What would "justice" look like here? Nothing will bring Mollie Tibbets back, and the safety of women being able to just be safe doing ordinary things feels more and more unsafe. I don't like to be an alarmist, but is it safe for a young woman to go running alone? Go traveling to a foreign country? Grab an Uber for a ride home?
I don't want to live in fear of bad things happening, or scare my daughters...but it feels to me as though our society has changed. Rape culture mentality and male entitlement is rampant. I don't know why that is...or if my perception is skewed.
I bought my daughter a treadmill. I don't want her running outside alone.
I also think our society has changed in regard to women's safety, and I believe it has to do with women feeling empowered to live their lives with the same human rights as men. By that, I mean women have increasingly become more independent and refuse to limit their activities. Unfortunately, doing so puts women at risk. For example, I don't remember my mother going out alone after dark, traveling alone, or doing many things alone, and she was 5'9"--taller than many men of her generation--and a strong farm girl. Women of that generation were socialized to be dependent--stay in groups, be accompanied by a male, or stay safe at home. She simply wasn't comfortable doing many things alone because it was not acceptable for women of her generation. Today's generation of women are socialized differently, and feel entitled to go where they want when they want, and rightly so, but the reality is that it makes women more vulnerable to gender-based violence and femicide, which is on the rise worldwide.
Posters on another thread were saying that "statistics" show "people" are safer today than in the past. I would be very interested in seeing those "statistics" broken down by gender. I believe they would show that
females are not safer. MOO.
Below is a link to an article about female solo travel that I posted in Carla Stefaniak's thread because it mentions her murder in Costa Rica. It includes some interesting information on gender violence in general.
Adventurous. Alone. Attacked.
“We have evidence that shows that women face risks that men don’t face in public spaces, at home, wherever they may be,” said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of
UN Women, an organization that promotes female equality. Increasingly, “wherever they may be” includes alone in foreign countries.
But she said that violence against female tourists was a thread in the broader fabric of violence against women around the world. And violent episodes are just as likely to occur, experts note, in rich Western nations
such as France,
Italy and
Germany as in the developing world.
"The root cause of this kind of violence against women in communities and in public and private spaces has a lot to do with the underlying gender stereotypes, social norms, entitlement and patriarchy,” Ms. Mlambo-Ngcuka said.
