Call It By Its True Name

On Thursday, the New Haven Police Chief classified the murder of Yale graduate student Annie Le as ‘workplace violence.’ Several (feminist) voices have been raised in protest of such a classification, but not nearly enough. I now raise mine.

Annie Le was a victim of a hate crime and it has a name. Its name is gender-violence. Its name is misogyny. Annie Le was murdered because she was a woman.
She was murdered by a bully with a history of violence against women; a brute who cleaned mice cages for a living and who became enraged when a petite, brilliant young woman with a promising career did not heed his commands, was not intimidated by his text messages, did not submit to his male entitlement to authority.

The leadership and citizens of this country point their fingers at violence against women in other parts of the world. We denounce female infanticide in China, bride burnings in India, honor killings in Pakistan and Syria, sex/slave trafficking in women’s and children’s bodies in Thailand and Cambodia, female genital mutilation in Africa, but when the cultural evidence is laid at our door and within our own borders we deny, refute, contest, defend and mask its true nature under euphemisms. Or we appeal to pathologies and psychoses that are unique to the individual alone so that once again we can hide behind the veil of denial. We say, “What a sick man HE is,” rather than diagnosing the disease that is pandemic in our culture.

According to the United States Department of Justice:

Women are more likely to be victims of sexual violence than men: 78% of the victims of rape and sexual assault are women and 22% are men.

Most perpetrators of sexual violence are men. Among acts of sexual violence committed against women since the age of 18, 100% of rapes, 92% of physical assaults, and 97% of stalking acts were perpetrated by men. Sexual violence against men is also mainly male violence: 70% of rapes, 86% of physical assaults, and 65% of stalking acts were perpetrated by men.

In 8 out of 10 rape cases, the victim knows the perpetrator. Of people who report sexual violence, 64% of women and 16% of men were raped, physically assaulted, or stalked by an intimate partner. This includes a current or former spouse, cohabitating partner, boyfriend/girlfriend, or date.

In 2000, 1,247 women and 440 men were killed by an intimate partner. In recent years, an intimate partner killed approximately 33% of female murder victims and 4% of male murder victims.

Of the almost 3.5 million violent crimes committed against family members, 49% of these were crimes against spouses. 84% of spouse abuse victims were females, and 86% of victims of dating partner abuse were female.

Males were 83% of spouse murderers and 75% of dating partner murderers.

The number one killer of African-American women ages 15 to 34 is homicide at the hands of a current or former intimate partner.

50% of offenders in state prison for spousal abuse had killed their victims. Wives were more likely than husbands to be killed by their spouses: wives were about half of all spouses in the population in 2002, but 81% of all persons killed by their spouse.

The Violence Policy Center reports that of females killed with a firearm, almost two-thirds were killed by their intimate partners. The number of females shot and killed by their husband or intimate partner was more than three times higher than the total number murdered by male strangers using all weapons combined in single victim/single offender incidents in 2002.

You want euphemisms? I can come up with plenty; workplace violence, bedroom violence, barroom violence, back alley violence, living room violence, hotel violence, street violence, inside-the-car violence, in-the-shed violence, in-the-schoolhouse violence. But PLACES don’t commit violence. HANDS commit violence. And overwhelmingly those hands are raised against women.
Call it by its true name. Its name is misogyny.

For more information visit the American Bar Association’s web site: http://www.abanet.org/domviol/statistics.html#prevalence