A Woman is Murdered in Trinidad, the Mayor Blames Her
Trigger Warning – Rape and Murder
Tragically this week, Asami Nagakiya, a Japanese women who attended the Trinidad Carnival celebration as a professional musician, was murdered — and likely raped. Now there’s a petition you can sign calling for the local mayor’s resignation after he blamed HER for it.
“‘She had a laceration on her elbow and black and blue marks on her waist,’ Adams told reporters. ‘It look like a rape/murder to me.’
Authorities released an autopsy report Thursday stating that Nagakiya had been strangled, according to television station CNC. They have not commented on the suspicion that Nagakiya was sexually assaulted.”
To make matters worse, the local mayor blamed HER for her own death.
“‘You know before Carnival I did make a comment about vulgarity and lewdness,’ Raymond Tim Kee said during a Wednesday press conference, according to local media station Loop. ‘The woman has the responsibility to ensure that [she is] not abused.’
Kee’s cringe-worthy comments kept getting worse, as he tried to link the Japanese musician’s killing to Carnival culture.
‘And my argument was you could enjoy Carnival without going through that routine … of prancing and partying,’ he asked. ‘Then why you can’t continue with that and maintain some kind of dignity?’
‘You have to let your imagination roll a bit and figure out was there any evidence of resistance or did alcohol control?’ he told reporters. ‘Therefore involuntary actions were engaged in, and so on ….
‘It’s a matter of, if she was still in her costume – I think that’s what I heard – let your imagination roll,’ he added, before casting the killing less as an outrageous crime than as an ’embarrassment’ for the city.”
Fortunately, there has been huge outcry over his comments.
“Within hours, a woman had launched an online petition calling for Kee’s resignation. By early Friday morning, it had gathered nearly 7,000 signatures. (That equates to roughly 10 percent of the population of Port of Spain.)
‘Victim shaming is an irresponsible thing for anyone to do, far less a leader in a society,’ wrote Rhoda Bharath, a St Augustine resident who signed the petition. ‘[The] Mayor has shown himself to be both insensitive, preemptive and ignorant. He must go.’
‘Tim Kee is an example of everything wrong with leadership in this country,’ added Ryan Ramoutar, a signatory from Point Fortin. ‘His thinking is archaic and his opinion essentially exonerates the perpetrators of any responsibility. He has, effectively, endorsed murder.'”
Our thoughts go out to her family and friends and hope there will be justice for her death. And we applaud everyone who is calling out the outrageous victim-blaming!
#CarnivalSemAssedio Campaign in Brazil
“A campaign against street harassment during Carnival is gathering steam in Brazil.
The campaign is using the hashtag #CarnavalSemAssedio, or #CarnivalWithoutHarassment, to help dispel the myth that harassment during Carnival is somehow more permissible.
“Unfortunately, sexual abuse figures increase in this period for many reasons and many men justify their abusive behavior as a normal attempt to ‘flirt’,” Heloisa Aun, one of the campaign’s founders, told Forum magazine.
According to the campaign’s materials, the goal is to “combat violence and machismo, promoting discussion that harassment is harassment no matter the time of year.”
Organizers are calling on women and men to break the silence and speak out against harassment during carnival, using the hashtag to document cases of harassment.”
Good for them!
I’m wishing all who celebrate it a safe & fun Carnival and Mardi Gras!
Video: Doggie Harassment
The ladies in this video show how inappropriate street harassment is, including when it’s directed at dogs.
Early Feb. 2016 News Round-Up
A few stories in the news:
IWPR, “Afghan Women Demand Action Over Street Harassment”:
“Latifa, 22, earns up to 150 US dollars each month working in a factory that processes dried fruit. She needs the money, but longs to leave her job because of the gauntlet she has to run on her journey to and from work each day.
Every morning, as soon as she leaves her house and heads for the bus stop, men begin to harass her. Private cars pull up beside her and the occupants try to lure her inside.
“These men invite me to go have fun with them, they offer to pay me money, they harass and taunt me,” she told IWPR. The same thing happens on the way home.
The harassment had reached a point, she explained, where she would prefer not to have to go out to work at all. However, she has to support her family as her father was killed in a suicide bombing three years ago.
Campaigners say that street harassment in Afghanistan has reached epidemic proportions. Women furious at the extent of the problem have been organising public protests across the country.”
She dropped out of school, around a year back, because of the street harassment she regularly faced while returning home. The teenage girl, however, did not know that she would soon muster the courage to fight back and speak up for others.
DNA, “The story of a teenage girl and her battle against street harassment”:
“This is the story of courage of 16 years old girl Anajli, who resides in Sanjay Camp area that comes under Deoli assembly constituency of Delhi. The JJ Cluster colony, according to rough estimates, is home to around 10,000 families, and is believed to be a highly unsafe area for women, who feared stepping out of their homes after 8 pm till some time back.
‘Lewd comments, ogling, attempts of molestation break the confidence of many girls living here. That’s what happened to me, and so I decided to leave school. I missed studies, but I feared the repercussions of going out and facing the menace,’ Anjali recalls…
Anjali, who is now well-versed in laws pertaining to gender-based violence and regularly holds casual meetings with women in her locality, is also happy to get back to school, finally. ‘I have no fear of the men I may face out there because I feel empowered by empowering others,’ she sums up.”
City Lab, “How Urban Design Could Help Reduce Rape in India”
“Indians are moving to cities to access opportunity. If women of any class or background feel unsafe leaving their houses to pursue that opportunity, the promise of India’s urban future would be lost. A radical rethink of how Indian cities are designed must be a central part of how the country does justice to “J”’s memory.”