The Dead Woman made real
Recognizing the reality of woman-killing in the real world
I wasn’t really paying attention.
I was unpacking and painting, settling into my new home and my new town, Spokane, WA. As I moved clothes from suitcases to hangers and got to know my neighbors, I turned to the local news to learn more about my new city.
Through the noise of news I started seeing women’s faces. More and more over the weeks and months. Radiant and life-full smiles of women who, up until reading the article’s headline seemed just as capable of winning a prize or sharing some civic achievement than what their image conveyed: news of their murder. This image of a single woman posed in a moment of life struck me - from this point forward they would miss cloudless days, carefree ones, expanses of time left up to chance. The banality of their days is something we all share. The routine nature of reporting their deaths makes it easy for us to ignore or fail to spot the pattern, the specificity.
Like, I said, like others, I wasn’t paying attention.
Spokane, Washington is a mid-sized railroad town located in Eastern Washington. It’s a rugged and masculine town, no doubt a demographic inheritance from its early resource extraction days. Men from all crowded its streets, hung up on a chance for work - or play.
The city’s terrain is intense and jagged. Regardless of where are any glance you cast could land on mythic-sized basalt boulders hunched over main thoroughfares or the city’s raging and sacred river. Within our first week, a thunderstorm clapped mightily above our home, shaking the hundred-year-old trees showing us animals the earth’s power. The cars and trucks are bigger, the politics are too. The energy is aggressive, explosive even. I had no idea how aggressive it could be.
Spokane County has the highest rates of domestic violence in the state of Washington. Long-time Spokanites ask if it’s something in our water. For certain, Spokane can and has been a violent city, with its share of people like serial killer Robert Yates who killed 11 women over the span of 23 years. Or Kevin Coe, known colloquially as the South Hill rapist, who assaulted and terrorized dozens of women.
Well into my second year in the city, and before the pandemic, I noticed story after story of women who had not only been murdered but in torturous and intentionally brutal ways. In addition to the unconventional ways I was led to the topic of femicide, Spokane cast the topic in real, local terms.
Violence in the city
In June of 2019, detectives found 24-year-old Arezu Kashify in the bottom of the family’s freezer. The Spokesman-Review reported that “a nurse who spoke to Arezu Kashify in late March or early April was told Wahid Kashify would “kill her immediately” if she called law enforcement for help.” Her husband and suspected murderer fled back to Afghanistan. Arezu’s murder is still unsolved.
In March 2020, Mikayla Young was found brutally stabbed and nearly decapitated. Found in a hotel room by housekeeping staff, Mikayla was partially nude with hotel bedding used to cover her decapitated head. Her killers included her boyfriend Anthony Fuerte and Lionel White. Mikayla fought for her life, and suffered multiple wounds to her hands and arms as a result. Anthony Fuerte was recently sentenced to 30 years in jail.
This April, 2021, Spokane was rocked by news of yet another murdered woman, Kassie Dewey. Kassie was found in her garage stabbed to death by Joshua Phillips. Her 5 year old daughter, Lilly suffered multiple, near-fatal stab wounds. These women are only a small portion of those who have been murdered, Kassie’s death is the only one the precipitated a vigil.
According to the CDC, Homicide is one of the leading causes of death for women aged ≤44 years. The pandemic has made matters worse. Calls to Spokane’s YWCA’s domestic violence hotline increased by 40% between 2019 and 2020, putting in stark relief the reality of increased chances for abuse and femicide when leaving home is discouraged.
To boot, survivors of domestic violence are 70x more likely to be murdered while leaving their abuser. More than 50% of female homicide victims are also killed by their intimate partners. This statistic does not hold for other female-to-male domestic violence situations, and it is impossible to not conclude that these women are killed simply for being women. Underlying factors such as age, race, and economic status greatly impact women’s ability to leave an abusive situation. I’ll explore these factors more in-depth, along with solutions, in my next blog.
What’s race got to do with it?
Everything.
The statistics are worse when you account for race. Femicide rates for Indigenous and Black women are roughly twice their white counterparts, and Indigenous and Black women suffer roughly the same femicide rates ~4.3 murders out of 100,000 and 4.4, respectively. I suspect these numbers do not reflect the totality of femicides, as both communities have a very real reason to mistrust law enforcement due to the damages and violence of colonialism and misogynoir. While indigenous women, two-spirit, and allies have gained visibility, Black women and girls often go missing without gaining public attention. Organizations like Black Femicide - America keep track of this phenomenon, but like other trackers, we need the support of our community and institutions to address and eliminate the problem. This isn’t an individual problem - it’s a systemic one.
In addition to the harms of femicide to the Black and indigenous community, hierarchies (between races) and systems of neglect impact everything from pay equity, housing, and healthcare - including maternal mortality rates. Harm to Black and indigenous women can be found in many covert, layered, and direct ways.
Deciding to do something
Even as I noticed women in my community being murdered with impunity, even as I stumbled upon the work of Texan nurse Dawn Wilcox, who documents every femicide she encounters, even as I attended MMIWG2s marches, even as I was confronted by face after face, I noticed a distinct lack of coverage about this phenomenon in the United States. Something as simple as setting up a Google alert for “femicide” and “violence against women” has shown me that the US does not share a common understanding of, or legal framework for femicide. I argue that without this framework and understanding we are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to tackling femicide. When we can name it, we can understand it, and when we understand it, we can destroy it.
When we believe the killing of women for their gender only happens in other countries, we are doing our communities a great injustice - simultaneously perpetuating the myth of American exceptionalism and casting other countries into an inferior and barbaric place to differentiate us as better, nobler, saner. The fact remains, the United States has a problem. It is up to us to decide whether another world is possible - one free of gender-based violence.