"The facts on 'femicide'" - from the Guardian [View All]

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(Esp. for anyone living in da Nile.)

The murder of the Amish schoolgirls is not the first time, by any means, that women or girls have been singled out for death. In 1989, when misogynist Marc Lepine stormed into a college in Montreal, Canada, and shot 14 young women dead, feminists began to demand that police categorise such killings as "femicide", for the same reason that racially motivated murders are named as such. Since then, hundreds of thousands more women and girls have been murdered by men around the world. Different circumstances, different methods, but all for the same reason: hatred of females, and a desire to exercise power over them.

In the 14th and 15th centuries, tens of thousands of women were drowned, stoned and hanged by men in Britain and Europe for being unmarried, or deviating from their prescribed gender role. Every year in Britain, an average of 100 women are killed by a current or former partner. This constitutes 42% of all female victims of homicide. The Council of Europe recently stated that domestic violence is the biggest cause of death and disability for all women under the age of 44. Girls are not exempt: young women aged between 15 and 24 have the highest risk of being killed by male partners... <snip..."retaliation murders", prostitutes murdered, etc.>

Globally, more than 5,000 girls and women are killed every year by male family members in so-called "honour killings", according to the UN. Their "crimes" include marrying out of their faith or culture, being raped, or something as trivial as talking to a man without a chaperone.

In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, there have been at least 370 murders of girls and young women since 1993. Bodies have been found in streets, ditches, rivers and buried in marshland. Police have variously attributed the murders to serial killers, drug cartels and domestic violence. Many of the victims were poor working mothers employed in factories. Most of the murders - committed by strangulation or stabbing - are thought to have been sexually motivated.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usguns/Story/0,,1887005,00.html