Thursday, April 23, 2009

Compassion and Solidarity


A PUBLIC EXPRESSION OF DECENCY
Join the Public March this Saturday12.0 Noon – Peoples’ Park.In Jersey this Saturday, we will be holding a peaceful demonstration in the form of a march from Peoples’ Park to the Royal Square.
Organised by survivors, supporters of survivors, and organisations such as the Care Leavers Association – this march will be an opportunity for decent people to come and join in and express support and compassion for survivors of abuse – wherever they may be.
Though organised by survivors, by taking part in the peaceful protest you will be helping to make a more general point concerning the frequently poor standards of public administration in Jersey.
Full details below.
Hope to see you there.
Stuart.
THE MARCH On April the 25th 2009 at 12 noon there is to be a silent and peaceful march from Peoples Park to the Royal Square. The march will be in support and acknowledgement of victims of child abuse past and present across the world.
On October the 21st 1996 up to 300,000 Belgian citizens took to the streets wearing white ribbons and arm bands as a symbol of hope which became known as “The White March”. It was not only a march for hope but also a silent peaceful protest against their governments handling of the of the Marc Dutroux case which bears many similarity’s, not only to the way our government has handled the child abuse scandal that has hit Jersey, but the way child abuse is handled by some governments across the world.
We would like the Jersey White March to be non political or critical of our government or police investigation. We believe it will be an opportunity to show abuse survivors and the rest of the world that the good people of Jersey do not condone abuse of any human being - child or otherwise.
Abuse survivors, across the globe, have had theirs and their family’s lives torn apart, wrecked, and destroyed, not only by the heinous abuse they have suffered at the hands of their abusers but the wall of silence that inevitably surrounds the taboo subject of paedophilia.
This March has the support of the Care Leavers Association (CLA) and the Jersey Care Leavers Association (JCLA) Please give this march and all abuse survivors your support and show the world the good people of Jersey DO care.
We would ask that if you are able to attend the march that you wear something white, a symbol of hope.If you are a blogger and support abuse victims around the world, please copy and paste this into your blog for this Saturday, the 25th April.
Thank you.

No, thank you!

COMPASSION AND SOLIDARITY

Links concerning Haut de la Garenne:

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Day of the Disappeared, Remembered

"The arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons, groups or persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law."

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Culture shock...

I believe the femicide is an unintended consequence of NAFTA. I do not believe that several future presidents sat around in a college dungeon plotting to rule the world by causing third world countries to “race to the bottom”. Culturally Mexico is a patriarchal society, as are many countries. With the flow of new job opportunities, employers found the women workers to be more compliant and easily dominated. 70% of these jobs went to women and girls. Work papers for underage workers were easy to procure and the $5 or so a day was a big lure. Over time shanty towns cropped up around Juarez, homes built of cardboard discarded from the factories. Women were making money and gaining a little power. In the U.S. during WW11, women took over many of the typically men’s skilled machine jobs. Women worked riveting and welding to continue to produce armaments for the war. When the war was over and the troops came back home there was resentment and many women lost their jobs and were told to go home to their families. It is difficult to unwind the clock and women started asserting their rights as equal human beings. The motives behind having a mostly women’s work force in Mexico are nefarious but the result may be a more independent gender. Men are starting to lose control and their culture is changing. Physical violence is the one constant control that men have over women. Women who were raised to honor thy father are still walking the tightrope of independence and are more likely to submit to a man’s will. Domestic violence, workplace violence, and stranger violence are the ultimate control over women. Add to the climate the fact that the very people in power to protect and punish offences against women are mostly men.
Many Thanks to Michelle and Niki

Thursday, May 1, 2008

The Crimes...

Because of the type of information around, I have to apologize in advance for a faulty argument. Statistics are skewed according to who is releasing the numbers, actual crimes are minimized or attributed to overdoses and natural disease and crime scenes have been destroyed. I also must say that I am writing this by memory and will include sourcing when needed. Occasionally I may write a sentence very close to what I may have read weeks ago, I am not intentionally plagiarizing another’s work. I just may have better comprehension skills than I thought.
Around 1993 women and girls began to disappear in Juarez. Many of these women came to Juarez to work and support their families. Amnesty International puts the number murdered at around 400 which may be a conservative estimate considering the fact that many women and girls go to the border area to work and do not have regular telephone contact with their families. Like in the U.S., before the amber alert system, missing children and women were written off as troubled or runaways. The number of women missing is anyone’s guess, estimates range from a couple of hundred to three thousand. Another reason the argument is difficult to make is the lack of real information. Bodies were misidentified and returned to the wrong families. In one case a misidentification and eventual confession through torture led one man to die in prison before being exonerated and another to be only recently released.

Who is killing these women?

Sexual predator or predators…

Absolutely, of the women bearing the same signature aspects of mutilation many of these women were of a particular type. The girls and women were small, long brown hair, and young. This sounds rather generic but when you look at the lifestyles of this particular group they were very similar. The girls came from poor but caring and or cohesive families; they were innocently trying to make things better for themselves and their families by working at the maquladoros, or shoe stores and or going to school. The women were not sex workers, drug addicts, and drinkers (high risk victims) as the police immediately suggested to the families upon receiving a missing persons reports. The Washington post camera works article describes the signature, “Sometime in the early 1990s - police cannot say why or exactly when - the pattern of killings changed. Once confined mostly to drug feuds, brawls and gang fights, the slayings began to include large numbers of women and girls. Many of these killings were almost incomprehensibly brutal. Women were raped and strangled, crushed or mutilated. Some bore knife or teeth marks on the left breast. In some cases, victims' partially clothed bodies had been bound with shoelaces; often someone had carefully arranged the shoes beside the body. Body after body turned up with skin singed black by the sun or bones picked clean by desert vermin”

The Egyptian

Oh please, this guy was a rapist and a creep, but drug gangs pulling a Bianchi stretches miles beyond incredible.

Organ thieves…

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

Snuff films…

Sounds reasonable but where are they? I have never read of a survivor speaking of video, still shots were mentioned once or twice as a means to intimidate and torture a victim. If anyone has any info on this please post a comment.
The Disappearing Women of Juarez
"After an altercation with some neighbors, Maria and her husband called the cops. When they went to the police station to lodge a complaint, the police arrested the couple and kept them in jail for 24 hours. During their detention, the police raped Maria. They took her to a cell that was littered with pile upon pile of women's clothing. When Maria asked what all these clothes were doing there, the police told her, "They belong to the women we've taken." With a shiver, Maria remembered that many of the murdered women's bodies had been found wearing the clothes of other disappeared women. (Later, some time after Maria's ordeal, when it was announced that the government was assigning a Special Prosecutor to investigate the Juarez murders, the police inexplicably burned one thousand pounds of evidence-- women's clothes.) Then they took Maria's picture, telling her, "If you report us, we will find you...and kill you and your family."
Maria says the police showed her a photo album, filled with pictures of girls with long hair. Pictures of these girls being dragged by their hair through the bushes. And more. According to Maria, the photos showed each girl laying in the middle of a circle of men who raped her, one by one. Then they beat her. Then they turned her over and raped her anally. The photos showed the men laughing. There are photos of the women's faces. Maria said, "They had expressions of pain and suffering. You could see them cry and scream. Her face--it showed the pain she was feeling. They looked very sad." There are photos of the men pouring gasoline on the women before they set them on fire.
After her release, Maria filed a report and identified the police who were involved in her rape. They were all arrested, but none of them were ever punished. Some time later, Maria got a job in one of the maquiladoras. On her first day at work, she sensed that someone was looking at her. She turned to see the factory security guard staring right at her. It was one of the men who'd shown her the photo album in jail."

more theories to follow...

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Articles

Guatemalan Congress Approves Law Against Femicide

More rebukes for Bruce
Lawmaker stands by remarks against "illiterate peasants" from Mexico

Sorry, had to slip this one in...

Murders of Women in Juarez Shock the World

Female murders in Ciudad Juarez hidden for years

Canada’s Juarez: Femicide North of the Border

Murder and Mutilation Stalk the Women of Guatemala

Hollywood tackles Mexican mystery

Congress Condemns Violence Against Women

Juarez Killings Escalate As Investigation Stalls

Mexicans Want FBI to Investigate Juarez Murders

Protect Guatemala's women

'Rich killers' stalk City of Lost Girls

Wave of Women's Killings Confounds Juárez

Slingshot Guatemalan Femicide

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING By Charles Bowden

Oh and..

If you happen on this page and have info or opinions to share please leave me a comment. If your input is not whacked I will try to place it in the body of the blog. Yes I will be the judge because here, and pretty much only here, I am the boss! I am working on locating more research sources. There are several outstanding books on the subject. I have contacted several sites for permission to use thier materials. As I said in a earlier post the point of this is to disseminate information, all accurate information is greatly appreciated.

Credit due...

I give so much credit to the bloggers out there. This has been up one day and feeling a bit stressed and tired. The main reason for this little piece of the internet is to try to get people to click the first link as I did. Once I was aware of the travesty that is Juarez I could not stop trying to find information on it. Because the killings have been going on so long it is a bit overwhelming parsing through current and dated material. You may as well just read everything because you will eventually, anyway. It is extremely underwhelming that for fifteen years this has been going on unabated and underreported. Theories abound as to the perpetrators...Organ harvesters, drug dealers, snuff film producers, the rich, the poor, the powerful, the bus drivers’, Ad nauseam. I think that unless they pick up every rug in Mexico, most of the killers of these women will not be punished here on earth. As an American, I can trace the murder of women right back to my computer, my closet and my jeep. A maquiladora or maquila is a sister factory to a U.S. company. For about five dollars a day, thousands of workers in Mexico and elsewhere make goods to be sold here in the U.S. While working conditions are difficult, harassment, some say pregnancy tests and low wages, the real danger is just outside these factories. If a woman is late for work she is locked out and has to manage a way home, often at night with no money. Being poor can and has been fatal.
From Karla Sais's website;


More…

Thank you Sprocket and Steev for all your help and quick response.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Wholesale Slaughter



In Ciudad Juárez Mexico there is a humanitarian crisis. Women are being murdered and tourtured with alarming frequency. Crime library has a rather outdated but helpful overview of this horror. There is a great deal of information on the internet decribing the crimes but there is very little main stream attention. The Washington post did do a story in thier camera works feature. The problem of femicide is a weave of sex, drugs, politics, international trade policy, poverty, border control, and corruption. Mexico is a country who's culture is sytematically being marginalized by insatiable North American comsumerism. In turn the women of Juárez are further marginalized by bosses, fathers, brothers, husbands, police, politicians, and drug and sex trade lords. Every day women are being beaten physically and emotionally into submission. If you knew that a childs life is the cost for your new sneakers would you pause for a moment?