That’s the title of this interesting post at Screaming Into The Void. Amananta writes in part:
Given there are only 300 million people living in America, and approximately 1 billion estimated in”the Muslim World”, given that most women killed by their male partners are killed for leaving and thus angering or shaming him, how can you say the numbers aren’t equivalent? No we don’t call them honor killings in the states. No we don’t officially and legally sanction them. But society clearly has sympathies to the men who kill”their”women. Every time someone asks”why didn’t she leave”, every time someone suggests that her behavior helped contribute to his murderousness, every joke cracked about wife beating, shows the underlying societal callousness to the state of women.”Honor killings”overseas and the guy who kills his wife and their children here because she was leaving him have the same effect – they both are actions meant to control women by saying”behave the way ‘your’ men want you to behave, or die.”People don’t want to see men’s murdering of women in the US as in any way similar. People want to pretend it is all private, unconnected matters if it happens in the US. “Oh he was depressed, distraught, crazy.” People believe something is wrong with the individuals involved when a man kills a woman here. They do not want to look at how society encouraged and condoned the killing. We view white Americans as individuals acting alone, and those”other”people overseas as a faceless mass acting all together.
Read the whole thing. It is a post that will really make you think.
–Ann Bartow
