Another murder in Valdosta

Another domestic violence murder in Valdosta:

A man shot and killed his wife Sunday evening, apparently following an argument at their home in south Lowndes County, according to Lowndes County Sheriff Chris Prine.

"He shot her six times, and what's worse, while their two young children were at home," Prine said. The woman died after being transported to South Georgia Medical Center.

The suspect has been taken into custody but had not been officially charged by press time Sunday evening.

Prine confirmed that the man called police after he shot his wife, threatening to kill himself, saying he was holding a gun to his head. Deputies were immediately dispatched to the home and were able to take control of the scene, secure the children's safety, and begin to render medical assistance to the woman.

Valdosta Daily Times provides a summary of the recent rash of domestic violence killings in their city.

Blog Hiatus

We'll be on a short hiatus this week, as our blogmistress is on vacation. Please take some time to digest last week's posts, and we'll pick back up next week.

Gender-Motivated Mass Shooting

From WIMN's Voices:

A health club in Collier County, PA this week was the site of yet another horrific mass shooting by yet another disaffected man armed with ammo and a deep hatred of women. The shooter specifically targeted women, reportedly firing 52 shots, killing three women and injuring nine more before committing suicide.

Today, the Associated Press’s Genaro C. Armas reports that the alleged shooter, George Sodini, maintained a website detailing his desire –and plans — to kill women. The calculated nature of the crime, and the gunman’s stated intention to target only women, is eerily similar to the Montreal Massacre of 1989, in which a man opened fire on students after screaming, “You’re women, you’re going to be engineers. You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists.”

Perhaps it takes this level of hit-us-over-the-head bluntness for media to notice that a mass murder is also a hate crime, when the victims of that crime are solely women. In contrast to many other shootings in which similar motivations have gone unreported over the past two decades, the AP (and several other news outlets picking up Armas’s story) have chosen to discuss the extremely relevant role of misogyny as the root cause of the bloody tragedy in Collier County. . .

So, finally, a gender-based hate crime is being reported (at least by the AP, at least for now) within the context of the killer’s actual anti-woman agenda. It’s an important step forward in media understanding of and coverage of this sort of crime. But if the press’s previous track record is any indicator, Sodini’s misogyny could potentially fall out of the frame of follow-up reporting.

Since such context has been woefully missing from most corporate media coverage of mass shootings over the last two decades, WIMN’s Voices would like to offer some helpful history from the WayBack machine:

From Jonesboro to Virginia Tech - sexism is fatal, but media miss the story***This includes a discussion of the sexist underpinnings of the murders at Virginia Tech in 2007, and a full reprint of “Jonesboro: Sexism Kills Girls,” May, 1998, Sojourner: The
Women’s Forum

"From Jonesboro to Virginia Tech" is an absolute must-read.

Amanda from Pandagon also outlines how gender-motivated crimes don't happen in a vacuum.

George Sodini was angry at the entire world of “desirable” women for not up and volunteering to have sex with him, and every day anonymous men around the country and world beat, rape, and even kill women because said women were also considered insufficiently compliant, often to unstated demands that women were supposed to just anticipate and fill without complaint. Today, women will be raped or beaten or maybe even killed for choosing to do differently than a man desired of them---everything from screwing up the household chores to being deemed a tease to thinking they had a right to go to this party/walk down this alley to leaving a man who wants them to stay. But most people won’t see Sodini’s crime as different by degree, but by kind, because unlike most men who commit this kind of hate crime against women, Sodini didn’t know his victims.

We’re going to write him off as crazy. But the thing is that “crazy” doesn’t mean completely detached from the world, at least most of the time. Sodini wasn’t one of those people who is so wrapped up in their delusions that they can’t hold a job and need to be kept in an institution. In fact, what’s disturbing about his diary entries is that they sound pretty much like the same ranting you get from every misogynist who thinks he’s a Nice Guy®, and who hates women for their perceived malicious unwillingness to have sex with him.

Anna at Jezebel also makes the connection to mainstream misogyny.

His conviction that all the "desirable single women" in the country are collectively rejecting him, even though he is not "too weird" seems at first like the antithesis of the bluster of pickup artists and "game" aficionados, but a glanceat repugnablog Roissy in DC reveals a connection. In a post about the shooting, Roissy writes,

When men kill women, the underlying reason is almost always an unfulfilled psychosexual need. This goes for spree shooters, rapists, and serial killers. I'm not surprised Sodini hasn't had sex in nearly 20 years. As I've written before, to men celibacy is walking death, and anything is justified in avoiding that miserable fate.

Roissy's contention that "anything is justified" to help men avoid celibacy is terrifying, but more subtly disturbing is his assumption that Sodini's rampage was directly caused by women refusing to sleep with him. Like Sodini himself, Roissy assumes that Sodini shot up a gym because women rejected him, not that women rejected him because he was the kind of guy who would one day shoot up a gym.

If your day isn't already ruined, go read the rest of that post and it will be.

Chris Brown Updates

We're a little late to the game on this one - Summer is a very busy time at WRC - but there has been a lot of recent Chris Brown news. We don't normally zero in on celebrities like this, but following the Brown case start to finish can really provide some insight into what abusive relationships looks like.

First off, after accepting a plea deal for no jail time, Brown was spotted at a party wearing a $300,000 custom-made diamond necklace reading "Oops". In light of that, his video apology rings kind of hollow. We're not the only ones who think so.

The obvious flaw in his apology is that you can't tell what he's apologizing for. He simply calls his brutal assault on Rihanna "the situation" or "what I've done". Anna at Jezebel provides a critique:

Brown says he's sorry about "those few moments," about "what I've done," about "the situation," about "what happened," and about "my mistake." Only once does he actually use the term "domestic violence," and this when he is mentioning the domestic violence that he witnessed growing up. Whether or not his apology is simply a calculated "ploy to encourage parents to let their children buy his records again," as entertainment.ie puts it, someone in Brown's camp clearly knows that if he said, "I'm sorry that I beat Rihanna," the apology would go down a lot less smoothly.

By going the vague route, Brown allows fans to forget the visceral reality of what he did — assaulting Rihanna until her face was swollen and bruised — and instead focus on all the nice things he says about his mother, his "spiritual advisors," and his commitment to change. By saying he's sorry he didn't "handle the situation better," he casts the beating as a response to a bad "situation" — and instance of poor conflict resolution, not of flying off the handle. And by implying there was something that needed to be "handled" in some way, this statement subtly implicates Rihanna too.

It seems that Oprah didn't buy it either. As promised in his apology video, Brown wanted to immediately begin doing interviews once his sentencing hearing was over. He wanted Oprah, but Oprah turned him down, so he turned to Larry King instead. His handlers believe that King will allow Chris the opportunity to get his apology across without facing “brutal questioning”.

But what does all this mean? Will Chris Brown stop being a batterer? Will his fans accept his apology and move on? No one knows, by Jaclyn Friedman at Huffington Post summarizes the implications of the sentencing, and of batterers intervention in general, nicely.

But what really may make the difference for Brown is a factor most programs sorely lack -- accountability. While all eyes will be on Brown as he completes his sentence, that's hardly the case for most abusers. In fact, few jurisdictions in the country have systems in place to enforce their own sentences when it comes to batterer intervention programs, resulting in a national noncompletion rate of about 50%. Given that abusers who fail to complete their court-mandated programs are more than twice as likely to reoffend than those who do, that's a gap which urgently needs addressing.

Go read Jaclyn's whole article. It makes some recommendations I'm sure that our friends at Men Stopping Violence would agree with.

Another Murder in Augusta

From the August Chronicle:

“She came to her mother’s house to get away from him. She had left him,” her sister, Shelia Chapman, said. “Then for him to come here and do that to her, it’s just wrong. She tried to leave.”

Ms. Sims, 33, was found dead early today in the front yard of her Wrightsboro Road residence, shot multiple times. The body of her estranged common-law husband, Johnny Lee Lewis, 33, of Hale Street, was also found on the front yard, with a gunshot wound to the head.

Authorities are calling the shootings a murder-suicide. It is the second such incident this year and Richmond County’s 14th homicide so far.

According to the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office, officers were called to a double shooting in the 1400 block of Wrightsboro Road shortly after 2 a.m. and found the victims’ bodies in the front yard of the duplex.

Both were pronounced dead at the scene. Richmond County Chief Deputy Coroner Mark Bowen said the Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime lab will conduct an autopsy.

According to the sheriff’s office, Mr. Lewis took a cab to Ms. Sims residence and into an argument with her. The argument then turned physical, at which point Mr. Lewis drew a handgun and shot Ms. Sims. He then shot himself.

Mr. Lewis and Ms. Sims had been together 17 years and have six children, said investigators.

The children range in ages from 5 to 16, said Barbara Ann Gresham, Ms. Sims’ aunt. One of the children saw the shooting, she added.

“They’ve lost their mother. She was a caring, loving mother,” Ms. Gresham said. “He took it upon himself to take her from this earth and from us, way too early.”

The couple had a history of domestic violence complaints in Richmond County.

Mr. Lewis had been arrested five times since 1997 for assaults on Ms. Sims. Ms. Sims was arrested once in 2004 for stabbing Mr. Lewis in the shoulder.

Despite what was going on, Ms. Sims would never let it show, Ms. Gresham said.

“She kept you laughing. She always had a smile on her face,” she said of her niece. “She would do anything for you. She loved her family. Family was important to her.”

Ms. Sims’ family is in the process of making funeral arrangements, Ms. Gresham said.

“We are going to miss her, but we know that she is with God now,” she said. “We will never forget her or that smile she always had.”

This is another woman who did everything "right". She called the police many times, she fought back*, and, when that didn't stop the violence, eventually ended the relationship. That doesn't, however, stop staff writers or police from blaming her. "Family members of Tonya Sims thought she had gotten herself out of a long-time relationship marked by domestic violence," the article begins. "She hadn’t, and police say it cost Ms. Sims her life this morning."


*One of the more common things we hear from people who swear domestic violence could never happen to them is that if their husband/boyfriend/partner ever hit them, they'd hit back.