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1 Cary Stayner plotted for a year to rape and murder and targeted two other groups of women before he spontaneously dragged three Yosemite National Park tourists into his fatal game of horrors . . . Days before he killed the three women, he said he had assembled a murder kit in a backpack consisting of a rope, a roll of black duct tape, a gun and a long, serrated knife. He had just been waiting for the right moment to use it. —S. Finz and K. Fagan, “Stunning Details in Stayner’s Confession” In 1994, a young woman at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute was raped in her dorm room by two varsity football players, Antonio Morrison and James Crawford. During the attack, Morrison said to the woman,“You better not have any fucking diseases.” Afterwards, in the cafeteria, Morrison was heard bragging how he “liked to get girls drunk and fuck the shit out of them.” —D. Hasenstab, “Is Hate a Form of Commerce?” In 1989, at the University of Montreal in Canada, Marc Lepine murdered 14 women in an engineering class before killing himself. During the shooting rampage in which he deliberately separated the women from the men, he shouted,“You’re all fucking feminists!” —B. A. McPhail, “Gender-bias Hate Crimes” Some men deliberately target women with violence. While the above examples are a few of the more well-known cases in which women were attacked because of their gender, as a group, women experience violence in staggering amounts on a daily basis. For example, two to four million women in the United States are victims of domestic violence each year (Valente, Hart, Zeya, and Malefyt 2001, 285). Violence committed by intimate partners or former partners is the leading cause of injury to American women (Atkins, Jurden, Miller, and Patten 1999). Studies also show that rape and other forms of sexual assault happen 1 Why Does Gender Matter? 2 | Gendered Hate frequently and are a devastating experience for many women (O’Toole, Schiffman , and Edwards 2007, 195; Pendo 1994). As the National Violence Against Women Survey revealed, one in every six women have been victims of rape (Tjaden and Thoennes 2006). More specifically, approximately twenty-one million men and women reported being forcibly raped at some point in their lives, 86 percent of whom were women. In addition, men were more likely than women to be perpetrators of forcible rape (Tjaden and Thoennes 2006). Although these numbers demonstrate the extent to which women are victims of violent crime, it is a fact that men are more likely than women to be victims of violent crime overall. According to national crime data, males are victims of violent crime at a much higher rate than females (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2009a). For example, of the 14,137 murder victims in 2008 for whom the gender was known, 78.2 percent (11,059) were male (ibid.). What these numbers fail to illustrate, however, is the fact that although women are less likely than men to be victims of violent crime in general, women are significantly more likely to be victims of a particular subset of violent crime. Indeed, what these numbers fail to show is the extent to which violence directed at women is gendered. Recent national statistics on crimes such as rape and sexual assaults reveal that 84 percent of the victims are women and 16 percent are men (Truman and Rand 2010). The gendered nature of intimate partner violence is also apparent when looking at national victimization rates. According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report (Catalano 2007), 22 percent of nonfatal violent crimes against females aged twelve and older were committed by intimates, compared to only 4 percent of nonfatal violent crimes against males of the same age. Other estimates are that approximately 50 percent of all murders of women in the United States are committed by intimate partners (Campbell et al. 2003), and that men are the perpetrators of 95 percent of violent acts between intimates (Taylor 1996). Even taking into account the limitations of victimization data and, more specifically , the underreporting of male victims of sexual assaults and domestic violence , the gendered nature of violence against women is clear: violence against women is primarily committed by men. Put simply, when women are victims of violent crime, the majority of offenders are male; conversely, when men are victims of violent crime, the offenders are rarely female. In fact, the degree to which women are victims of gender-based violence...

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