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 categorize 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 percent 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.
There are no exact figures available for sexually motivated murders of girls and women in the UK, such as the notorious Sarah Payne case, but they happen regularly enough -- on average 10 every year. Police say some of these 10 will be rape victims, killed by the rapist to stop them from giving evidence. The courts call it "disposing of evidence".
A number of shootings of women across the UK over the past few years are "retaliation murders" -- gangland, drug-related killings of female relatives and friends of men in conflict with the killers, such as Charlene Ellis and Letisha Shakespeare, who were gunned down in Birmingham in 2003.
Since 1990, almost 70 prostitutes are known to have been murdered in Britain. Girls trafficked into prostitution from Africa and Eastern Europe often go missing from children's homes. Sometimes their bodies turn up, disposed of by the trafficker or maybe killed by a punter.
The majority of the 69 women missing in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside district were involved in prostitution. It took years of pressure from family members before police began treating the disappearances as potential murder. In 2002, the remains of 20 of the women were found on a pig farm near where they were last seen. Police now believe there may be more than 100 victims on the farm.
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.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations