“The Events of October”: Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus

Appendixes

283 Statement drafted by Gail Griffin for President James Jones Jr., October 25, 1999. One week ago, the Kalamazoo College community suffered a profound shock from which it will be recovering for months and years to come. We have lost two members of our community to the violence which, tragically, has come to characterize U.S. society. Students, faculty, and staff of the College have rallied to see each other through this nightmare , with the deeply appreciated support of alumni, parents, and the larger Kalamazoo community. In order to move ahead in our struggle to comprehend what has happened on our campus, we must look at it in a larger and even grimmer context. We must begin to acknowledge that an event that seems extraordinary is, in fact, devastatingly common. The rampant male violence against women in our country and our world has struck too close to us to be ignored or denied. In order to confront this reality, we must first face the most difficult fact of all: that men who commit violence against women are not necessarily people we identify easily or readily as dangerous, as evil, or even as disturbed. They may be people we know, like, and love, as many on this campus loved Neenef Odah. It would be a great deal easier to prevent such disasters if those tending toward violence were obvious monsters, but they are not. They are complex, multifaceted individuals, as we all are, and their violent acts stem from sources and forces that must not be oversimplified. We only start to comprehend the violence that threatens women’s lives when we see that it does not come solely from a small class of criminal, openly misogynist, or habitually violent men. It can come from our brothers, our sons, our friends. Our challenge is to sustain our love for them while struggling to understand their actions. To do so demands that we turn to the larger societal context. APPENDIX A APPENDIX A 284 The cold facts paint a horrible picture: 90 percent of murdered women are killed by men, two-thirds of them by a man known to them, and 30 percent by a male partner or former partner. Four women die each day at the hands of male partners. The suicide or attempted suicide of the perpetrator is a common feature of this deadly scenario. Over half the women in this country are battered at some point in their lives. Women are much more likely to suffer male violence while or after leaving the relationship. Finally, while studies indicate that 10 percent of high-school students experience violence in dating relationships, among college students the figure rises to 22 percent, the same figure for the adult population in general. In other words, the college years, the time we regard as one of opening doors and widening possibilities, are also the time when our society’s patterns of violence against women become firmly established. In the cruelest of ironies, we are now entering the final week of Domestic Violence Awareness Month. We must pledge ourselves as an educational community to do all we can to break those patterns—through institutional policies and procedures that guard women’s safety; through interventions as friends, teachers, and mentors in situations where we perceive women to be at risk; through study and discussion of the phenomenon of male violence against women. To this end, this Wednesday’s symposium, sponsored by the Women’s Studies Program along with the Women’s Equity Coalition and the Women’s Resource Center, can help us initiate a new level of discussion. Let us use every possible means to reach beyond factions and personal loyalties toward a common goal: a campus where violence is identified in its roots, where women’s welfare is taken seriously, and where women students, faculty, and staff can be safe. 285 APPENDIX B Do You Know . . . The Warning Signs of Potentially Abusive Relationships? (A note on pronouns: abusers and victims can be of any gender, but the vast majority of cases involve men abusing women.) He is controlling and possessive . . . • He restricts her contact with friends or family and is often very critical of them. • He monitors her communication with others by phone or e-mail. • He is intensely jealous of her interactions with other men. • He invades her privacy—her home or room, her diary, her e-mail, her phone, her possessions. • He...