I make no apology for what may look like me just lazily redirecting readers to another site. It’s just that I think Robert Fisk’s series in this week’s Independent on so-called honour crimes is so important everyone should read it.
So here are the links:
The crimewave that shames the world
One woman’s nightmare, and a crime against humanity
Relatives with blood on their hands
The lie behind mass ‘suicides’ of Egypt’s young women
The truth about ‘honour’ killings
Too Much To Say For Myself 
I was having an okay day but my mood plummeted during the reading of these links. Probably shouldn’t have read them one after the other without a break (or a drink) Now I don’t even know what to do with myself, I am enraged and upset. Heart wrenching stuff – so thanks for the links, I think.
Sobering stuff. Still not on the news I notice, though apparently wayne rooney is requesting privacy.
thanks for posting these links.
someone sent me a piece called ‘a genocide against my people’ – something a sioux chief said and that she applied to women. i think it’s true, don’t you? all these women being murdered, because they are women, being raped because they are women. an yet, when you try and talk about it, you get what about teh menz thrown in your face.
amnesty calls violence against women and girls the greatest human rights violation of our time, and the news isn’t even reporting the rapes in the congo. a religious bigot desperate for press attention, they report about, fuelling his egtisitical desires. a footballer who fuels the industry that contributes to this genocide, they report about, conveniently forgetting the latter fact. but the countless murders of our sisters every day, every week, an ominious silence. and even when it does make the news, it is framed around the fault of women.
sometimes it feels so overwhelming when you can’t even win the simple argument. i was reading an article on liberal conspiracy a while back about forced sterilization of women, and the commenters, rather than discussing the horror, argued about whether it could realy be called genocide, whether it really fitted the dictionary definition (it did, in my view, but not in the view of the person who posted the definition)
because semantic are soooooo much more important than women’s lives.
ps – i do think semantics are important btw, and i don’t want to give the impression i don’t care about language and how it’s used, but it was very frustrating that an article clearly about horrific acts of vawg prompted a debate about words rather than a debate about vawg – it seemed a classic shifting technique where people were uncomfortable and decided to try and discredit the author, rather than discuss the matter at hand.
Urgh, not up to facing reading those right now, but thanks Cath.
Sianushka, I abolutely agree – violence is being committed against women *because we are women* yet if we dare say so, we’re ignored or accused of alienating teh pooor menz. Gah.
Thanks for posting this, Cath. It’s so sad, and incredibly enraging. It was too upsetting to read all through at once, but I will.