jessica valenti

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When I was a volunteer emergency room advocate for victims of rape and domestic violence, the first question we were trained to ask women who had been abused by their partners was whether or not there was a gun in the home. Because we knew that women whose partners had access to a gun were 7 times more likely to be killed. In fact, women who are killed by their partners are more likely to be murdered by a gun than all other means combined.

Despite this tower of evidence, people will continue to insist that these women could have somehow stopped the violence. (Inaccuracies aside, the idea that women have a responsibility to keep someone from killing them rather than an abuser not to commit murder is baffling.)

“The average prison sentence for men who kill their intimate partners is 2 to 6 years. Women who kill their partners are sentenced, on average, to 15 years.¹⁷ A pair of Maryland cases vividly illustrates this inequality in sentencing.¹⁸ In one case, a judge in Baltimore County, Maryland sentenced Kenneth Peacock to 18 months for killing his unfaithful wife. The very next day, another judge in the same county sentenced Patricia Ann Hawkins to three years in prison for killing her abusive husband. Significantly, the prosecutor in the Peacock case requested a sentence twice as long as the one imposed, while the prosecutor in the Hawkins case requested one-third of the sentence imposed.”

“Media tributes to [Jovan] Belcher are problematic because they place him, those who witnessed his death, and those will play for the Chiefs without him, before the life and memory of the woman he murdered. When we reduce Kasandra to a role in relation to Belcher in headlines, only refer to her by her gender, or render her nameless and make no mention of her at all, we strip her of dignity and humanity and make her a mere casualty of a “larger” tragedy.”