July 2022

 

Welcome & Introduction

 

Stats;

·        1 rape on average being reported per school day

·        1/3 of girls are sexually assaulted @ school

·        1/4 of women will experience sexual abuse 1.6 million per year

·        1/2 million women are sexually assaulted every year

·        85,000 women are raped every year.

·        Every x 3 days a woman is murdered by a man

Karen Ingala Smith updates a list of women in the UK who have been killed by men or where a man is the principal suspect. To date 52 women have been killed this year, I then proceeded to read out the 9 women this month.

A moments silence/reflection

I then went on to talk about the length of time some cases take;

Melanie Road, murdered aged 17 in 1984. It took 31 years for her killer Christopher Hampton to be jailed for life. The DS @ the time of the murder was Julia Mackay who has written a book called ‘To Hunt a Killer’, & it was her tenacity that finally got the conviction with the advancements of DNA testing. She progressed to Superintendent & is now a Consultant focusing on Homicide Prevention.

Agnes Wanjiru, a 21 year old Mother of a 5 month old baby @ a sex worker @ the time of her death. She died as a result of stab wounds to her chest & abdomen in Kenya. She disappeared in March 2012 & her body was discovered 2 months after she went missing in a septic tank.

A serving British office has been named by his comrades after he allegedly confessed to the killing.

The Pathologist said that her injuries may not have been enough to kill her, she could still have been alive when she was stuffed into the septic tank.

At the inquest which began in Nov 2018 Judge Njeni Thusku who is the Principal Magistrate for Nanyuki Law Court unusually named the soldiers who booked the rooms in the Lions Court Hotel the night Agnes was killed. She quoted from the poem ‘Silence’ by Anasuya Sengupta “Too many women in too many Countries speak the same language of Silence”. Thusku told the courtroom in Nanyuki that the Court refuses to speak the language of silence.

Subsequently nine soldiers have been involved Facebook exchanges making jokes about what happened – not dissimilar to the police officers who took the photographs/selfies of the two murdered sisters Bibaa Henay & Nicole Smallman who were both stabbed to death.

WHERE IS THE RESPECT?

To date, 10 years later no action has been taken.

Recent news of the American Supreme Court overturning the Roe V. Wade constitutional right to abortion. The consequences will be catastrophic for millions of women who have lost access to legal & safe abortions since the ruling

The British Pregnancy Advisory Service have called on the Government on 29th June to enshrine in law a woman’s right to abortion has been rejected by Deputy PM Dominic Raab & will not appear in the new British Bill of Rights.

SO we are going backwards in time not forwards!

 

There needs to be more conversations about Male Violence & behaviours.

Violence against women should be treated as a Public Health issue.

Book by Laura Bates to read ‘ Fix the System Not the Women’.

 

Thanks everyone for attending, 22 tonight – a good turnout.

 

Annie  Gardner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

September 2024

  Hello and thank you all for coming to join us this evening.   We meet here on the first Monday of every month to remember the UK women who have been killed by men, and to honour all of the women who have suffered from VAWG. This is the start of the fourth year of our vigils, and I was drawn to review things… We still use the information from the brilliant Karen Ingala-Smith’s website and Twitter account ‘Counting Dead Women’. We still do that because it is the only source we can find that collates the information.   A woman is killed by a man every three days and yet no government or police body has thought to look at these numbers separately to overall numbers.   Since our first vigil in September 2021, 318 women in the UK have been killed by men. Just about 9 every month, or one every 3 days. We stand here and talk about this every month, but I don’t think I’d stopped to think about how the numbers were adding up.   And we also need to ...
Read more

December 2023

Hello and thank you for joining us on this 10 th day of the 16 Days of Action Against Gender Based Violence. That’s not just something that we have made up locally here in Richmond, it’s an international campaign that runs every year from  November 25 th - the United Nations Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women - to  December 10 th - International Human Rights Day. And it’s right that this issue should be being tackled and talked about on a national and international level, and not just once a month here on Twickenham Green. This international campaign encourages awareness of - and action against - all forms of  violence against women and girls  including rape and sexual assault; domestic abuse; child sexual abuse; child sexual exploitation; sexual harassment; stalking; female genital mutilation; forced marriage; child marriage; sex trafficking; pornography; prostitution; and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation. And it’s important...
Read more

March 2024

  Hello and welcome to our March vigil. We meet on the 1 st Monday of each month to highlight the issue of male violence against women and girls, and to honour the women killed by men. We’ve been doing this since September 2021 when we realised that just 6 months after Sarah Everard was murdered by Wayne Couzens - when big headlines were written, and huge political promises were made - more than 50 other women had been murdered by men and only one of those had made national headlines, and nothing had changed… And still nothing has changed. We gather our information from the same source that MP Jess Phillips uses – a charity called the Femicide Census. Let me stress that – a charity, not a government department or a civil servant, officially this data doesn’t exist.   For the past nine years, Phillips has read a list of women killed by men or where a man is the principal suspect in the UK, and she read the latest list last week. She described the task as an honou...
Read more