10 women in 22 days - wtf Australia?

Wow that was such a poorly written article. But the over use of the word despair aside, as an Australian, I really don’t find the statistic that surprising. There is a large element of Australian society where violence is a daily occurrence that goes unnoticed. Many of the women who died would have been a part of this. Their deaths wouldn’t have been particularly visible to people outside their immediate social circle. Occasionally there will be an event that shocks the nation like double/triple homicides involving children or gun murders (gun crime in not that common and has a shock factor). But women being beaten to death by boyfriends etc just seems to be the way some people like be there. As the population has risen and no one has bothered to do anything about it it’s inevtuabke that the figures are getting very high.

Horrendous. This is exactly what researcher Jackson Katz writes and talks about when he says violence against women is a men's issue.

The section in the talk about language specifically addresses what happens with language to take men out of the equation.

If you scroll down to this section of the transcript and click - it will take you to the correct section of the video:

I want to share with you this exercise that illustrates on the sentence-structure level how the way that we think, literally the way that we use language, conspires to keep our attention off of men. This is about domestic violence in particular, but you can plug in other analogues. This comes from the work of the feminist linguist Julia Penelope.

03:07
It starts with a very basic English sentence: "John beat Mary." That's a good English sentence. John is the subject, beat is the verb, Mary is the object, good sentence. Now we're going to move to the second sentence, which says the same thing in the passive voice. "Mary was beaten by John." And now a whole lot has happened in one sentence. We've gone from "John beat Mary" to "Mary was beaten by John." We've shifted our focus in one sentence from John to Mary, and you can see John is very close to the end of the sentence, well, close to dropping off the map of our psychic plain. The third sentence, John is dropped, and we have, "Mary was beaten," and now it's all about Mary. We're not even thinking about John, it's totally focused on Mary. Over the past generation, the term we've used synonymous with "beaten" is "battered," so we have "Mary was battered." And the final sentence in this sequence, flowing from the others, is, "Mary is a battered woman." So now Mary's very identity Mary is a battered woman is what was done to her by John in the first instance. But we've demonstrated that John has long ago left the conversation.

www.ted.com/talks/jackson_katz_violence_against_women_it_s_a_men_s_issue/transcript?language=en

Can you imagine men's uproar if it were THEM dying at the hands of women. As it is just women, they will no doubt blame feminist women for not doing enough to stop men from killing us.

It’s pretty fucked. 1 shark is a national emergency but 22 women in 10 days no one cares.

That's a devastating number. Personally I'm finding Hannah Cornelius's murder in South Africa absolutely devastating to read about in the press too.