Activists in Aotearoa New Zealand marked International Women’s Day today and the start of Ramadan this week with solidarity rallies across the country, calling for justice and peace for Palestinian women and the territories occupied illegally by Israel.
The theme this year for IWD is “For all women and girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment” and this was the 74th week of Palestinian solidarity protests.
First speaker at the Auckland rally today, Del Abcede of the Aotearoa section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), said the protest was “timely given how women have suffered the brunt of Israel’s war on Palestine and the Gaza ceasefire in limbo”.
Del Abcede of the Aotearoa section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) . . . “Empowered women empower the world.” Image: David Robie/APR
“Women are the backbone of families and communities. They provide care, support and nurturing to their families and the development of children,” she said.
“Women also play a significant role in community building and often take on leadership roles in community organisations. Empowered women empower the world.”
Abcede explained how the non-government organisation WILPF had national sections in 37 countries, including the Palestine branch which was founded in 1988. WILPF works close with its Palestinian partners, Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC) and General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW).
“This catastrophe is playing out on our TV screens every day. The majority of feminists in Britain — and in the West — seem to have nothing to say about it,” Abcede said, quoting gender researcher Dr Maryam Aldosarri, to cries of shame.
‘There can be no neutrality’
“In the face of such overwhelming terror, there can be no neutrality.”
Dr Aldosarri said in an article published earlier in the war on Gaza last year that the “siege and indiscriminate bombardment” had already “killed, maimed and disappeared under the rubble tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children”.
“Many more have been displaced and left to survive the harsh winter without appropriate shelter and supplies. The almost complete breakdown of the healthcare system, coupled with the lack of food and clean water, means that some 45,000 pregnant women and 68,000 breastfeeding mothers in Gaza are facing the risk of anaemia, bleeding, and death.
“Meanwhile, hundreds of Palestinian women and children in the occupied West Bank are still imprisoned, many without trial, and trying to survive in abominable conditions.”
The death toll in the war — with killings still happening in spite of the precarious ceasefire — is now more than 50,000 — mostly women and children.
“Achieving durable and equitable peace demands addressing the root causes of violence and oppression. This means adhering to the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 advisory opinion by dismantling the foundational structures of colonial violence and ensuring Palestinians’ rights to self-determination, dignity and freedom.”
Action for justice and peace
Abcede also spoke about what action to take for “justice and peace” — such as countering disinformation and influencing the narrative; amplifying Palstinian voices and demands; joining rallies — “like what we do every Saturday”; supporting the global BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaign against Israel; writing letters to the government calling for special visas for Palestinians who have families in New Zealand; and donating to campaigns supporting the victims.
Lorri Mackness also of WILPF (right) . . . “Women will be delivered [of babies] in tents, corridors, or bombed out homes without anasthesia, without doctors, without clean water.” Image: David Robie/APRLorri Mackness, also of WILPF Aotearoa, spoke of the Zionist gendered violence against Palestinians and the ruthless attacks on Gaza’s medical workers and hospitals to destroy the health sector.
Gaza’s hospitals had been “reduced to rubble by Israeli bombs”, she said.
“UN reports that over 60,000 women would give birth this year in Gaza. But Israel has destroyed every maternity hospital.
“Women will be delivered in tents, corridors, or bombed out homes without anasthesia, without doctors, without clean water.
“When Israel killed Gaza’s only foetal medicine specialist, Dr Muhammad Obeid, it wasn’t collateral damage — it was calculated reproductive terror.”
“Now, miscarriages have spiked by 300 percent, and mothers stitch their own C-sections with sewing thread.”
‘Femicide – a war crime’
Babies who survived birth entered a world where Israel blocked food aid — 1 in 10 infants would die of starvation, 335,000 children faced starvation, and their mothers forced to watch, according to UNICEF.
“This is femicide — this is a war crime.”
Eugene Velasco, of the Filipino feminist action group Gabriela Aotearoa, said Israel’s violence in Gaza was a “clear reminder of the injustice that transcends geographical borders”.
“The injustice is magnified in Gaza where the US-funded genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people has resulted in the deaths of more than 61,000.”
‘Pernicious’ Regulatory Standards Bill
Dr Jane Kelsey, a retired law professor and justice advocate, spoke of an issue that connected the “scourge of colonisation in Palestine and Aotearoa with the same lethal logic and goals”.
Law professor Dr Jane Kelsey . . . “Behind the scenes is ACT’s more systemic and pernicious Regulatory Standards Bill.” Image: David Robie/APR
The parallels between both colonised territories included theft of land and the creation of private property rights, and the denial of sovereign authority and self-determination.
She spoke of how international treaties that had been entered in good faith were disrespected, disregarded and “rewritten as it suits the colonising power”.
Dr Kelsey said an issue that had “gone under the radar” needed to be put on the radar and for action.
She said that while the controversial Treaty Principles Bill would not proceed because of the massive mobilisations such as the hikoi, it had served ACT’s purpose.
“Behind the scenes is ACT’s more systemic and pernicious Regulatory Standards Bill,” she said. ACT had tried three times to get the bill adopted and failed, but it was now in the coalition government’s agreement.
A ‘stain on humanity’
Meanwhile, Hamas has reacted to a Gaza government tally of the number of women who were killed by Israel’s war, reports Al Jazeera.
“The killing of 12,000 women in Gaza, the injury and arrest of thousands, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands are a stain on humanity,” the group said.
“Palestinian female prisoners are subjected to psychological and physical torture in flagrant violation of all international norms and conventions.”
Hamas added the suffering endured by Palestinian female prisoners revealed the “double standards” of Western countries, including the United States, in dealing with Palestinians.
Filipino feminist activists from Gabriela Aotearoa and the International Women’s Alliance (IWA) also participated in the pro-Palestine solidarity rally. Image: David Robie/APR
8 March is International Women’s Day. Women and allies around the world are joining together in celebration of our strength, and we’ll be commemorating all of us who have died at the hands of men.
We are, of course, gathering in solidarity against against sexism and misogyny. Over the past few months, I have spoken to a number of people who feel that misogyny isn’t as bad as it used to be; that somehow our UK society is learning to be better. They cite the fact that sexual consent and boundaries are now practiced in many relationships. But let’s face it, a man checking whether his sexual partner consents is the bare minimum of what he should be doing anyway. It’s disturbing that it’s taken us until 2023 to get this far. The bar is very, very low when it comes to how we expect cis men to act.
If you think this shows that men are somehow better these days, you’d be wrong. The number of women who are being spiked on a night out is alarming, and in 2023, it’s now normal for notices in club toilets to suggest politely that men “stop spiking”.
On top of this, violence against women during consensual sex is now completely normalised. We are often labelled and shamed as being ‘vanilla’ if we don’t want to be strangled, or if we don’t want to consent to a man’s kink. Strangling during sex is highly gendered, and is now the norm, rather than the exception. Men often strangle us without our permission. In 2019, theBBC wrote:
more than a third of UK women under the age of 40 have experienced unwanted slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during consensual sex…”
Four years later, I would argue that not much has changed.
in November 2021, the Court of Appeal decided Sam Pybus’s sentence of 4 years 8 months should not be increased, after he strangled Sophie Moss until she was dead, and claimed that she had encouraged him to do it. We think there could be no clearer sign the law is not yet working.
The lead appeal judge argued that Sophie had consented to being strangled; quite how the misogynist judge could know this is a mystery. And how exactly could she consent to being strangled until she was murdered? Pybus had a history of violence against women, and had strangled his previous partner, too. But, of course, Sophie was held accountable, even in her death, because Pybus’s actions were apparently consensual.
In England and Wales, it has now also become an offence for someone to inflict harm through non-fatal strangulation. But We Can’t Consent To This said:
With the introduction of a 5 year sentence for Non Fatal Strangulation, shockingly, it’s possible to kill a sexual partner and get a shorter sentence than you would have for not killing her. These short sentences for manslaughter are common – in each case the violence used is shockingly severe.
Misogyny as the norm
Of course, misogyny doesn’t just rear its ugly head during sex. It’s so normalised in our society that we don’t even see it for what it is. An obvious example of this is the treatment of famous women when they dare to challenge famous misogynist men. In 2022, the world witnessed Amber Heard and Johnny Depp in court. I felt sick when I heard how Depp had treated Heard. But I felt even more sick when I realised that the world was defending him; that it didn’t matter how disgusting he was towards women – nothing could pull him off his pedestal.
The misogynist backlash Heard received – surprisingly from all genders – was absolutely sickening. As Canary guest writer Annie Stevens wrote at the time:
Any man that uses terms like “idiot cow”, “withering cunt”, “worthless hooker”, “slippery whore” or “waste of a cum guzzler” (Depp’s words) to describe women is clearly a misogynist.
And yet, despairingly, the world still stood by Depp, hero-worshipping him as a cis man who could do no wrong, even when his vile misogyny was shown to the world, plain as day. This case is a prime example of how society excuses and emboldens men to act however they want. Stevens wrote:
there is no question that it will impact survivors here who have seen friends, family and colleagues back Johnny and claim that Amber is a liar.
Women have already been pulling out of cases due to the fear of going through what Amber did. Not only that, this case has also emboldened abusive men.
Prioritising feelings of men
Since then, the case of another cis man, footballer Benjamin Mendy, has been in the public spotlight. He, along with his friend Louis Saha Matturie, was accused of multiple sexual offences, including rape, by 13 different women. It will, no doubt, have taken the women all of the courage they could muster to be involved in this prosecution, particularly after they witnessed how Heard was treated by the world.
Unsurprisingly, the majority-male jury found Mendy not guilty of six counts of rape and one count of sexual assault. A retrial is due to take place after the jury couldn’t reach a verdict about one count of rape and one of attempted rape.
Instead of focusing on whether a majority-male jury should even be allowed in such cases, the mainstream media commented on how Mendy’s life had been shaken up by the accusations. Rather than talking about how the women will have been traumatised by such a man, the BBC wrote that:
The allegations and trial had been “absolute hell” for Mr Mendy.
‘Not all men’
Of course, you might be a man reading this, thinking to yourself that “not all men” are misogynists, “not all men” are predators, and that “not all men” are sexist. But this is a tiresome argument, used by many of you around the world to excuse yourselves from doing any work on your own patriarchal behaviour. By saying “not all men”, you’re refusing to self-reflect. And this refusal is insulting to the very women who you claim to care about, and who you say you would never harm.
The “not all men” argument is useless to us. It doesn’t make me or my friends any safer in our homes. It doesn’t prevent us from being harassed, or spiked in a club, or murdered by people who claim to love us. 1,425 women have been killed by men in the UK over a decade, between 2009 and 2018. 62% of women are killed by their current or former partner. Others are murdered by relatives. In 92% of the cases, the women knew their killer.
Men, it’s time that you step up
I have previously written about how UK society likes to victim-blame women for the misogyny we encounter. I said:
As women, we are sick and tired of being told to moderate our behaviour. “Follow the rules”, they say. “Don’t walk alone in the dark”. “Don’t be drunk”. “Don’t dress a certain way”. How, exactly, does moderating our behaviour in any way address the root issue: the misogyny entrenched in our society?
It is not, in any way, a woman’s responsibility to change how we act. The time has come for men to step up. Look at yourselves, your own behaviour, and the behaviour of your male friends. Look at how patriarchy is entrenched in all of you, and how you all need to do the work to unpick it. Call out your friends who have misogynist or sexist opinions, and challenge them. Don’t shy away from difficult conversations.
And if women call you out for being sexist, don’t get defensive, and don’t let your male fragility rear its ugly head. Instead, take the time to reflect. When you want to open your mouth and protest, “but not all men”, think twice. After all, you can never, ever know what it’s like to live in a misogynist world.
We need your understanding. But more than that, we need you to be actively willing to fight sexism and misogyny within yourselves and in society, wherever it manifests.
Progressive Kurdish and Iranian groups worked together to build a successful demonstration on September 25 in Sydney Town Hall square to protest the killing of Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini by Iran’s notorious ‘morality police’, reports Peter Boyle.
Warning: this article contains graphic description of assault
A sexual predator has been jailed for at least 36 years for the murder of primary school teacher Sabina Nessa.
Koci Selamaj, 36, travelled to London from the south coast to carry out the premeditated attack on September 17 last year.
The garage worker targeted 28-year-old Ms Nessa as she walked through Cator Park in Kidbrooke, south-east London, to meet a friend at 8.34pm.
CCTV footage captured the moment Selamaj ran up behind her and hit her over the head 34 times with a 2ft-long metal traffic triangle. He carried her unconscious body up a grassy bank and out of view. He then pulled up her clothes, removed her tights and underwear, and strangled her before covering her body in grass.
Ms Nessa, who taught a year one class at Rushey Green Primary School in Catford, was found nearly 24 hours later near a community centre in the park.
Days later, Selamaj, from Eastbourne, East Sussex, was arrested in the seaside town and pleaded guilty to murder in February.
Jailed for life
On Friday, Selamaj refused to come to the Old Bailey and was jailed for life in his absence. Mr Justice Sweeney set a minimum term of 36 years for the “savage” sexually motivated attack.
He said Ms Nessa was the
wholly blameless victim of an absolutely appalling murder which was entirely the fault of the defendant.
Her death added to “the sense of insecurity” particularly felt by woman walking through the city at night.
He said:
She had every right, as her family said, to be walking through the park all glammed up and out to enjoy herself after a long week at work…
The defendant robbed her and them of her life.
No remorse
The judge noted the defendant’s guilty plea and lack of previous convictions. But he added:
It is a striking feature of the defendant’s case that, clearly deliberately, it is not suggested by him that he had any remorse for what he did to Sabina Nessa.
The judge said it was “cowardly” of the Albanian national to refuse to attend his sentencing but said he had no power to force him.
Earlier, prosecutor Alison Morgan QC said Selamaj had been violent towards his ex-partner in the past, including throttling her a number of times.
Three days before the attack on Ms Nessa, the defendant booked a room at the five-star Grand Hotel in Eastbourne, East Sussex, just five minutes from his home.
At about 2.20pm on September 17, hotel staff alerted police via 101 after Selamaj checked in to his £325-a-night room. Police said they had been concerned about his demeanour and the fact he lived close by. Selamaj went on to contact his former partner in a failed bid to persuade her to have sex with him. She said in a statement that he appeared “very agitated” when they met in his car near the hotel.
The defendant then drove his Nissan Micra to Brighton and on to Kidbrooke in south London. He used his bank card at Sainsbury’s to buy a rolling pin, chilli flakes and an energy drink. He rejected the rolling pin as a weapon in favour of the traffic triangle, which he was to use to attack Ms Nessa.
CCTV of Koci Selamaj in Sainsbury’s buying a rolling pin before the murder (Met Police/PA)
Ferocious attack
He entered Cator Park shortly after 8pm and lay in wait for half-an-hour before Ms Nessa arrived en route to The Depot bar where she was due to meet a friend.
Ms Morgan said Ms Nessa had expressed concern about being in the park after dark but decided to use the cut through that night because she was running late.
In grainy footage played in court, Selamaj was seen running up behind Ms Nessa and launching a ferocious attack with the 2ft long traffic triangle. As he carried her up a grassy hill, they went out of shot for 20 minutes.
Before leaving the park, he picked up pieces of the warning triangle and used wet wipes to clean a park bench near to where he launched his initial attack.
En route back to the south coast, Selamaj dumped the warning triangle in the River Teise in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.
Police said Selamaj appeared to be “calm and collected” on his arrest.
On being cautioned through a translator, Selamaj said:
What will happen if I open up now and say everything?
In mitigation, Lewis Power QC had said Selamaj had provided no explanation for why he killed Ms Nessa, adding:
He simply accepts that he did it.
‘You are not a human being, you are an animal’
Addressing her absent killer on Thursday, Ms Nessa’s parents Abdur Rouf and Azibun Nessa said in a statement:
You had no right to take her away from us in such a cruel way.
The moment the police officer came to our house and told her she was found dead our world shattered into pieces.
How could you do such a thing to an innocent girl walking by, minding her own business.
You are not a human being, you are an animal.
Ms Nessa’s family hugged supporters as they left court.
Paige Mitchell and Bradley Gray forged a bond over tragedy. Late one Sunday in October 2009, Mitchell’s husband borrowed a motorcycle from a neighbor on a whim, rumbled down a back road in rural Moundville, Alabama, and careened to his death. Almost exactly a year later, at almost precisely the same time of night, Gray’s wife died on the same county byway when her car crashed into a tree. Fate seemed to push Mitchell and Gray together, making their relationship hard to sever even as it descended into dysfunction.
Mitchell treated Gray’s son, Bradley Jr., like one of her own children, bringing him on outings with her daughters, Kayla and Kaci. Gray, who worked for a construction company, mowed Mitchell’s lawn and did repairs around her house. They went to concerts and cruised the Black Warrior River in Gray’s boat. Mitchell, a hairdresser with a gregarious personality, was glad to have someone to laugh with. But a darkness hovered over their relationship. Gray drank – a lot. And when he drank, his temper exploded. After beating a friend with a baseball bat in 2014, he was charged with felony assault, though the case was eventually dismissed.
Gray tried rehab, but he couldn’t stay sober, Mitchell’s family said. Many of the people who loved him gave up. Mitchell felt sorry for him, her family said; like the German shepherd she rescued and the foster children with disabilities she took in, she thought she could help him heal.
Paige Mitchell (left) and her 14-year-old daughter, Kaci (right), of Moundville, Ala. Credit: GunMemorial.org
After Gray hit her in the chin with a metal hand-grip exerciser, bruising her face and leaving her worried she would lose her tooth, Mitchell began to give up, too. But Moundville is tiny, and they kept running into each other. On the night of July 9, 2015, she went to Gray’s home to pick up her car and collect her belongings after another split. This time, according to police, he showed her a Glock in a holster and threatened to use it: “I will blow you away.” Police arrested Gray at his house and confiscated his gun, evidence of a potential crime. Prosecutors charged him with third-degree domestic violence, punishable by up to a year in jail.
Then Gray bumped into Moundville’s police chief, Ken Robertson, in a convenience store and started “really ranting,” Robertson recounted in a deposition five years later. Gray called Robertson and his officers “you son of bitches” and demanded that they return his gun. “Let me see what’s going on and we will rectify the situation,” Robertson told him.
Back at the station, Robertson read Gray’s arrest report – and, over the objections of another officer, he handed back the gun. The former police chief, who is now a sheriff’s deputy for Hale County, didn’t respond to requests for an interview. But in his deposition, he offered an explanation of sorts: Police didn’t have a search warrant for the weapon, he said. In his view, “there was zero legal reason to keep it.”
In fact, under Alabama law, police could have – and should have – sought a court order to retain the gun through a process known as condemnation, said Hale County District Attorney Michael Jackson, whose jurisdiction includes most of Moundville. Giving back the gun, Jackson said, “was a big mistake.”
Former Moundville, Ala., Police Chief Ken Robertson returned a confiscated gun to Bradley Gray after Gray was arrested and charged with domestic violence in July 2015. Credit: Gray Media Group Inc./WBRC
That error was compounded a few weeks later after Gray pleaded guilty to the domestic That error was compounded a few weeks later after Gray pleaded guilty to the domestic violence charge. Along with a 30-day suspended jail sentence and a year’s probation, he was ordered to enroll in anger management classes. The timing was crucial: Under a state law that took effect the previous week, on Sept. 1, 2015, Gray’s domestic violence misdemeanor conviction meant he was no longer allowed to possess a firearm or have one “under (his) control.” As a convicted abuser, Gray was now also permanently barred from possessing a firearm under federal law.
Bradley Gray. Credit: Hale County District Attorney
If Robertson’s department had held on to the Glock, the rest of the story might have been different. But Gray had his gun – and the new Alabama statute didn’t spell out a procedure for him to surrender it. Nor was there any requirement for law enforcement to seize it. In his deposition, Robertson acknowledged that Gray was no longer allowed to have a firearm, but he said he didn’t follow up on the case: “We don’t have the authority to go and start checking everybody that’s been convicted.” He also admitted that he’d never notified Mitchell that he’d given back the Glock. The law didn’t require it.
A little more than a year later, Mitchell, then 37, ran into Gray unexpectedly at a friend’s place and made it clear one more time that the relationship was over. “Brad was trying to convince her otherwise, and she was moving on,” said Sylvia Ray, Mitchell’s aunt and adoptive mother.
Hours later, just before dawn on Jan. 26, 2017, Gray broke into Mitchell’s house through the back door, according to her family. When Mitchell’s foster child woke and went to check on the noise, Gray told her to go back to bed. In the living room, he found 14-year-old Kaci, who had been asleep on a couch by the front door, and shot her in the neck, according to her autopsy.
Next he turned the Glock on Mitchell, firing a single bullet into the back of her head.
The shooting was over so quickly that 10-year-old Kayla slept through it. She discovered the bodies of her mother and sister when she woke the next morning to get ready for school.
As officers waited on his front porch soon after to question him, Gray fired one last shot with the gun he wasn’t supposed to have. He died at a hospital three days later.
A community memorial baseball game in April 2017 honors Paige and Kaci Mitchell. Credit: Erin Nelson/USA Today Network
Every 16 hours somewhere in the U.S., a woman is fatally shot by a current or former intimate partner. The numbers have been soaring: Gun homicides by intimate partners jumped 58% over the last decade, according to never-before-published FBI data analyzed for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting by James Alan Fox, a professor and criminologist at Northeastern University. The pandemic has been an especially lethal period for abuse victims, Fox found; gun homicides involving intimate partners rose a stunning 25% in 2020 compared with the previous year, to the highest level in almost three decades. Women accounted for more than two-thirds of the victims shot and killed by intimate partners last year.
Intimate Partner Shooting Deaths Are Soaring
Domestic violence gun homicides fell sharply in the 1990s, then began to rise in the Obama years, reaching a 26-year high during the pandemic. The change in killings by other methods has been less pronounced over time.
Source: Unpublished FBI data analyzed for Reveal by criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University Credit: Reveal
Many of these killings involve offenders, such as Bradley Gray, who were legally prohibited from having guns, a Reveal investigation has found. From 2017 through 2020, Reveal identified at least 110 intimate partners and others who were fatally shot by offenders using weapons they weren’t allowed to possess under federal and, in some cases, state law.
The true numbers aren’t known; the federal government doesn’t track fatal shootings by intimate partners who shouldn’t have firearms, and state data is incomplete, inaccessible or nonexistent. To find these cases, Reveal amassed information on hundreds of gun homicides around the U.S. from domestic violence coalitions, news accounts and state agencies, then vetted each shooter using criminal background checks and thousands of pages of police and court records. The number of cases we found is almost certainly a vast undercount, in large part because we were able to obtain limited information from only 21 states, and crucial records in many cases were missing.
The victims, nearly all of them women, represent a cross-section of race and class. They include a 26-year-old factory worker from Arkansas whose boyfriend shot her in the back of the head in front of her two infants. A nurse in Washington state who was about to move to Missouri when her estranged husband gunned down her and her mother. Seventeen people in the database were killed during the pandemic, including a Milwaukee mother and four teenagers slain by a convicted felon with a 12-gauge shotgun. Four of the victims were pregnant. Also killed were bystanders, police officers and a 4-year-old girl.
“Every one of these deaths is preventable,” said Natalie Nanasi, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University who specializes in gender-based violence. “It’s absolutely outrageous that we’re losing people in this way, because we know what we need to do in order to prevent it from happening. We have laws on the books. We’re just not actually enforcing them.”
Intimate Partner Homicides in the U.S.
At least 122,000 Americans have been slain since 1976, with more than 2,800 killings in 2020 alone.
Source: Unpublished FBI data analyzed for Reveal by criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University Credit: Reveal
Guns are the No. 1 weapon in domestic violence killings in the U.S. – just owning a firearm makes an abuser five times more likely to take a partner’s life. People with a history of violence against a partner, including stalking or strangulation, are also far more likely to go on to commit more heinous acts. Earlier this year, researchers reported that more than two-thirds of recent mass shootings in the U.S. involved perpetrators who killed partners or relatives or had a history of domestic abuse. There’s an obvious antidote, said David Martin, who supervises the domestic violence unit for the King County prosecuting attorney’s office in Seattle. “The lowest-hanging fruit in this entire conversation is making sure that people at high risk do not have access to firearms,” he said. “This is the easiest thing that anybody can do.”
But in a country with some of the highest levels of gun ownership in the world, deeply divided by politics and culture and increasingly hostile to the rights of women, enacting comprehensive gun safety measures – universal background checks, licensing and permitting, bans on military-style weapons, and national databases to track who owns firearms and how they’re used – has been politically unfeasible. Indeed, Robyn Thomas, executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, sees an opposite trend: “We’re going in the wrong direction in some states and repealing gun regulations.”
Thus, the U.S. relies on an amalgam of narrower laws and policies that often end up working against the abuse victims they’re supposed to protect, creating not just gaps in protection, but gaps in accountability.
The Gun Control Act of 1968, enacted in the aftermath of political assassinations that roiled the country in the 1960s, makes it illegal for people convicted of a felony to possess a firearm. A quarter-century later, as part of the Violence Against Women Act, Congress barred people subject to family violence protection orders from having firearms. Two years after that, lawmakers led by then-New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg expanded the federal gun restrictions to include some people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors, a critical change given that many abusers avoid more severe charges through plea agreements. The passage of the latter two bills helped drive down the number of women shot and killed by their partners starting in the 1990s, said Fox, the Northeastern criminologist.
But the number of domestic violence homicides has climbed again in recent years, exposing the system’s fundamental weaknesses.
Every state has passed some version of the federal ban on felons having firearms. In addition, in 33 states and the District of Columbia, it’s illegal for people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors to possess guns. But federal gun laws and the vast majority of state statutes share a glaring flaw: They don’t address how to get guns away from people who aren’t supposed to have them. They don’t say how offenders who are banned from possessing firearms should surrender them or spell out procedures for confiscating them. They don’t create the legal infrastructure that is essential for keeping abuse victims, their families and communities safe from dangerous offenders.
Instead, around much of the country, these gun laws are enforced on an honor system that relies on people who are prohibited from possessing firearms to disarm themselves.
“You are trusting somebody who is not worthy of being taken at their word,” said Democratic U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, who spent seven years working as a prosecutor in Alameda County, California. “And that has been to the peril of domestic violence victims.”
U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., is a former prosecutor in Alameda County, Calif. Credit: Al Jazeera English/Fault Lines
The notion of leaving it up to offenders to turn in their guns of their own volition is absurd, law professor Nanasi added. “It’s a fairy tale.”
Intimate partner violence is, by its nature, the most local of crimes, and states and local jurisdictions are where the vast majority of domestic violence cases are handled. But 17 states do not make it illegal for people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors to possess guns. Even in states with misdemeanor bans, the restrictions can be significantly weaker than federal law. For example, South Dakota bars people from possessing a firearm for just a year after they’re convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor; in South Carolina, the length of the ban depends on the crime’s severity. In Arizona, the gun prohibition applies only while offenders are on probation.
Hale County District Attorney Michael Jackson outside a courthouse in Alabama. Credit: Andi Rice for Reveal
And local and state officials can’t enforce federal gun laws. “It’s a jurisdictional thing,” said Alabama district attorney Michael Jackson. “As a general rule, the feds are the ones who enforce their own laws. … We’re the prosecutors for the state, and we enforce state law.”
How State Gun Laws Leave Abuse Victims Unprotected
Every state has some sort of ban on felons possessing firearms. But big gaps remain. Only ■ 33 statesand the District of Columbia bar people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors from having guns for some period of time. Seven states ◥ require prohibited possessors to give up their firearms. Three states ◢ require proof of surrender.
Source: Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence Credit: Reveal
But the federal criminal justice system is inundated, and the volume of cases just involving felons caught with guns is staggering. Part of the problem is that it’s easy to obtain a weapon, even for felons, through private gun transfers that don’t require background checks.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives investigates federal firearms violations when it learns of them – for instance, when local police respond to a domestic abuse incident and discover an offender has a gun illegally – but none of its agents focus exclusively on domestic violence. “A lot of the time, firearms violations are only detected when they have resulted in violent crime,” Thomas Chittum, the ATF’s acting deputy director, said in an interview.
Nor does the ATF or any other federal agency track the number of people prohibited from possessing firearms who go on to kill their intimate partners.
“Oh, I don’t know that number,” Chittum said. “I’m not sure anyone knows that number with precision.”
Jazmine Willock (center) and her sisters, Rosa (left) and Domonique (right). Jazmine was killed by her boyfriend, Taris Ford-Dillard, in January 2018 in Tucson, Ariz. Credit: Courtesy of Annette Sisson
Taris Ford-Dillard was a former community college basketball team captain who, at 6-foot-3, towered over his partner, Jazmine Willock. But in every other way, it was clear that she was the one with the gigantic spirit and he was the one who felt small.
Willock was a gifted artist whose high school self-portrait won the Congressional Art Competition and hung in the U.S. Capitol. She had a green belt in taekwondo and a kick so powerful that it earned her a spot on the U.S. Virgin Islands Women’s National Soccer team, playing for the island territory where she grew up. She went to college at 17, moving to Arizona, where her mother and siblings lived, to finish her degree. She bought a house at 21; to pay the mortgage, she juggled a server job at The Cheesecake Factory with a gig as a physical therapy assistant in Tucson. Her mother, Annette Sisson, can’t recall how the two met, but Willock thought Ford-Dillard was handsome, smart and charming. Sisson was less impressed: “Narcissistic people are always charming.”
Jazmine Willock. Credit: Courtesy of Annette Sisson
From early in their romance, Ford-Dillard showed signs of having a jealous, controlling personality, Willock’s family said. He seethed if she glanced at another man and tagged along wherever she went, even insisting on driving her to work. He also had a worrisome history of abuse; he was convicted of a misdemeanor domestic violence assault charge after punching his previous live-in girlfriend in the face and shoving her to the ground. Ford-Dillard was ordered to undergo domestic violence counseling and sentenced to a year of probation.This 2014 conviction meant he was permanently prohibited from possessing a gun under federal law and barred under Arizona law while he was on probation.
By July 2017, it was clear the relationship with Willock had turned abusive as well. During one especially terrifying incident, she told police, Ford-Dillard flung her across the bed and onto the floor, ripping her shirt, squeezing her neck in a headlock and smashing her face with a shoe.
Then, Willock recounted, he grabbed the handgun he always seemed to carry despite the federal ban.
“I should, I should,” he said, pointing the gun at her.
Jazmine Willock and Taris Ford-Dillard. Credit: Courtesy of Annette Sisson
To escape that night, Willock told police, she bolted out the sliding back door, leaped over a cinder-block fence and sprinted through overgrown bushes across a dry, rocky riverbed into the desert, until she reached a shopping center, where she flagged down someone who called for help. She urged police to contact her mother, because Ford-Dillard had threatened to hurt her, too. When Tucson officers arrested Ford-Dillard the next day, they recovered a gun magazine from the trunk of his Pontiac Grand Prix, but no weapon. A little over a week later, a grand jury indicted him for felony aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and domestic violence kidnapping.
At his initial hearing after his arrest, Tucson Magistrate Nikki Chayet, who’d been a magistrate judge for almost 30 years, laid out the conditions of Ford-Dillard’s release on $7,500 bail: “You’re to commit no acts of domestic violence, possess no firearms, have no contact with Jazmine of any sort, except for legal proceedings, and you’re not to go back to within three blocks of her residence. Do you understand that?”
His response was a forceful “yes.”
But that was it. Chayet didn’t ask him about the gun. She didn’t order him to turn it over. Chayet declined to answer questions for this story.
The reality is that nothing in Arizona law prohibits someone convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor from possessing a firearm once he completes his probation. Nor do Arizona judges have the authority to require offenders to provide proof that they surrendered their guns. Local laws in Pima County don’t require proof either.
“I see this all the time, where the way the law currently works, we’re trusting abusers will relinquish their weapons,” said Negar Katirai, a clinical law professor and director of the Domestic Violence Law Clinic at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “It just doesn’t make sense. It leaves victims extremely vulnerable.”
Meanwhile, fearing for her own safety, Willock’s mother sought a protection order that same day in Pima County court in which she urged a second judge to explicitly prohibit Ford-Dillard from having any firearms. “He made a verbal threat against my life, to my daughter,” Sisson wrote in her petition. “He also threaten (sic) and hurt her as well. Always has a gun.”
But when Justice of the Peace Charlene Pesquiera issued an injunction against harassment, it didn’t include a firearm prohibition.
Pesquiera declined an interview, but noted in an email that Chayet already had ordered Ford-Dillard not to have a gun at his initial appearance that day. Willock’s mother scoffed at that excuse.
“I think she’s passing the buck and blaming someone else,” Sisson said. “She fell short because it was her job to protect me and Jazmine at that moment.”
The next time Willock and Ford-Dillard came to the attention of police, nearly four months had passed. A video from a neighbor’s Ring doorbell camera captured Willock running naked from her home late one night in early November, screaming, “Help me! Help me!” as Ford-Dillard grabbed her and steered her back inside.
Still under a felony indictment in the earlier incident, Ford-Dillard was quickly charged with three additional misdemeanor domestic violence offenses. But he didn’t surrender to police until just before Christmas, and once again, no police officer, prosecutor or judge intervened to try to take away his weapon – or even acknowledged that he was already under indictment for assaulting Willock with a gun. On a form releasing him from custody, Tucson Magistrate Susan Shetter ordered Ford-Dillard to stay away from Willock and her home and not to commit any more acts of domestic violence. But the judge didn’t check the “possess no firearms” box on the form. Shetter declined to comment on the case.
A month later, when Willock didn’t show up at work for two days, her boss called police, who notified Sisson, who raced to her daughter’s house. No one answered the door, so Sisson broke in through the living room window. Then she opened Willock’s bedroom door.
“Who is that girl?” Sisson wondered at first, peering through the darkness.
Then she recognized her 22-year-old daughter, lying naked on the floor. The beige carpet beneath her chest was crimson. A gunshot at close range had seared a black muzzle imprint into her chest. At least five other bullets had ripped through her head, hand and thigh. Ford-Dillard was slumped on the floor, too, dead from a self-inflicted wound. Between them on the floor was the pistol no one in law enforcement had taken away from him.
Still tacked to the back wall of the garage were two paper targets riddled with practice shots from Ford-Dillard’s gun. A large can on the floor brimmed with spent shell casings.
Bullets collected from the scene where Taris Ford-Dillard killed Jazmine Willock and himself. Credit: Tucson Police Department
A recording of Willock’s interview with Tucson police after the November incident shows why making sure abusers surrender their weapons is crucial. The two officers were sympathetic toward Willock and disdainful of Ford-Dillard, gently probing her about why she didn’t push him out of her life. Willock gave an answer that police and victims advocates hear over and over. “I keep thinking I can help him,” she sobbed, adding: “I know he loves me, but it’s just – he’s messed up.”
What do you think is going to happen after this incident?
“I feel like I can’t escape, I feel like I can’t leave. … I want to help him and I want to be here, but I just, like, I feel like I just keep digging a bigger hole and I don’t know what to do now.”
Well, you need to do what’s going to make you happy.
“I’ve thought of moving, and I don’t know how to do this.”
It’s a scenario that plays out all the time in police stations and courtrooms and among family It’s a scenario that plays out all the time in police stations and courtrooms and among family members and friends: Victims are asked, “Why don’t you just leave?” Yet the question fails to acknowledge the complexities of domestic violence – the crimes are deeply intimate, unseen and easy to mask; the victim and the abuser are often emotionally and financially intertwined. It’s a question that “makes us feel better, that we would be different. It is victim blaming,” said April Zeoli, an associate professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. “Why didn’t the justice system use the tools available to it to remove the guns they knew were illegal?”
Jazmine Willock’s mother, Annette Sisson (left), and sisters Rosa (center) and Domonique (right) visit Jazmine’s gravesite. Credit: Al Jazeera English/Fault Lines
What’s more, fighting back often intensifies the abuse. At its core, intimate partner violence is about power and control. Disrupting this power dynamic – for example, by reporting the abuse to police or trying to leave – can make the situation far more volatile and dangerous, ample research shows.
“It is an incredibly difficult and challenging and high-risk moment in (an abuser’s) life,” said David Martin, the King County prosecutor. “And when they have a firearm in their hand, the likelihood that they’re going to terribly harm that person or terribly harm themselves is exponentially greater.”
Removing a gun greatly reduces the chances that an episode will escalate, he said. “You’re putting barriers in place. … You’re making it harder to act on an urge to kill someone.”
But just seven states require the surrender of firearms. Only California, Connecticut and Nevada explicitly order offenders to prove to courts or law enforcement that they’ve turned in their guns. Another half-dozen local jurisdictions require proof of surrender, including Seattle/King County, Denver and Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located.
Federal gun laws are also silent on relinquishment. Swalwell has reintroduced legislation, the No Guns for Abusers Act, which would direct the federal government to develop best practices for states to use for firearm relinquishment in domestic abuser cases. But the legislation has already died in Congress – twice. Even if the current version passes, neither the federal government nor states would be required to adopt any of the recommended procedures.
“Today in America, the right for an abuser to own a gun is greater than the right of a victim to be safe,” Swalwell said in an interview. “We are truly flying in the blind.”
Without national leadership, some local officials have tried to come up with solutions suited to their own communities. In 2015, after a rash of domestic violence homicides in the Dallas area, then-Judge Roberto Cañas and a few of his colleagues grew tired of doing only what Texas state law required: verbally warning people with felony and misdemeanor domestic violence convictions that they couldn’t possess a firearm.
“Even if everyone knew that a guy had an arsenal of guns he shouldn’t have, there was no follow-up,” Cañas said.
So they launched a gun surrender program, requiring judges to press defendants on whether they had any firearms and, if they did, to turn them over. The goal: to collect 2,400 guns over four years. But the result was disappointing, netting fewer than 200 weapons. After Cañas left the bench in September 2018, the program largely petered out.
“Part of it is courage,” he said. “You have to put yourself out there to do something a little different. It’s going to take a little drive from elected officials and the criminal justice system.”
Dave Keck, project director for the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence and Firearms, has seen a similar pattern in many communities considering relinquishment programs: Initial enthusiasm gives way to excuses and inertia. “Relinquishment should be automatic,” he said. “But there is a general reluctance to do it.”
Some law enforcement officials cite practicalities, telling Keck, “We can’t store all those guns.” Others argue that their area has a “gun culture.” “Are they trying to say it’s OK to shoot your wife or your girlfriend with a gun?” Keck said. “If you’re violent, particularly toward people you love, you (shouldn’t) have a firearm. Gun culture doesn’t change that.”
One of the biggest obstacles, Keck says, is the gender bias that pervades the criminal justice system. “The whole ‘he said, she said’ implies that women lie. Society expects women to take the fall,” he said. “The very thought of taking someone’s gun away from them, and at the same time doing it because of domestic violence, inflames a lot of people.”
There’s no doubt that Chad Absher should never have had the rifle he is accused of using to kill Ashlee Rucker in October 2017. Jacksonville, Florida, police and prosecutors knew that better than almost anyone else. What’s more, they had a clear opportunity to take away Absher’s weapon following a domestic battery call six months before Rucker died.
But instead, they did what so many law enforcement agencies around the U.S. do when confronted with an offender illegally possessing a firearm: next to nothing.
Absher’s propensity for violence was evident at a young age. So was his fascination with firearms: By 20, he had a tattoo of a clown gripping a pistol emblazoned on his chest. When his teenage girlfriend broke up with him in February 2006, he threatened to “kill her and throw her in the river so no one could have her,” according to a police report. He demonstrated his rage by decapitating a teddy bear, throwing the head onto her family’s driveway and dumping the body next to her car in the high school parking lot.
Four days later, as his ex-girlfriend and her family slept, he took a handgun to their house and opened fire. Three bullets pierced the walls of the girl’s bedroom. Absher was convicted of two felony charges and was sentenced to four years in prison and two years of probation.
As a felon, under both federal and Florida law, Absher was prohibited from having a firearm. But that didn’t seem to deter him, recalled Tiffany Johnson, whose best friend, Rucker, started dating Absher eight years after his conviction.
Ashlee Rucker (left) and sister Lisa Rucker. Both were shot at their home in Jacksonville, Fla., in October 2017. Lisa survived after being in a coma for two days and undergoing multiple surgeries; Ashlee was pronounced dead at the scene. Credit: Courtesy of Lisa Rucker
Rucker was a single mother in her late 20s working as a medical assistant. Absher, then 28, ran a lawn care business and ingratiated himself by taking her young son, Joseph, for a ride on his mower. Within a few months, they were living together and socializing with Rucker’s family and friends. “Anytime they came to the house, he would have his gun and put it on my refrigerator and let it be known that he had it,” Johnson said. It was a macho thing, she added: “He just always acted like he was a man and carried a gun.”
According to her family, Rucker didn’t know the details of Absher’s conviction – at least not at first. “And I don’t think specifically, she cared at that point,” recalled her younger sister, Lisa Rucker. “You know, she saw him at face value, basically.”
But about a year and a half into the relationship, alarms went off. One Sunday in August 2015, Absher called Lisa Rucker in a panic, claiming her sister had tried to kill herself. “(She’s) going crazy,” Lisa Rucker remembered him saying. “We were arguing and going back and forth, and she stabbed herself in the stomach.”
Chad Absher. Credit: Jacksonville, Fla., Sheriff’s Office
As Absher was phoning police, Ashlee Rucker managed As Absher was phoning police, Ashlee Rucker managed to get to her car and drive away. Police found her on the floor in the back of her vehicle and rushed her to the hospital, where surgeons sewed up her abdomen, then leveled with her sister. “It’s almost physically impossible for you to stab yourself through your abdominal wall,” Lisa Rucker recalled the doctor telling her. The staff was worried enough about Ashlee Rucker’s safety to register her under a pseudonym. But because the incident had been reported to police as a suicide attempt, Absher wasn’t arrested, Lisa Rucker said.
In April 2017, the couple got into another fight, this time about one of her relatives who was staying with them. Ashlee Rucker later told police that Absher whipped her with a phone charger cord, and when she fell to the ground in the fetal position, he forced her mouth open to prevent her from screaming. When police pounded on the door, Absher grabbed a rifle. “I’m gonna die for you,” he told her. She barricaded herself in the bedroom and escaped by climbing out the window, where police were waiting to take her to safety. One officer noted Rucker had abrasions to her eye and scratches across her face. She warned them that Absher was still inside and had a weapon.
In their report, police noted that Absher was a felon with a gun, an offense punishable under Florida law by up to 15 years in prison.
But instead of trying to arrest him on the spot, officers remained outside and tried to reason with him. “We made multiple attempts to get the suspect to leave his residence with negative results,” they wrote in their report. The officers didn’t try to seize the weapon, even though they knew Absher was prohibited from possessing it. After about an hour and a half, police decided to leave the scene “due to the suspect not making any threats with the weapon to harm himself or the victim.”
Only then did police seek a warrant for Absher’s arrest for misdemeanor battery and felony possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, forwarding the case to the local state attorney’s office. But they didn’t take the obvious step of getting a search warrant for the gun. A month later, prosecutors denied the arrest warrant and declined to charge Absher, citing insufficient evidence – and shifting the blame to Rucker. “The only evidence that the suspect was in possession of a gun is the testimony of V, who is uncooperative,” prosecutors wrote in their disposition statement, referring to Rucker as V for “victim.”
It’s one of the most common excuses prosecutors give for dropping domestic violence charges – yet women are often reluctant to cooperate out of fear of antagonizing their abusers. In Ashlee Rucker’s case, Absher had threatened to kill her when she tried to leave, her sister said. If police had obtained a search warrant and seized the gun, they wouldn’t have needed Rucker’s help. But as so often happens with intimate partner abuse, law enforcement put the onus on the victim.
Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams turned down an interview request and refused to answer detailed follow-up questions about how his department handled the case. The local state attorney, Melissa Nelson, also declined to discuss the case and her office’s policies on domestic violence cases more broadly.
If police and prosecutors didn’t seem to understand the urgency of the situation, Rucker did. She tried to break off the relationship for good, moving in with her sister and their two young sons. She covered up the tattoo she’d gotten of Absher’s name.
But Absher kept coming around, and sometimes he brought his rifle, friends and family said. One night, he refused to leave, even after Lisa Rucker called 911. She told dispatchers that he didn’t have a gun; she didn’t realize his rifle was hidden behind a cushion. A few minutes after 2 a.m. Oct. 31, 2017, Absher shot both sisters, according to court records. Their sons, 9-year-old Joseph and 4-year-old Colten, cowered in a bedroom nearby.
“I looked over and I saw my nephew standing over my sister, and he was crying,” Lisa Rucker said in an interview. “And I guess Colten noticed that I was awake, because he came over to me and he said, ‘Mommy, please, don’t die.’ ”
The bullet pierced the back of Lisa Rucker’s head, nicked her carotid artery and shattered the mandible bone on the left side of her face. She was in a coma for two days and underwent multiple surgeries. Ashlee Rucker was pronounced dead at the scene.
Two days later, police found Absher hiding at a friend’s house and recovered a rifle.
Lisa Rucker remains outraged that law enforcement failed to prosecute Absher before or confiscate his gun.
Lisa Rucker and her son, Colten, visit Ashlee Rucker’s gravesite in 2017. Credit: Courtesy of Lisa Rucker
“My sister would still be here,” she said. “I wouldn’t have to live with the trauma, the scars, the heartache and everything that goes along with it. … My nephew would still have his mother.”
Absher and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. He is scheduled to go on trial for first-degree murder and attempted murder in mid-December. He also faces an additional charge, one that comes too late for Ashlee Rucker: possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
Freelance journalist Katherine Sypher contributed to this story. It was edited by Narda Zacchino, Nina Martin and Andy Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick. Soo Oh created the charts.
Armed and Abusive is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
The murder of Sabina Nessa as she walked through a London park has, rightly, shaken women across the country yet again. It seems like only days ago we were reading similar headlines about Sarah Everard, Bibaa Henry, and Nicole Smallman.
As women, we are sick and tired of being told to moderate our behaviour. “Follow the rules”, they say. “Don’t walk alone in the dark”. “Don’t be drunk”. “Don’t dress a certain way”. How, exactly, does moderating our behaviour in any way address the root issue: the misogyny entrenched in our society? As women, it’s not our responsibility to make sure we are safe. It’s our most basic right to be safe. If you’re a man reading this, it’s your responsibility to tackle misogyny within our society. Please don’t respond with, “but not all men”. Please don’t ignore the fact that this is a systemic failing that you’re a part of.
The majority of women aren’t actually murdered on the street
According to Counting Dead Women, at least 108 women have been killed by men, (or where a man is the principal suspect), in 2021 so far. On average, this year, a man has killed a woman every 2.5 days. Think about this. Every 2.5 days. This figure is far greater than the stories covered by news headlines. Usually, it’s young women, murdered while walking on our streets who are deemed worthy of mainstream media attention. “She was just walking home,” we now hear all the time.
But the majority of women aren’t killed while walking down a city street. The Femicide Census names all of the 1,425 women killed by men in the UK over a decade, between 2009 and 2018. It has found that 62% of women are killed by their current or former partner. Others are murdered by relatives. In 92% of the cases, the women knew their killer. Many of the women had lived for years in abusive relationships, subjected to coercive control. In fact, the researchers argue that coercive control in a relationship is key to understanding whether a woman is in danger of being murdered.
The ages of the 108 women killed by men this year vary greatly: 71-year-old Christina Arnold was killed by her husband of fifty years. 85-year-old Loretta Herman’s son was charged with her murder. And as I write this, the ex-partner of 26-year-old Bethany Vincent has stood up in court and denied her murder. Vincent was stabbed to death in a house, along with her nine-year-old son.
Don’t ignore domestic abuse victims
By giving the greatest headlines to those who were “just walking home”, or who were attacked on the street by strangers, are we somehow victim-blaming the women who were murdered by people they know, inside their homes? Are those killed by their husbands seen as less innocent? As a society, do we see them as complicit in their abuse because they weren’t murdered by a stranger, or because they didn’t walk away from their abuser?
The Canary spoke to Alice Chambers, who works with survivors of domestic abuse. She said:
We know that when women are killed it is usually by someone they know – two women are killed a week by a partner or ex-partner in England and Wales. Yet it is often when the perpetrator is a stranger that the story hits the headlines and protests ensue. What does this tell us about our views of domestic abuse victims?
Chambers continued:
Women are often blamed for the harm perpetrated against them by men. It seems this is even more so when women are attacked by their partners or ex-partners, with common responses being that she must have driven him to it or that she should have left him. Women killed by their partners and ex-partners are just as worthy of our compassion and rage as those killed by strangers and they are in no way responsible for what happened to them. We must get educated about domestic abuse and challenge these harmful myths.
State failings
Independent magazine Hate Zine, summaries our society nicely when it says:
[Women’s] behaviour is constantly scrutinised, dissected and micromanaged by a society which is somehow still able to ignore the entrenched misogyny within.
I have already written about how the state should be held accountable for the murder of women. Back in December 2020 I wrote:
Under UK law, a perpetrator receives a minimum sentence of 15 years for murder if the weapon he used was already in the home where he committed the crime. But if the perpetrator takes a weapon to different location and kills someone, he is sentenced for a minimum of 25 years. It’s a travesty that the murder of someone in a home can be seen as a less serious murder than one on the street. And because most women are killed in their homes, this law can be seen as systemically sexist.
And in April 2021 I wrote about how the government rejected amendments to the Domestic Abuse Bill: amendments that might have protected women more.
The issue is men
By focusing only on the victims who are attacked on the streets, it’s easy for the government and the police to come up with half-hearted solutions, like lighting our streets better, or giving us suggestions not to walk alone. And by ignoring all those domestic abuse victims murdered by men, the state don’t have to face the actual issue at hand. And that is male violence.
The issue isn’t about whether we are safe alone at night. We aren’t even safe in our own homes, surrounded by those who are supposed to love us the most. So while we grieve Sabina Nessa and Sarah Everard, remember, too, 85-year-old Loretta Herman, 71-year-old Christina Arnold and more than one hundred more women in 2021 who have barely made news headlines. Let’s continue to shout all of their names in rage as we fight against entrenched misogyny.
Featured image via a Bristol activist. Used with permission
Living close to Turkey, I follow the situation there perhaps with more worry than others. And nothing good seems to happen:
Turkish police detained three district heads of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and seven others in Istanbul on Friday over alleged links to militants, police said, two days after a court case began over banning the party.
Separately, Turkey’s Human Rights Association (IHD) co-chairman Ozturk Turkdogan was arrested by police at his home, IHD said, prompting human rights groups to call for his release. Turkdogan was then released on Friday evening, the association said.
Responding to the arrest today of Öztürk Türkdoğan, the president of Turkey’s Human Rights Organisation, Esther Major, Amnesty International’s Senior Research Adviser for Europe, said:
“The detention of Öztürk Türkdoğan is outrageous. With ink barely dry on the Human Rights Action Plan announced by President Erdoğan two weeks ago, his arrest reveals that this document is not worth the paper it is written on.
After over three years in jail without a conviction, one of Turkey’s highest-profile detainees, Osman Kavala, is “not optimistic” that President Tayyip Erdogan’s planned reforms can change a judiciary he says is being used to silence dissidents. A philanthropist, 63-year-old Kavala told Reuters that after decades of watching Turkey’s judiciary seeking to restrict human rights, it was now engaged in “eliminating” perceived political opponents of Erdogan’s government. Kavala was providing written responses via his lawyers to Reuters’ questions days after Erdogan outlined a “Human Rights Action Plan” that was said will strengthen rights to a free trial and freedom of expression. See: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/09/16/osman-kavala-and-mozn-hassan-receive-2020-international-hrant-dink-award/ and
Not surprisingly this is leading to reactions, such as a bipartisan letter penned by 170 members of the US Congress to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in which the lawmakers have urged President Joe Biden’s administration to consider the “troubling human rights abuses” in Turkey. “President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party have used their nearly two decades in power to weaken Turkey’s judiciary, install political allies in key military and intelligence positions, crack down on free speech and (the) free press,” the letter said. Dated 26 February but made public on 1 March, the letter asks Washington to formulate its policy regarding Turkey considering human rights, saying that the Erdogan administration has strained the bilateral relationship.
On top of this Turkey has pulled out of the world’s first binding treaty to prevent and combat violence against women by presidential decree, in the latest victory for conservatives in President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party. The 2011 “Istanbul Convention| [SIC], signed by 45 countries and the European Union, requires governments to adopt legislation prosecuting domestic violence and similar abuse as well as marital rape and female genital mutilation. Conservatives had claimed the charter damages family unity, encourages divorce and that its references to equality were being used by the LGBT community to gain broader acceptance in society. The publication of the decree in the official gazette early Saturday sparked anger among rights groups and calls for protests in Istanbul. Women have taken to the streets in cities across Turkey calling on the government to keep to the 2011 Istanbul Convention.
Gokce Gokcen, deputy chairperson of the main opposition CHP party said abandoning the treaty meant “keeping women second class citizens and letting them be killed.” “Despite you and your evil, we will stay alive and bring back the convention,” she said on Twitter. Last year, 300 women were murdered according to the rights group We Will Stop Femicide Platform. The platform called for a “collective fight against those who dropped the Istanbul convention,” in a message on Twitter. “The Istanbul convention was not signed at your command and it will not leave our lives on your command,” its secretary general Fidan Ataselim tweeted.
Kerem Altiparmak, an academic and lawyer specializing in human rights law, likened the government’s shredding of the convention to the 1980 military coup. “What’s abolished tonight is not only the Istanbul convention but the parliament’s will and legislative power,” he commented.
CONTENT WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS REFERENCES TO VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN THAT SOME PEOPLE MAY FIND DISTRESSING
It should possibly come as no surprise that the government is seizing upon the murder of Sarah Everard to roll out more Stasi-like undercover policing, all in the name of protecting women. Boris Johnson has announced that the government is going to send plain-clothes police officers to spy on people in bars and clubs around England and Wales. It’s part of a pilot scheme, Project Vigilant, which was launched by Thames Valley police in 2019, and is now going to be rolled out nationwide. The mainstream media is calling it a “drive to protect women“, and a scheme “to catch sexual predators“.
Spy cops abuse women. They don’t protect them.
But we’ve seen time and time again that undercover police abuse their powers, deceive women into relationships, and wreck their lives. More than 30 women have been tricked into relationships with spy cops. The exact figure is likely to be higher, because the government likes protecting the identities of undercover policemen who have infiltrated women’s lives. And they don’t like telling us whether the police are still doing it now.
This latest announcement about deploying undercover police makes a mockery of the Undercover Policing Inquiry that is currently taking place, which should be investigating the disgraceful actions of undercover officers and their bosses. It’s a kick in the teeth to the women participating in that inquiry whose lives were torn apart by police spies.
People have taken to Twitter to vent their frustration:
Undercover police hanging around in bars “to protect women”?
Tell that to the heroic women activists who were subject to systematic and coordinated human rights & sexual abuse by undercover #SpyCops.
— Dave Smith – Join A Union: Save Lives Save Jobs (@DaveBlacklist) March 16, 2021
How could you look at a cop being charged with murdering a woman, police being investigated for failing to investigate him properly, an officer joking about her murder, and police violence against mourning women, and conclude that undercover police in nightclubs is the answer?
A serving Metropolitan police officer has been charged with Sarah’s murder. And the subsequent police violence towards protesters on the streets, showed the world that the police are definitely not here to protect women.
And Sarah’s murder was just the tip of the iceberg. A document called #194andcounting shows that at least 194 women have been murdered by the police and prison system in England and Wales, either in state custody or in prison, since the 1970s.
The Canary’s Steve Topple reported on statistics which show that between January 2009 and September 2020 there were:
11 murders [of women] involving serving or ex-police officers. Eight were convicted. Three cases are ongoing. But nine of the 11 victims were police officers’ wives or girlfriends.
Over 90 charges of, or convictions for, rape among [employees of the criminal justice system]. The majority were against women and children. Several of the offenders committed multiple crimes. Dozens of these were serving police officers.
And there are a number of other disgusting misogynist incidents involving police officers. I will list just a couple. On 15 March, the Sun reported that a Metropolitan policeman, who was guarding the spot where Sarah Everard was murdered, sent out a meme “containing six images of a uniformed officer abducting a woman”. In 2020, Metropolitan police officers took selfies of themselves next to the bodies of murdered women Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman.
Also in 2020, a police officer from Avon and Somerset was found guilty of gross misconduct for his treatment of a domestic abuse survivor whose ex-partner broke into her house and “punched her head into a wall”. The policeman described the survivor as “anti-men”. The Canary spoke to the woman, who said:
When you call the police, you expect to be treated with respect. You don’t expect to be treated with prejudice by an officer who clearly has an issue with you as a woman. Misogyny has no place in any police force. Misogyny kills.
Giving the police more powers to act with impunity
It’s all too clear to women that the police are institutionally violent towards us. But instead of addressing this, the Tory government is giving them sweeping new powers. The recently passed Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act legalises the criminal activities of undercover officers and agents working for the police, MI5, and other state agencies. The Act doesn’t prohibit murder or torture in the name of undercover work. So, essentially it means spies and their agents will be able to act with impunity.
Meanwhile, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill currently being rushed through parliament will give police officers even more powers. Sisters Uncut argues:
As the actions of police at peaceful vigils this weekend show, police abuse the powers that they already have – and yet the government plans to give them more powers in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.
The death of Sarah Everard must be seen in context of the structures of violence against women in this country, which include the police who brutally manhandled grieving women on Saturday, and the routine failures of the police to investigate rape cases as well as their own record of domestic abuse against women.
It continues:
The police are institutionally violent against women. Handing them more powers will increase violence against women.
We need systemic change
While the government pretends to care by promising to provide us with undercover cops and better-lit streets, the reality is we need complete systemic change. Women are unsafe, whether they’re walking home or already in their house. In fact, 62% of women murdered between 2019 and 2008 were killed by men who were currently, or had previously been, in an intimate relationship with them. No amount of spy cops or street lighting will protect us from the misogyny and patriarchy within our society, ingrained in boys from an early age.
We don’t trust the police, or the criminal justice system, to protect us. The number of successful rape convictions is at an all-time low. The Centre for Women’s Justice’s Harriet Wistrich has argued that rape has virtually been “de-criminalised” because it’s so rare that a man will be convicted of the crime. It’s therefore unsurprising that, according to the Office for National Statistics, “less than one in five victims of rape or assault by penetration reported their experience to the police”.
We are tired Johnson and Patel’s crocodile tears. We are tired of our behaviour being policed, of being told that we must not walk alone at night, just because we’re women. We are tired of being victim-blamed for being assaulted. Together we must fight for radical change.
Featured image via a Bristol activist, with permission
This is the revolutionary Anna Campbell. Monday 15 March marks three years since she was murdered by the Turkish state in Rojava, north-east Syria.
Anna was an anti-fascist, feminist and queer internationalist. She joined the women’s revolution in Rojava in May 2017 during the fight against Daesh (ISIS/Isil). Turkey invaded Rojava’s Afrin region in 2018, and Anna joined the YPJ’s armed resistance against the invasion. She was murdered by a Turkish missile strike in March 2018, along with her friends Sara Merdin and Serhildan, as they tried to help refugees flee Afrin.
Fighting for a “free and dignified life for everyone”
Rojava is a region of around 3 million people, organising themselves using a model of direct democracy, attempting to give power to the grassroots. It is a society that centres on women’s liberation, religious tolerance, and minority protection as key. According to Anna’s friends:
It was anti-fascism, peoples’ democracy and women’s liberation that first attracted Anna to Rojava.
But, like all of her comrades in Rojava, Anna wasn’t just fighting for direct democracy in that region. She was fighting for a free and dignified life for everyone, and she was fighting for women’s liberation everywhere. The people of Rojava don’t see their struggle as separate from here. They see it as a small part of a global struggle.
Organising in the UK
Anna was an anarchist and anti-capitalist organiser, working tirelessly before going to Rojava. Her friends say:
[Anna was] involved in every type of resistance in the UK and Europe, from distributing food, protecting the environment, resisting detention and deportation of refugees and immigrants, to prison abolition.
In the UK, Anna stood on the streets against fascists. The Canary’s Tom Anderson recalls:
We both stood our ground alongside fellow anti-fascists one day in Dover, as the National Front lobbed bricks at us. The Front was trying to hold a racist march through the city.
Her friends say that Anna:
knew how to fight fascism, but that fight was not limited to street punch ups or macho posturing. Anna was humble and she gave meaning to every action, serving the people.
“Her loss leaves a legacy”
If Anna were alive in the UK today, she would no doubt be outraged by the systematically misogynist UK state, which fails to protect women and, in many cases, doesn’t even bother to investigate their murders. She would be disgusted by the fact that a man murders a woman every three days in this country, and that 62% of these victims were murdered by a spouse or former-partner. She would be using her education in Rojava to build a different society in the UK: one that actually tackles patriarchy and misogyny head on, and one that ensures that women are actually safe in their own homes.
Her friends say:
Remembering those we have lost in the struggle against capitalism, fascism, and patriarchy reminds us of the need for revolutionary commitment, grief and love. The present is born in every moment from the past, and we walk in the paths trodden by those who came and left before us.
We miss Anna every day, not just at the time of this anniversary. Her loss leaves a legacy; we must keep revolutionary fires burning…
They continue:
Let’s keep the momentum going in 2021, in the name of Anna Campbell, of Sara Merdin, of Serhildan, and of every person who has fallen in our struggle for freedom and dignity.
We have the power to create a society where gender liberation is at the forefront. But we can’t rely on our government to do it for us. The majority-Kurdish women’s struggle in Rojava and Bakur (within Turkey) is perhaps the strongest women’s movement in the world right now. Let’s learn from these revolutionary women so that Anna, Sara and Serhildan, and all of their comrades haven’t died in vain.
Featured image via Anna’s friends, with permission
Millions of women around the world are taking to the streets today to mark International Women’s Day — in a year where women have been disproportionately impacted by rising poverty, unemployment and violence during the pandemic. We hear voices from protests in the Philippines, Mexico and Guatemala.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN:Millions of women around the world are taking to the streets today to mark this International Women’s Day — in a year where women have been disproportionately impacted by rising poverty, unemployment and violence during the pandemic.
In the Philippines, hundreds of women led a rally outside the presidential palace in Manila, chanting “Stop killing us.” Protesters are demanding the resignation of President Duterte. This is an advocate with the women’s rights group Gabriela.
JOMSSALVADOR:We would like to underline the fact that we are in a deeper crisis and we are facing a virus far deadlier thanCOVID. And it is the rotten, anti-people, pro-foreign interest and fascist, macho-fascist presidency and leadership of President Duterte.
AMYGOODMAN:In India, thousands of women farmers led hunger strikes and sit-ins at multiple sites on the outskirts of New Delhi, where tens of thousands of farmers have camped out for over three months protesting new neoliberal agricultural laws promoted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
In Australia, hundreds of workers, from nurses to teachers, gathered outside a government building in Sydney condemning violence against women and calling for greater gender equality and protections in the workplace.
In Mexico, the names of femicide victims were painted on security barriers placed in front of the presidential palace in Mexico City’s Zócalo ahead of a massive march today. Over 900 femicides were reported in Mexico last year alone.
MARCELA:[translated] We believe that it is important that they are written because the fight is for them. What we want is to ask for justice, for the people to be aware and for the president who lives here to understand that we are fighting because they are killing us.
AMYGOODMAN:In Guatemala City, hundreds of women and girls gathered outside the presidential palace to protest the rising number of femicides. After a march, advocates filled the Constitutional Plaza for a music festival, where activists danced and artists painted colorful murals commemorating the victims of femicide. This is one of the protesters.
PROTESTER:[translated] I dream that women are free from violence, that I can go out on the streets and be at peace, know that I’m going to come back home alive. We want the liberation of women from this patriarchal system.
AMYGOODMAN:International Women’s Day also marks four years since 41 girls were burnt to death inside an orphanage near Guatemala City for protesting sexual and physical violence.
