PHOTO: Yet Another Woman Has Been Killed For Turning Down A Man Who Asked Her Out
Many women feel
uncomfortable when men tell them to smile or make comments about how great
they look while they walk down the street, a point that's been underscored over
and over again by the anti-street harassment movement. But even though some feel that catcalling is fairly harmless, many women know the truth: that rejecting a man in public could end up
getting you bullied, beaten or even killed.
At about 2 a.m.
on Jan. 22, that's what happened to 29-year-old Pittsburgh woman Janese
Talton-Jackson. Earlier in the evening, Talton-Jackson had been at a bar called
Cliff's, where a man named Charles McKinney, 41, reportedly approached her to
ask her for a date.
According to CBS
Pittsburgh, McKinney was apprehended after being shot by Pittsburgh police
officers in the course of a shootout. (The officers involved in the chase have
been placed on administrative leave for opening fire on the suspect.) He is in
stable condition and has been charged with homicide.
Were
Talton-Jackson the only woman to be killed for daring to rebuff a stranger's
advances, her death might be considered a one-off act of violence committed by
a lone maniac with a gun. But she's far from the only woman who has lost her
life for turning down a man who asked her out. In the past two years, at least
four other women have been brutally murdered for turning men away, while many
more have survived other violent attacks.
In Oct. 2014,
two women were attacked within two weeks of each other for rejecting strangers'
advances. One, an unidentified Queens, New York woman, survived having her neck
slashed in the lobby of her apartment building after turning a guy down. The
other, Detroit native Mary "Unique" Spears, was shot three times
after she refused to give a man her phone number, eventually dying from her
injuries.
The following
month, 30-year-old Dana Kimbro, who was eight months pregnant at the time,
turned down Jesse Cervantes, a stranger she met on a San Antonio, Texas street.
Cervantes then followed her, slammed her against the sidewalk and stabbed her
in the abdomen.
About six weeks later, in December, a Spokane, Washington woman
survived an attempted murder by Avery Quin Zion Latham, an acquaintance who
strangled her and slit her throat with a pocket knife.
Again, that was
just in 2014.
The
blog When Women Refuse is full of more stories of women facing violence
for rejecting men's advances, submitted by readers or taken from headlines. As
Deanna Zandt, the activist who created the Tumblr, told Think Progress shortly
after it launched, the goal was to highlight the fact that "we still don't
view gender based violence as a large cultural issue — we tend to think of
these as isolated incidences."
But as
Talton-Jackson's murder and each of the attacks that came before it show,
that's absolutely not the case
source:cnn.com/googleimage
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