In the late afternoon of December 6, 1989, an angry young man with a semi-automatic rifle walked into the registrar’s office at École Polytechnique, the University of Montréal’s engineering school. After twenty minutes, 14 women lay dead, and 14 others, mostly women, were injured. He had compiled a hit list of 19 other women he wanted to murder. Journalist and prominent feminist Francine Pelletier learned that she was one of them.
“Please note that I am committing suicide today,” Lepine wrote, “not because of financial reasons, but because of political ones. I have decided to send ad patres [“to their ancestors”] the feminists who have always ruined my life.”
Why are so many women charged with murder, as opposed to manslaughter, if there is strong evidence of domestic violence?
How different is the attitude to men defending property than to women defending their own lives or the lives of their children against violent men? When Richard Osborn-Brooks was arrested after stabbing a burglar who tried to break into his home, the hashtag #FreeRichardOsbornBrooks was launched alongside a petition calling for the Crown Prosecution Service to take no action against him. He was released without charge. “We have the right to protect ourselves in our own home,” tweeted one man, in support of Osborn-Brooks.
The victims of domestic violence, who live in well-founded fear of their lives, have the right to a fair trial. Tragedies could have been avoided had the perpetrators of these crimes been dealt with in the first instance. For the sake of all the Emma Humphreys out there, let us demand that domestic violence becomes a thing of the past.
According to a report from The Sydney Morning Herald, sources close to the commercial dealings of the station have said that on an annual basis, the boycott could cost the show about $6 million in advertising. The top-rating show typically brings in $12 million a year.
Jones has faced major commercial backlash since he used violent language towards Jacinda Ardern in August. On his popular breakfast program, Jones said that the New Zealand Prime Minister should have a sock shoved down her throat and that she needed a “backhander”.
After two trials described by Amnesty International as “grossly unfair,” Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh has been sentenced to a total of 38 years in prison and 148 lashes.
Critics from around the world decried the outcome of Sotoudeh’s case. Amnesty International said it was harshest sentence documented against a human rights defender in Iran in recent memory. Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran, told CBS News it exposed “the insecurity the regime has to any peaceful challenge.”
The deaths of Ms Maureen Mandijarra, Ms Mullaley’s son baby Charlie, Ms Dhu, Ms Amy Armstrong-Ugle, Ms Maher, Ms Williams and her unborn child, Aunty Tanya Day, Ms Cherdeena Wynne and Ms Joyce Clarke shows the fatal consequences of a legal system that refuses to protect Aboriginal woman, and a health system that too refuses to care. These systems work together like a well-oiled machine with devastating results. The one place in which Aboriginal woman should be able to count on to find recourse, one would think, would be the Human Rights Commission. But of course, it too is a state-sanctioned institution that fails to serve Aboriginal women in much the same way that the health and justice systems do.
In June this year, the HRC published ‘Let’s Talk About Race: a guide on how to conduct a conversation about racism’ which seeks to promote “positive” “constructive” and “objective” conversations about racism, to accompany the documentary ‘The Final Quarter’. The guide forms part of the HRC’s signature campaign ‘Racism. It Stops With Me’ which doesn’t appear to attend to the violence of racism, but instead advises that racism can cause “feelings of sadness and anger, even anxiety and depression”. The HRC assures us however, that racism exists among “a small minority of people”.
Right now Aboriginal woman are doing so much of the heavy lifting, while suffering the full brunt of racist violence at the hands of the state, so Human Rights Commission, where the bloody hell are you?
Woman’s Shelter Twitter account show several threats and messages scrawled on the centre’s windows like “KILL TERFS” and “TRANS POWER.”
The shelter is believed to be Canada’s oldest and longest standing rape shelters for women.
The Post Millennial reached out to Vancouver Rape Relief who confirmed that the motivation behind the vandalism and threats was their refusal to allow biological males to stay in their rape shelters.
Since last week 22 companies have pulled their advertising from The Alan Jones Breakfast Show on 2GB and there are 55,000 mad witches to thank for it.
Encouraging major brands to pull their marketing spend from a major media platform like Jones’ radio program is no small feat and there are 55,000 witches around Australia to thank for it.
In January of 2016 Jennie Hill set up Facebook page called Mad Fucking Witches to highlight the appalling sexism, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism she was seeing in Australia.
The page’s name was inspired by the famous text message federal MP Peter Dutton accidentally sent to political editor Samantha Maiden in which he described her as a ‘mad fucking witch’.
Within a few days 20,000 ‘witches’ had signed up. The group, which continually highlights government and societal misogyny: from the lack of women in government positions, to asylum seeker issues, Indigenous issues, cuts to women’s family violence services and cuts to women’s medical services, now has 55,000 followers. A number of volunteers work alongside Hill to manage the page.
Evie Amati, who attacked two strangers with an axe in a Sydney convenience store in 2017, has her jail term increased by five years after the Crown appealed the leniency of her original sentence.
Amati’s lawyer had asked the court to reject the appeal by citing the progress she has made in custody and the antagonism she has suffered from female inmates due to her gender status.
But Acting Justice Carolyn Simpson said “a manifestly inadequate aggregate sentence was imposed for three very serious crimes”.
For decades now the NRA has successfully lobbied Congress to prevent any funding for the CDC to study why gun violence in the US has grown to epidemic proportions.
I don’t have a Ph.D, and I’m not a social scientist, but I’d like to offer a few observations and ask that we perhaps “study” the following:
1. Nearly all gun murders are committed by one gender. Let’s study why that is.
2. The vast majority of guns are owned by white people. Why is that? Most of these white people live in nearly all-white suburban and rural areas which have little or no crime. Why, really, do they need all those guns?
3. Why are most of these school shootings and other mass shootings committed by young white males?
4. Why, when the media covers gun violence in our black communities, do they never speak of it as the result of millions of African Americans still forced to live — 150 years after slavery — in a premeditated, predetermined system of enforced and cruel poverty, thus causing a tremendous amount of suffering and pain and death.
5. Why are many men unable to work out their anger issues without violence? And what are they afraid of? Why not study why there is so much unfounded fear within white men. Are they subconsciously afraid because they know they live in a society where one race gets a pass (or at least a chance), and the other races are left to fight for the crumbs? Why not study why there is so much unfounded fear within white men. Do white men who see so many fellow white men crushed by a dog-eat-dog economic system, they fear they too may be next?
So the frightened scared man needs a gun. Yet women — who have a REAL reason to be afraid in this society — carry hardly ANY of the 300 million+ guns in this country. Let’s study that.
6. Why are women so often the victims of this violence? Let’s study how millions of boys are raised and socialized in this culture to be man-boys who fear & despise women. And why women end up dead because of this ugly misogyny.
7. Perhaps it simply comes down to this: In the US, women hold no real political, economic or social power. 75% of Congress are men. A woman wins the presidency, but a slave-era law prohibits her from taking office. Just 6% of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies are women. None of the major religions are run by women. Wall Street is not run by women. We still haven’t passed the Equal Rights Amendment for women.
Wouldn’t a scientific study by the CDC show that if Congress was majority female (which might give us better schools, universal health care, day care and senior care), and if women were paid the same as men (a strong wage so all could have a decent life), wouldn’t this then be the ultimate result: Far less of us will die on any given day from an angry spray of random bullets?
In the late afternoon of December 6, 1989, an angry young man with a semi-automatic rifle walked into the registrar’s office at École Polytechnique, the University of Montréal’s engineering school. After twenty minutes, 14 women lay dead, and 14 others, mostly women, were injured. He had compiled a hit list of 19 other women he wanted to murder. Journalist and prominent feminist Francine Pelletier learned that she was one of them.
