The woman whose life he took is forgotten
Remember when the interim director of the Berkeley Astronomy department said: ““Of course, this is hardest for Geoff in this moment”?
Now it’s Oscar Pistorius who is “in need of healing.”
[A] justice system serves society with a split purpose. There’s punishment of the perpetrator and an element of rehabilitation (which has been vigorously stressed in this case – the terms of his house arrest include community service). And there’s also the strong social message that the justice system serves: through its sentencing, it makes a comment on the seriousness of the crime and how profoundly it will be perceived. This is the sticking point.
…
Judge Thokozile Masipa had to deal with the facts in front of her, and mete out a sentence as appropriate. But the parole board decision to release Pistorius from prison today measures the life of a woman, violently taken, in just a few short months behind bars. The value of South African women’s lives is set at an all-time low.
When the homepage of a major South African news site carries a story saying that Pistorius is ‘broken and in need of healing’, we, as women, are told that the perpetrator of the most violent of crimes is actually the victim, in need of comfort and protection, while the woman whose life he took is forgotten, edited out the story, just another statistic in a justice system that served her poorly.
We must make sure the world remembers: #HerNameWasReevaSteenkamp. And it is her life, not her killer’s, which it’s important to include in our ongoing conversation about global rates of violence against women.
And our ongoing conversation about whether or not women even matter.
Reminds me of this god-awful bit of poetry I sat through early last year. The original, which friends had seen and which I believe organisers didn’t want performed, was basically a misogyny spite-wank over how Poet had deliberately damaged his ex’s life by introducing her to an abusive someone with a drug dependency. It was amended for performance (not that the organisers were happy with that either), with Poet pointing out his scheming had had unintended consequences for his Daughter, and how it was such a darn struggle, his coming to terms with what he’d done.
His daughter’s and ex’s suffering was mentioned only in the abstract, never actually being described, while his own inner struggle, fatuous and self-pitying as it was, took center stage.
Well, it is true.
Oscar is in need of healing.
Reeva cannot be healed because she is FUCKING DEAD!
In Whitechapel there are daily “Jack the Ripper” tours where tourists are guided round the sites of his murders. I used to know one of the tour guides who said she doubted whether many people knew the names of any of his victims even after going on the tour.
broken? in need of healing?
Nope. That is just stupid and offensive. Let him remain unhealed.
“healing”
As “chigau” above says, you can’t heal if you’re dead.