Women's oppression
& the Green River murders
By Jane Cutter and Kaz Susat
Seattle
On Nov. 6, Gary Ridgway pleaded guilty to
murdering 48 women in King County, Wash., most of the murders
occurring between 1982 and 1984. Most were street sex workers,
often teenage runaways. He was dubbed the Green River Killer
after a Seattle-area river where some of their bodies were
first discovered.
In exchange for the guilty plea and his cooperation with
investigators--he show ed them the locations of previously
undiscovered remains--Ridgway was sentenced to life without
parole rather than the death penalty. Many, including some
progressive people, are decrying this plea bargain as a
miscarriage of justice. To paraphrase this argument, these
people say that Ridgway would have gotten the death penalty if
his victims had been men, or women from more economically
privileged backgrounds.
Certainly it is true that police authorities acted as if the
lives of the sex worker victims were of less value than others.
Because of that, in the Seattle area in the 1980s a struggle
was launched, mostly by sex workers and their supporters in the
women's movement, to force the authorities to launch an
investigation task force. Prior to that, the suspicious
disappearances and murders of these women got little
attention.
Ridgway, the deadliest serial killer in U.S. history,
murdered women for more than 20 years before his arrest in
November 2001. He was identified and arrested as a suspect in
1987, but then was let go. He was finally conclusively linked
to six of the killings through improvements in DNA forensic
technology.
The Ridgway case brings to mind the current situation of the
many missing and murdered women in the border city of Juarez,
Mexico. Authorities there have treated the brutal murders of
young working women as a thing of no consequence. It is a slap
in the face when the police, the only authorities under
capitalism with ready access to the evidence and to the tools
of investigation, refuse to take seriously the disappearance
and murder of any woman, let alone a series of killings that
follow a pattern.
Misogyny--hatred and oppression of women--is a cornerstone
of class society. The oppression of women, as well as of
lesbian, gay, bi and transgender people, became
institutionalized when communal society was replaced by
patriarchal family units based on private property. Women, who
had been valued contributors to the commune, under class
society became little more than the property of men and
breeders of the next generation of heirs and slaves.
Since then, slavery has been replaced by feudalism and then
by capitalism. But improvements in women's legal or social
status have come about only as a result of struggle.
Ridgway represents the most extreme example of misogyny
today. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic
Violence, in 2000, the latest year for which crime statistics
of this type are available, 1,805 women in the United States
were murdered by men; 62 percent of them were killed by a male
partner. In that year, 331 women--almost one per day--were
killed by a male partner during the course of an argument.
Domestic violence is the number one reason for women to seek
attention at hospital emergency rooms. Almost half of all women
in the U.S. will be attacked by a rapist at some time in their
life. Virtually all women in U.S. society experience some form
of sexual harassment.
Certainly, if anyone deserves the death penalty because of
the heinous nature of his crimes, it is Ridgway. But the death
penalty applied by a racist, sexist and imperialist system can
never be the means of dispensing liberation to women. It is
important to note that most of the families of the 48 victims
have not criticized the plea bargain. After all, an execution
cannot bring back their loved ones. Gender oppression is a key
element of class society; at the same time, the death penalty
is a key component in the repressive apparatus of the
state.
The death penalty is used alongside other tools of state
repression--courts, prisons, police--to uphold capitalist
control of society. The death penalty is used almost
exclusively against poor people, and disproportionately against
people of color. When the death penalty was being restored in
many states, it was accompanied by a media focus on cases in
which the person to be executed--like Ridgway-- had admitted to
committing a particularly repugnant crime. But the root causes
of violence against women and other gender-oppressed people
cannot be eliminated by the use of the death penalty or other
instruments of state repression. The death penalty was restored
in Washington state in 1975. Ridgway's murders were all
committed after that time.
Women, other gender-oppressed people and their allies
organize on a daily basis to make life safer through
self/community defense, education and increased public
awareness. But to end gender-based violence, we need to
eliminate the system of exploitation that both needs and feeds
the violence.
Reprinted from the Nov. 20, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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