a woman. Why should their daily lives be curtailed? :rolleyes: ) That one can keep me ranting for days whenever it turns up on TV.

So, trust me, I'm on board with the general thrust of your arguments. My problem is that I think you're devaluing your own argument by using facts and incidents which don't fit your profile of male random violence against women and twisting them or speculating about the motivations which caused them to force them to fit your theory. It would be more valuable in making your point persuasive, imo, if your research was more factually based and less speculative and your statements less sweeping and generalised. The latter never convinced me of anything and are unlikely to.

As a sidenote, I would also reiterate that I find little value in media reports of such incidents. In the last ten years, I've been behind the scenes of several events reported on by newspapers and TV media. From huge, national stories to the inconsequential. In not one instance did they get the facts correct. And I'm not talking exclusively about the big facts, I'm talking about them not even managing to get the small details right like names, dates, locations. I have learned - sometimes bitterly - to go straight to the source on something I read in the papers or see on the news before I get myself worked up about it. And, more often than not, I discover the facts aren't quite what was presented. Often by a huge margin. Whether through the agenda of the reporting source intentionally twisting the facts or just plain incompetance.

So, really, all I'm saying is, if you want to convince me of your conclusions here, then I'm likely to take you seriously far more if you bring me sources like the official Dunblane report than I will if you just cite speculative, sensationalist news stories. Course, that may just be me.

You sound astonished that I would, Ann. Frankly, I'm astonished that you would rather believe the news media than eyewitness statements and official reports! So, yes, I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to disbelieve the sworn testimonies of those who were actually there in the room with the killer during his killing spree. If I'm going to believe anyone, it's going to be them. So, no, I'm not so ready as you apparently are to discount their story. I see absolutely nothing to suggest at all that what they stated was a lie.

Your statement above implies that it is an absolute impossibility that random chance could affect the casuality outcome in a situation where a gunman steps into a room and begins spraying it with bullets, without first pausing to assess exactly who is in the room or focusing on specific targets. Which is quite clearly illogical. And, again, it just gives me the impression that you are determined to prove your own conclusions by any means whatsoever, even if it means distorting or ignoring facts and evidence which inconveniently get in the way of them.

This is going to be my last post on this one. I don't really have much of an interest in debating it and I think now that I've made my pov clear, I'll leave it at that.

LabRat

Well, you made me break my vow, Carol. But I have to respond to this because it's such a huge distortion of my first post that I'm disappointed in you. Just because I can see - based on scientific, factual evidence and logic - that we have a problem with random violence against males and females, regardless of the percentages of who gets beat up on most, :rolleyes: (it's not a contest, people, they're all victims, no matter what their gender) and can deplore all of it does not lead to an automatic conclusion that I discount violence on women exists.

Now, this really is my last post.

Absolutely, Carol. Amazing, difficult to conceive of given the tragedy they're dealing with, but an example for us all.


Wendy

This doesn't have a lot to do with the current debate, but in regards to the Amish, I read a wonderful book that was all about the Amish. It's called Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult. You get a wonderful view of what their daily lives are like. It's about a woman who is forced to live in an Amish community while preparing a defense for her Amish client. There are so many aspects of Amish life that are portrayed. Jodi Picoult is a fabulous writer. And there's a small love story on the side.

But with the recent tragedy, not too far from where I'm at actually, I understand how they can be so forgiving towards the man that just murdered members of their families. I don't think I could be so forgiving, and the fact they their entire community can...it really humbles me.

I would highly recommend any of Jodi Picoult's books, the first being The Pact. But Plain Truth was definitely my second favorite.

~Kristen

First, I need to make a few points clear. Obviously I would never suggest that men are not victims of violence, too. Also, I would never say that all men are violent, or that the world would get so much more peaceful if only women got to rule it. After all, Margaret Thatcher "ruled" Great Britain for a number of years, and that didn't make Britain more "peaceful" as far as I could see.

I will say that globally, more females than males are murdered. The only person who has ever tried to seriously address this question, Indian professor and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, wrote a paper in 1990 claiming that more than 100 million women are missing from the world, because they have been murdered or otherwise fallen victim to deadly gender discrimination. According to Professor Sen, however, in the Western world women are not killed more often than men.

I will say, too, that I strongly believe that even in the Western world, girl children are killed more often than boy children. In the late 1990s, I tried to find out about the murder rates for young boys and young girls in Sweden. I wrote to the Public Swedish Center for collecting and compiling national statistics, and I asked them to send me whatever facts they had about child murders in Sweden, broken down by age and gender. They sent me ten years of statistics about murders of Swedish boys and girls aged 0-18 years.

This is what I found, when I compiled the figures they sent me. From the age of 0 years to the age of eleven, more girls than boys are killed in Sweden. This is true for all age categories: it is true for 8-year-olds as well as for 2-year-olds, for 11-year-olds, 5-year-olds and for little babies who never got to live thorugh their first birthday. For all children up to the age of eleven, more girls than boys are killed in Sweden. Or at least this was so during the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, and I don't believe those figures have changed at all.

So how many more girls than boys are killed, then? The difference is not huge. Typically, for every two boys that are murdered, three girls meet with a similar fate.

Please remember that we are talking about the youngest, the most helpless and the most innocent victims, those who are least likely to have brought their deaths on on their own.

When it comes to the very, very youngest victims, the newborn ones, the difference in murder rates grows large. I know of about ten newborn babies who have been determined to have been murdered in Sweden. Of these ten, one was definitely a boy. (His mother testified that she had concealed her pregnancy and had decided to kill her baby as soon as it was born. She had strangled her newborn without even looking at him, and she had never known that her baby was a boy.)

Of the remaining nine murdered newborns, one was a baby whose gender was never disclosed. All the other eight ones were girls.

I put it to you that a newborn baby can be considered a human being without any characteristics at all, apart from its gender. If a mother kills her newborn, she kills a baby she doesn't know as a person at all. All she really, truly knows about her baby is its gender, provided she bothers to take a look. If eight out of ten murdered newborns are female, and the only confirmed murdered male newborn was killed by a woman who wouldn't even find out about her baby's gender, then I say that new mothers are five to ten times more likely to kill their baby girl than their baby boy. Indeed, I'd say that new mothers are extremely unlikely to kill their newborn sons at all. There seems to be an absolute taboo against killing a newborn son. But such a taboo does not exist against killing a newborn daughter. In other words, during the first few days of her existence, the simple fact that a newborn baby is female makes her a potential murder victim. If she had been a boy, and her mother had been aware of her baby's gender, the baby would not be at risk.

I might add that during the 1990s, a study showed that a hospital in India had aborted more than 5,000 female fetuses and one - one! - male one.

Let me return to the murder statistics for young people in Sweden. When the children are twelve and thirteen years old, the probability of being murdered becomes the same for boys and girls. Later, the boys overhaul the girls, and the male murder victims begin to outnumber the female ones.

As for the school killings, the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators have been male. I stongly believe that at least half, and most probably more than half, of the victims have been female. I'm sure that the only times that the perpetrators have ordered one group of students to leave and ordered another group to line up against a wall, whereupon he shot them, execution-style - well, the only two times when that has happened the students that were ordered to leave were male and the students that were lined up against the wall and shot were female.

I want to quote one of the reasons that Carol brought up for why men's violence against women continues:

Yes, Carol, that is exactly my point. I do think women play along and even quietly encourage male violence. We turn a blind eye and refuse to see a pattern. We won't raise a ruckus and demand that society and the law protect women. Why don't we?

Of course, men don't speak up against male violence either. But sometimes it happens. Last year there was a man who murdered his wife here in Sweden and who was sentenced to the minimum penalty for first degree murder, namely ten years in prison, with the prospect of being let out after six or seven years. The court ruled that the man had committed a "normal" sort of murder, not "exaggerated" or unusually cruel in any way. Well, as soon as some of the details of the murder were released, the murder actually seemed extremely cruel. A rather large group of Swedish men protested. They wouldn't accept that the law would let off a man so lightly after he had deliberately and most thoroughly murdered his wife. These men insisted that it was absolutely unacceptable that the law should consider it in any way "normal" for a man to act like that. "We men are better than that!" these men said. "We demand that society expects all men to be better than that!"

So how about it, people? Why not speak up against male violence?

Finally, Arawn. You are absolutely right about this:

No, Arawn, male victims are not less important than female ones. So why not speak up against violence in the first place, all violence, whether it is committed by men or by women?

But I'll still insist that it gets to me in a special way that girl children are killed more often than boy children - which they are, I insist - and when the lives of girls and women are seen as cheaper and less valuable than the lives of boys and men.

Ann

Further on the funerals... this sickens me.

Hold whatever views you like, but do not use the funerals of little girls to promote your cause. If any of these kids was even aware of what homosexuality is, I'd be amazed.

I'm not surprised Phelps got his slot on the local radio - I'm sure people would do anything to keep him and his nutjobs away from those funerals. But that's disgusting tactics.


Wendy

I agree Wendy. I'm speechless. But what really hit me about the article was this:

How dare they? What do they know about the Amish and their beliefs? And no one deserves what happened in that schoolhouse, regardless of who they are! I just don't understand who would EVER want to disrupt a funeral for their own agenda. If anything, they are hurting their cause. Whatever they have to say will be overshadowed by how they got on the radio in the first place. But seriously, is nothing sacred anymore?

~Kristen
(can't even begin to describe the anger!)

Yes, all of it gets you steamed up in different ways, doesn't it? The comments against the Amish and the 'they've brought it on themselves' offensive slander, the attempt to use the funerals as a political football, the blackmail, or that they're now getting an hour's free airtime to vent their hate?

As a Norwegian journalist friend of mine reminded me, this Fred Phelps is the same person who pronounced that the Swedish tsunami was God's punishment for Sweden's tolerance of homosexuality.

I know and respect the fact that some members of these MBs have strong anti-gay views; that's their business and they're entitled to their opinions and I'm not criticising that. But this guy... he makes me sick.


Wendy

To boil this down to "men kill women because their lives are seen as less valuable in society" seems to me to be really simplistic. I don't argue that there is a value judgement involved, as much as there is against races within the fabric of American society at least (I don't feel comfortable generalizing further than this), but the issue is much, much deeper than that.

Saying such a thing and accepting it unconditionally obscures the complex processes through which people are socialized and can suffer from mental illness and instability, a process that is a mix of the environmental factors (both immeadiate and otherwise) and biological predisposition. No, that doesn't excuse violence, but it complicates the "root" of it because not every ******* who thinks he's better than women takes a gun and blows away little girls. The line has to be drawn somewhere, because, at least to me, the two are not the same.

Not to mention that the A=B formula assumes that hate crimes against women will stop if we manage to change society's views on women as less. So then erasing all difference we can hope for the same deaths from violence that men suffer. I'm not sure if that pleases me all that much.

Not sure I'm interpreting this point as you intended it, Aria, (those missing words and that A=B formula reference:) ), but I'm going to comment anyway.

I'm more optimistic about the long term possibilites of changing attitudes towards violence against women (and towards men too.) at least here in Canada. Just as attitudes to smoking have changed and driving after drinking have, so too will the tolerance of violence.

For example, spanking of children is no longer condoned, bullying is taken far more seriously by parents and by schools, It's no longer legal to beat your wife, the death penalty has been abolished, not to mention that there hasn't been a public execution in well over a century. As well, it's not just women now who are speaking against the violence that is still so prevalent in pop culture.

Nevertheless, changes of these sorts are slow to happen, and these days it can seem like we've plateaued in our climb toward that goal. But it does begin with a culture which demonstrates that is does value men and women equally.

Nor do I believe that this will mean female violence will reach the same level as male violence. (although I can't support that belief with logic:)

(btw I've focused my comments on the issue of violence against women which is the issue that Ann orginally raised. This doesn't mean I'm not concerned with man/man violence.)

There's a small flaw with speaking out against specific violence. Sure, the world will react, people will be apalled and attempt to stop it, people will make protests such as these posts.

But all the spotlights in the world won't minimize it. The people doing this are still sick, insane, psychopaths, or just mental. They have issues, imagined (or even real) issues with the type of people that they commit the violence against. It's a mental wall between what's right and their own perceptions. It's not something you can deal with rationally.

Each of the people were brought up in the same society we were. Most grew up with the same moral code. We know there's no excuse for their behavior, but they create excuses. Excuses that we cannot understand, nor could we sway their minds without heavy drugs and counselling. Which, because of their particular psychoses, may be hard to detect until the short fuse is lit. In many cases, the words heard from the people who knew them are "(S)He seemed so nice. Wouldn't hurt a fly. I can't believe that (s)he did it."

Am I making excuses? No. Do I understand? Not fully. But sometimes loud noise is not the right fix.

I don't think there's been an explosion of violence lately. There's probably less than before. The difference between now and 50, 100, 400 years ago is collection methods, the media, and how fast news can spread across the globe. It's a small world after all.

This Westboro Baptist Church, is it for real?
It says in the article that it has 70 members, but aren't they really in it for the attention or money or something?

It's seem rather strange that they would believe that disrupting funerals for fallen soldiers or murdered schoolgirls would make anyone inclined to oppose homosexuality.

My point went along with Karen's in that violence is not rational. Pedophiles, domestic abusers, murderers, etc. are not just people who value their victims less, they are fundamentally damaged people at a much, much deeper level.

Sure we can condone violence all day, but that won't change that the person next door to you might have a bad day and decide to get a gun at wallmart and use it on some unsuspecting innocents. And nothing can stop it, not even an egalitarian society where those innocents are worth as much as their killer.

I really don't understand how people accept simple explanations of violence or why people think they can possibly understand what lies at bottom. Human beings just aren't that simple. For most of us the reasons behind these horrible things are inaccessible and maybe it's better that way.

On the other hand, I'm sure that pretending that there's a clear cut answer--something concrete and simple helps a lot of people sleep better at night. When you blame society and dream of utopia being achievable it becomes a lot easier to trust your neighbors.

TOC,
Then why do you make a bigger thing out men’s violence against women(I really hate that term) then violence in general? In Sweden, violent crime targets men in about 70 percent of the cases. The more severe the abuse, the likelier it is that the victim is male.

If you are referring to violent crime, why should I need to? No one I know would say assault or murder is a acceptable and I certainly don’t think so. I see no reason why anyone would think otherwise. But if you like, I hereby declare that killing or assaulting men or women is a bad thing. Satisfied?
Actually I think it’s far worse when people who can’t defend themselves, like women and children are abused but that is most probably the social conditioning I received as a man. Intellectually I know that all life have equal value.

Concerning violence in general it’s a little more complicated, as someone who has practiced martial art for a large part of my life, I enjoy fighting, the bruises and the pain. It’s exhilarating and good exercise too. But I think this as even less to do with violent crime then video games.

That you strongly believe something doesn’t make it so. But even if it was so, it doesn’t necessarily mean that misogyny is the reason. Men are physically and psychologically better equipped to deal with extreme situations. See boats that sinks for example, men tends to survive in a far greater degree.

Depends. They believe in what they say. The church is mostly all from one family, with a few outsiders. Most of the people who used to be outsiders have married into the family. Some information on who they are and what they do can be found here (yay, wiki) (Warning: contains foul language, crudity, and general stupidity -- quotes from WBC).

Frankly, I think they're an idiotic bunch of extremist kooks who needs a 2x4 of reality knocked up against their heads.

I'm not sure that's where I was going exactly.

It's a very complex issue, and certainly we're not able to either identify or control the behaviour of violent psychopaths, whichever gender.

Nevertheless, social values do change, have changed over the centuries. In Canada, it's easier, safer to be a woman in 2006 than what it was for my mother and my grandmother. But I suspect that's less true in those places where "honour killings" still occur, for example. Nevertheless, I know enough history to be aware that violent control of women was once part of our culture too.

So, yes, I do believe that social conditioning can influence behviour. But, yes, also, i have no clue how you predict or control for the random violence of the very small percentage of psychopaths out there or those tragic individuals whose brain chemistry suddenly turns them to irrational acts of violence .

c.
edit: btw, for people in Ontario, TVO is looking at this topic on "The Agenda" right now.

perhaps I shouldn't have laughed reading that article, but seriously were do this kind of people come from?

They are apperantly allowed to raise children. America most be a scary place.

Arawn, I do admit I may be wrong here, but I get the impression that men kill women because they want to kill them, but they kill other men more accidentally, because they wanted to "beat the crap out of the other guy" and show off. I do believe that most men who fall victim to violence are brought to the hospital and survive, because it was not the perpetrator's intention to necessarily kill them. I do believe that when men severely attack women they fully intend to really kill them, and most of the severely attacked women die, too, because the killers made sure that they did. I see a hatred here that is different from the "showing off" that leads men to attack other men. Let me return to the school killings. Has anyone heard of a case where a man on a rampage ordered all the women - better yet, all the young girls - to leave, whereupon he lined up all the men against a wall and shot them, execution-style? Has anyone heard of something like that?

I'll keep insisting that some men feel a special hatred against women that makes them put a very special effort into killing women, such as lining them up against a wall and shooting them, execution-style. Sweden's worst rampaging mass murderer ever, Mattias Flink, was motivated by his need to kill women. His girlfriend had just left him, and Flink, a military man, got his military rifle and climbed up a tree. He then waited until a group of six young women came by. He shot them, killing five and wounding the sixth one. Everybody in the vicinity fled, but after a while, a male cyclist dared to approach. Flink shot and killed him, and later, a passing male pedestrian met with the same fate. But I'll insist that if either of these two men had passed before Flink had shot the women, the men would not have been attacked. Afterwards, relatively little was made of the fact that Flink had been motivated by his need to kill women.

Tommy Möller, a researcher from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden who has studied the effects of steroids, the favorite drug of so many athletes, was invited to our school to lecture on the effects of steroids on the human body and mind. In his lecture, Möller specifically highlighted the lack of control and explosive rage that male steroid users can experience. According to Möller, many of the most gruesome attacks on women in Sweden in later years have been committed by men on steroid highs. More girlfriends have been killed by men on steroids, more deliberate stalkings of women leading up to murders are taking place, and there are more random attacks on females. According to Möller, steroid use among men has increased the deadly attacks on females more than it has increased the deadly attacks on other men. Personally I conclude that this is because the steroids allow some men to give a free rein to their hatred of women. But their feelings towards other men don't change much, since these men don't normally hate other men in the first place. Mattias Flink, the man who wouldn't shoot at anyone until he got the chance to kill a whole group of young women, was on steroids.

So I'll insist that there is a special male rage directed against women, and even though I'm sure that it is only a small group of men who feel such a rage, it worries me that the rest of society doesn't do more to try to stop them. Why do we encourage boys to be strong, assertive, excessively male and, if need be, violent? Because I think we do. I'm old enough to remember the seventies very well, and I do think boys were raised to be much less "macho" back then. And six-year-old girls were not dressed up to try to be Paris Hilton.

Also, I firmly believe that we all, collectively, accept the idea that men are simply a bit more valuable than women. Men deserve more money and better service. A study here in Sweden found that doctors tend to prescribe more effecient and more expensive drugs to their male patients than to their female ones.

And really, to me the heart of the matter of my feminism is this: It's the idea that women and girls are not worth as much as men, so that their lives are cheaper. So that it's more okay to, well, squander them. There is a worldwide shortage of women, because more women than men have been murdered worldwide, and that means just this: that women's lives are worth less than men's. If girl children are killed more often than boy children even in the West, then that must reflect an idea even in the West that girl children are worth less than boy children. If even a handful of new mothers will kill their newborn baby because she is a girl, but possibly not a single new mother will kill her newborn son if she is aware of his gender, then girls are worth less than boys even in the West. And if even a relatively small number of men are burning with hatred against women and girls just because women and girls are female, and if they murder females because of their hatred and society won't do its utmost to stop these men's murderous misogyny, then that, too, reflects the idea that women aren't really that valuable. We don't need each and every woman, we can do well without some of them.

You know what I'm actually afraid of? I fear that with the new technology that makes it ever easier to learn about the gender of the fetus, and with the ever simpler and safer ways to have your own home abortion, we are going to see an epidemic of girl killings like never before. No, it's not going to happen from one day to another, of course. It is going to be a slow thing, something everybody will get used to ever so slowly. But I fear that we are going to get ever more used to the idea that it is kind of unnecessary to have a daughter when you can have a son instead. I fear, therefore, that the world's population of female humans will dwindle, while at the same time the world's population of human males will grow, perhaps rapidly. It goes without saying, of course, that the really severe shortages of women will be found in countries like China and India (where girl killings on a large scale are already happening) long before it starts really happen in the West.

What will such a shortage of women lead to? In my opinion, it will lead to more global unrest, more wars, as men fight for the right to have no daughters but nevertheless have wives - or female sex slaves, rather - for themselves and for their sons. And women will be turned into slaves, into livestock, into cattle, into being utterly devoid of any human rights. Women will be bought and sold, kidnapped and traded, used as sex slaves and as the producers of male offspring for their owners until they outlive their usefulness and their owners have them put down like cattle.

Okay, Arawn, that is what I ultimately fear will happen. This is what I can see happening in the future, when I find that even today, girl children are killed more often than boy children and this is neither recognized nor considered a problem. And I see these future horrors happening when gynecide and misogyny are thought of as individual idiosyncracies rather than as a problem that concerns us all.

Ann

Wow - is there a law against kooks being allowed to procreate in other countries? Who gets to decide if they're "fit for parenthood"? If we tried that here the ACLU would really freak out.

That's the drawback of an open society, I suppose. If I'm allowed to have my own beliefs, then so are all the nutjobs. I don't think that particular problem (extremists allowed to walk the streets with impunity) applies only to America. If it did, Theo van Gogh and countless others would still be alive.

Sue (having a kneejerk reaction to generalizations - sorry if I offended anyone)

You'd be surprised at the whack jobs all over the world even in "safe" countries.

I remember for instance, hearing about the Japanese dude that went to France (was it?) and got a crush on some lady and then killed and ate her. Not to mention that German dude who struck a deal with another for the same thing.

Sick people are everywhere. I just think the American media is more overzealous in covering that stuff.

Be scared of what you DON'T know about.

Sue, I said raise, not procreate, I suppose that was harsh, but it just angers me when children are raised on a steady diet of hate, chances are that this will be what their lives centre on, though no fault of theirs, and I think they deserve better.

Did you read the Wiki article? This community is a couple of intermarried families that lives in a little world of their own behind concrete walls. The social security did threaten to take the children from them if they took them to any more rallies.

And no it’s not so much that there are cooks it’s when you let them organize sects, and separate themselves from the real world it starting to get dangerous. This is the stuff Waco was made of.

Alcyone,
It depends on what you mean by sick. Violent crime is worse in the US then in any other industrialized country by far. Both absolutely and proportionally. I assure you the European press doesn’t pass up opportunities to write about cannibals or school massacres given the opportunity. In fact some tabloid press, like in say England would most likely run a series exposing all the dirty Amish secrets just about now if it happened there.

Well first I was refering to specific crime we're talking about, which is different from the "violent crimes" that most often occur and inflate the US crime rate. Most of those occur in underpriviledged areas and these crimes are part of larger issues more blatantly related to US history and context. So while it's also "violent crime," it's not the same thing.

That said, the American media machine I believe has more to gain from the widespread panic for a variety of political reasons. I don't think it's the same abroad (although media machines are similar, I'll concede that), but media studies is not my field. While I lived abroad, I remember a case of some woman going out and stabbing people randomly and that got nowhere near the same attention there as some other random crimes have gotten here.

*shrug*

TOC, you mentioned that infant girls are killed far more often than boys. While I can't speak to why that is in Sweden, in most of the third world it is the boy that carries on the family name. So boys are more valued than girls. In China with the one child policy, almost all adoptees are girls while murdered infants tend to be girls. It's rare to find a family with only a girl child. If girls carried on the family name, I'm sure the statistics would reverse.

In many parts of the world, women are considered subhuman, such as in the Middle East. Only recently have women successfully fought for things like the right to vote or to have the right of education.

Much of the violence against men also goes unreported. Also there is a significant lack of support programs for men in case of violence against them. I read an interesting book written by a former male member of the National Organization for Women board of directors, Warren Farrell, called "The Myth of Male Power: Why Men are the Disposable Sex". It's quite a fascinating read. And he writes in a way that doesn't discount feminism at all seeing that he was a member of NOW. His emphasis is that the media's and government's focus is on women victims, almost ignoring the victimization of men.

Here's a link to it on Amazon:
The Myth of Male Power

There has been a lot said, and I don't know that I can really add anything esle, but I do have a couple of things to say.

Yes, Ann, I have to agree. When an man is selectively killing women and only women, it can be considered a hate crime. If it's random then I don't believe that's necessarily true.
~~

Unfortunately men tend to be much more angry than women - all that testosterone. But crimes committed because of race, ethnicity, or religion are also crimes of anger - also mostly committed (as most crimes are) by men. There aren't very many women serial killers are there? It's also a crime of anger. And rape, the violent kind, is also a crime of anger and is also usually committed by men. That having been said, that doesn't mean all those crimes are against women. There are also many crimes against men. And women do commit some of those crimes.

I like what Wendy said:

But I think I understand where Ann is coming from. She is concerned about the specific instances of violence by men against women.
~~

Well said, Wendy
~~~

Arawn said...
Arawn, as a nurse, I've got to say that this isn't completely true. Men may be able to endure physical activity longer, probably don't get hurt as easily which is what you may mean by them being able to take more 'punishment', and can deal with 'extreme' situations better, but I can you tell that they don't endure physical pain better. Just ain't true. I've just seen too many instances of men in pain and women in pain. Women endure it better. I think most medical folks would agree. There was one study that disagreed with what I say, but I'm going by personal experience, and I've been a nurse for a long time.
~~~

Yes, and since the funerals involve the Amish, and they don't believe in homosexuality, it really makes no sense, does it? And I'd like to know how those radicals can even call themselves Christians. As a Christian, I have to say that isn't very Christian-like at all. They are loony and there's a place waiting for them in, well, you know...
~~

Yes, Ann, it seems I have. But I can't remember the specific instance.
~~

I'm not so sure about this. Many hispanic cultures give their children a double last name - of course the father's name goes first.

~~~

Very interesting discussion.


Did I really say I was just going to say a couple of things? Nah... not possible...

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.

Quite a lot probably, considering that women rarely commit murder and even more rarely kill strangers.
I think the public outrage would be just about the same if it was boys, girls, or a combination thereof, even though some talk shows probably would bring up shrinks that would analyze what issues she had with the male gender.

Really if a man decide to molest children, do you find it weirder that he target girls then boys?

I think you are confusing what people find acceptable to what they expect.
People expects murderers to be men because they overwhelmingly are, so the male sex of a perpetrator gets little attention, which is completly different from finding the act itself acceptable.

On this one, you might be right, Ann, but not for the reason you're arguing. I agree with Arawn: it's because women are not seen as being killers - and, statistically, they're far less likely to be than men.

As I said many, many posts up this thread, this scenario would gain attention because of the gender of the killer - because when women are revealed to be guilty of this sort of crime they're reviled far more than men are.

I mentioned before people like Myra Hindley , Rosemary West and Karla Homolka . Other notorious women killers include Kristin Gilbert , Carol Bundy , Beverley Allitt , a nurse suffering from Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy, and Mary Bell , who as a child killed children younger than she was - and, though she's now in middle age and was given a new identity, was exposed a few years ago and her daughter hounded by the press. It will be interesting to see if the then-children who murdered James Bulger face similar treatment in later years - they have also now been released and given new identities.

Many of these women - not all, of course - worked with male partners. Most of the time, while the women's names are easy to remember, their fellow killers are less so. Yes, there's more interest paid in women who kill - and more vitriol directed at them - because society doesn't expect killers to be women. Society expects women to be nurturers and providers - whether or not that's either a fair or accurate representation, or whether it's actually true that women are naturally less violent than men. Is that nature or nurture, in any case?

So that's why, Ann, people would be more shocked by your scenario - not because the victims are boys but because the killer is a woman. That's what's different.


Wendy

Wendy, you and the others who have had issues with me have had many good points. I concede many of them. Yes, more adult males than adult females are killed in the U.S.A., in Sweden and in the West in general. Many more adult males than adult females are killed here, in fact. And yes, most murderers are males, though there are certainly female murderers, too. And yes, there are female mass murderers as well as male mass murderers. And yes, some mass murderers "specialize" in killing men, and some mass murderers specialize in killing women. I concede all of this. But this is not what I wanted to discuss.

I was trying to discuss the following questions:

1) When children are murdered, even in the West, more girls than boys are killed. Should we acknowledge this fact in the first place? And should we consider it a problem?

In my opinion, it is definitely a problem. In my opinion, there is something particularly insidious about killing the very youngest. When you kill children, you rob them of all of their lives. You are not giving them a chance to be part of society at all, or to experience any sort of adulthood, and everything that goes with that.

Killing children is always a specific problem. But if you specifically kill girl children, I think the problem becomes infinitely worse. Because if you specifically kill children because of their gender, then their gender becomes the reason - the only reason - for why they are robbed of all of their lives. Do you agree with me that this is a problem?

First of all, though, do you believe me when I say that more girl children than boy children are killed? That would be interesting to know. Second, if you believe me, do you think that such a steady surplus of girls among murdered children is a problem? Or is the gender of the murdered children unimportant? Is it only the age of the murdered children that matters - the fact that they are children in the first place?

2) I'm also saying that there is a worldwide shortage of women, because more women than men are murdered in the world. The gender balance in certain countries, particularly India and China, is already shifting to an ever-increasing shortage of women and an ever-increasing surplus of men. The most important reason why we see such a gender imbalance in these countries is that female fetuses are selectively aborted on a very large (and possibly growing) scale. Is this a problem for us in the West? Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't. However, could the problem come to us? People, remember that the ever-improving medical technology is giving us ever-improving methods of finding out the gender of the fetus very early in the mother's pregnancy. Also, we are undoubtedly going to see ever-improving and ever safer ways of having your own abortion at home. It will become easy and tempting to have an abortion if the child you are carrying turns out to have the "wrong" gender.

Not only that. Personally, I believe that within ten or twenty years, it may be possible to "choose" your baby's gender right from the start, provided it is a planned pregnancy and you take the necessary steps. You can decide if you want to have a boy or a girl, and then you can see to it that you get what you wanted. Are we going to have boys and girls in equal numbers when the parents can choose the gender of their children? And will it matter if we don't?

About ten years ago, I heard about a fertility clinic which claimed it could help parents have children with a preferred gender. (It was probably a case of in vitro fertilization, where it might have been possible to know the gender of the fertilized eggs.) Anyway, a representative of this clinic said that when people who were not from the West visited the clinic, all of them wanted a son. Perhaps more interestingly, he also said that when people from the West came to the clinic, about 70% of them wanted a son.

So what do you think? When it becomes possible to choose the sex of your baby, are people going to have as many daughters as they have sons? Or is there going to be a worldwide shortage of women that is going to create international tension, civil wars and various conflicts? Is the rest of the world going to suffer from a shortage of women, while we in the West are going to be unaffected? Or can our Western society handle a noticable gender imbalance? What do you think?

3) I have also tried to discuss the existence of a specific hatred against women and girls, leading to a surplus of women and girls as victims of rampages. To me, this question is particularly interesting when seen in the context of girl killings in general. It was, of course, the Amish girl killings that prompted me to start this discussion in the first place. Perhaps it is not a good thing to be stuck on this particular incident, as I would like to discuss this question as a broader topic.

These are the questions I wanted to discuss. I guess I myself veered off-topic when I concentrated too much on the Amish girl killings, though I still find them extremely interesting. Similarly, I got completely off topic when I challenged a few of you personally about your personal views. Since I'm trying to discuss what entire populations tend to think about these questions, it doesn't matter what a few individuals think - not to mention the obvious fact that I have no way whatsoever to know what any of you are thinking.

Anyway, I have no reason at all to think that the members of these boards have anything against girl children. Rodstewfan posted a poll some time ago, where she asked the members here if they want Lois and Clark to have a son or a daughter. As of today, 59 people have taken the poll. 31 of them want Lois and Clark to have a daughter and 28 want them to have a son.

Even so, I still think that many of those who have commented here have avoided the question. Is there a surplus of girls among murdered children, and if so, is it a problem? And does it suggest that we could be facing worse problems in the future, where the killing of girls on a large scale (gender-selective abortions) is going to totally change the makeup of our populations?

Ann

Ann, could you link to a source that claim this? Before you listed ten cases of killed children in Sweden over a thirty years period, even if your statistics are correct, that is a rather small sample to extrapolate to the entire Western world. In fact I doubt you could get statistic significance for Sweden.

AFAIK males have a higher risk of death throughout all age category’s. Whether they are murdered less often in the industrial world I don’t know, but I doubt it.

I don’t think you will find anyone that believe the killing of children is not a problem.

Everyone I know would find that bizarre. Most seem to prefer a mix of children. There is always more men born then women, even without manipulation. Personally I think that it should adjust itself automatically, if there is a shortage of women in India or China shouldn’t it be more interesting to have daughters?

Actually, this is not a fact, at least in the US. First glance at the FBI statistics for 2005, more boys are killed than girls . The only age range that this is not true is 9-12, and then the numbers are only 2 different. While wives/girlfriends are killed more t...hters, brothers more often than sisters. In 2004 , the age group where more girls than boys were killed was 5-8. 2003 (xls file), 5-8 were 41 for each gender, but again, more boys than girls killed.

Canada: Hopefully I found the right statistics. 0-11, girls outnumbered the boys in 2001 and 2003 by 7 and 5, respectively. 12-17, it's always more boys than girls.

I can't find the UK's very easily, but someone else can take a crack at it.

That is an interesting point, I'll admit. Demography is hugely important in the long run but it's hard to see the forest for the trees. I think that China and India are setting themselves up for a *major* problem, with potentially disasterous consequences. China's "one child" policy really doesn't help, though I suppose in the long run it will decrease the population, if everyone chooses a son over a daughter -- and it's my understanding that a *lot* of them are doing so.

In the longer run -- a generation or two out -- I think sanity would return. But in the meantime, there's a lot of guys who can't get laid and that does tend to bother them.

I do believe that in Muslim/Arab culture, a son is expected to serve the older generation of his family -- I worked with a guy from Iraq and he was explaining it to me. When the uncle needs a car, Raad bought it for him. When dad's depressed, he calls Raad, who then sets up the doctor's appointment. There's a lot admirable about this; don't get me wrong. But I suspect there's a perception that daughters get married and leave -- so if you want someone to boss around when you're old, you'd better have a few sons.

Speaking of which, I do know that "Muslim" culture varies to some degree from population to population -- even family to family. I consider myself a full part of Western culture, and I think of you guys the same way, but obviously there's a variation in our beliefs. So what's in the Koran is important but not the whole story. I mean, Christianity is hardly monolithic, why should Islam be?

Part of the trouble, of course, is that the peaceful decent Muslims don't get into the papers; the excitable ones who kill people do. I suppose I'll leave that argument there

I'll have to re-read Ecclesiastes It was a very cynical book, but I didn't specifically notice anti-woman venom.

Okay, I need to go to bed now.

PJ
ps. speaking for just a second as an admin -- this is a fairly explosive topic, and on some boards it would long since have devolved into flames. I think y'all are doing a great job of keeping things civil.

Karen, it wouldn't surprise me too much if more boys than girls are killed in the United States. I distinctly remember a bit of statistics that cause a sensation several years ago, probably in the late eighties or the early nineties. It was found that black males in Harlem had a shorter life expectancy than men in Bangladesh. As far as I can remember the figures, a man in Bangladesh could look forward to an average life span of, perhaps, 53 years. A woman in Bangladesh would on average live for a somewhat shorter time, perhaps 51 years. A black man in Harlem would live for about as long as a woman in Bangladesh, and not as long as a man in Bangladesh. A black woman in Harlem, however, would live for about 69 years, fifteen to twenty years longer than a black man in Harlem. That is a huge difference.

It could be than young men, including boys, still fall victim to a prevalent gang culture in certain parts of the U.S.A., which causes more boys than girls to be murdered in the U.S.A.

Ann

That could be true, but that wouldn't be true for the Canada statistics. I'll have to look up other countries tomorrow. I'm not sure I'll be able to find the UK's; I can find other statistics, but not the exact ones I'm looking for. I'll have to try other countries while I'm at it.

If anyone knows exactly what sites to go to (for instance, I knew the FBI would have the pertinent US statistics), can you point me in the right direction? Thanks.

Life expectancy, though, is far from the same thing as 'homicide expectancy'. Many things affect life expectancy - and 'average' is a very misleading concept when it comes to age, since it generally refers to the mean as opposed to mode and doesn't represent a 'typical' life expectancy.

For example, in the UK in the eighteenth century average life expectancy for women was, I think, late thirties or early forties. Does that mean that most women died around that age? No. It means that there was a high infant mortality rate, which dragged down 'average' life expectancy. (Similar causes dragged down average life expectancy for men).

It's extremely difficult to obtain international murder statistics of any kind, let alone with a breakdown by gender. If you were able to obtain reliable international statistics to prove your assertion that more women are killed internationally annually than men, or more girls killed than boys, Ann, I would be astounded. I'm used to this kind of research; I was a university professor for 16 years. I routinely looked up statistical information and assessed its reliability. There is no reliable international data on this subject. The United Nations, the CIA, the top international university criminology and statistics departments and national government statistics wings all say the same thing.

It's possible to look up individual countries, though there in some cases data are lacking. The country with the highest murder rate per capita is Colombia. Try finding a breakdown by gender there. I couldn't. There, murder and other violent crime is largely associated with the cocaine industry and gang violence. They don't care whether the victims are male or female, believe me - I've talked with Colombian refugees, and with people who've worked with trade unions in the education sector in Colombia.

The country with the second-highest murder rate per capita is South Africa. The closest I can get to official statistics for that country is a report for the Medical Research Council of South Africa.

It's clear from this report - and you have to read it carefully, because death by homicide is considered as a proportion of all deaths by unnatural causes - that many more men than women per annum are murdered in South Africa.

I've already cited statistics for the UK. Without quoting them here, I'll add that statistics for Australia pretty much match what we've already seen for the US, UK and Canada.

China may well be a special case, given the one-child policy. Again, I'd like to see statistics there - but I bet you can't get them, because killings of newborn children, where they occur, will be covered up wherever possible.

Overall, Ann, I can't see that you can actually prove your assertion that internationally more women/girls are murdered than men/boys. No-one's saying that the killing of women is not a serious issue. What we are saying is that we can't find hard, compelling evidence for your argument that there is systematic selection of women or girls for murder and that it's happening worldwide.


Wendy

Just thought I'd quote this from Nwe York Times, October 16, 2006:

Ann

Ann, you're quoting someone's personal opinion to back up your assertion. This is not proof. I quite agree that violence against anyone is wrong, that violence against women is wrong and specifically worse, and that violence against children is evil and heinous in the most specific sense. Children are, by nature, defenseless against adults or older children, so we as adults must do our best to protect them from it.

But that still doesn't add up to a world-wide conspiracy to kill females. I think you've allowed a just cause (opposing violence against women) to overcome your logical thinking and take over your emotional centers, not to mention your writing.

I agree that violence directed against women is wrong, period. I do not agree that women all over the world are somehow targets for the other gender. If we're talking about violence against children, let's not forget Susan Smith, who drowned her two pre-school children by running her car into a lake with them strapped in their car seats. Or the woman in Houston who drowned her four children in the bathtub one by one. And they're not the only examples we could choose.

Violence is not an exclusively male domain. All people are inherently evil, and unless we control our violent impulses, we are all capable of committing horribly violent acts. I don't think we can stop the hate, but I think we can significantly reduce the violence in our cultures. Maybe we should focus on that instead.

Terry, the only thing I was trying to prove is that more people than just me think that violence against women is a specific problem and that we ought to be more shocked at this problem than we are. That's all I was saying.

Ann

I've always been taught that people are inherently good, and that those who are bad choose to be so. It's all a matter of opinion, I guess.

I need to repeat, for the record, that I believe that there can never be a world-wide conspiracy to kill females. The way I interpret the word, a conspiracy to do something is a hidden plan to do something to reach a certain goal. Moreover, many people must be in on this plan and work together to reach its goal. In Nazi Germany, there was certainly a plan, hidden or not, to kill as many Jews as possible, preferably all Jews, and much or most of Nazi German society cooperated to make the mass murdering of Jews possible. But there can never be a world-wide plan to kill all females. Never. That is a ridiculous idea. If all women were killed, all men would have to go without a female sex partner. Would all men want that? Would most men want that? The answer is too obvious.

Moreover, if all women were killed, humanity would quickly become extinct. Would most people want that? Again, the answer is simply too obvious.

So I repeat, there is no general conspiracy to kill as many women as possible. There never can be. Every time a female is killed because of her gender, she is killed because her killer, whether male or female, has an individual, personal wish to kill her. She can be killed because her killer gets a sexual kick out of killing her, like the Amish girl killer probably did. She can be killed because her killer needs to establish his own, rightful(?) superiority over her, which may be a variation of the sexual theme. Or she can be killed because her gender makes her a less valuable member of her killer's family, which is the reason why huge numbers of girls are killed in countries like China and India. I think that every time a female is killed because of her gender, she is killed because she is considered less valuable as an individual than a male. But in each and every case, we are talking about the killer's own, personal need to kill the female, not a world-wide conspiracy that could conceivably lead to the building of extermination centers all over the world where humanity's females are to be mass-murdered on a grand scale.

Ann

I always thought people were inherently neutral. Their actions determine which way they go.. lawful or unlawful, good or chaotic.