By Essence Dennis |Staff Writer|
Misogyny, Transphobia, Boko Haram—these words should scare you.
They are literally and figuratively detrimental to the health of women around the world, transgender individuals who are accepting themselves, and Boko Haram who are popping people off as if they were toy soldiers a toddler chucks away with no thought.
“We should clothe ourselves with compassion and act in such a way that exudes kindness,” said student Nicholas Navarro.
However, countless slayings and acts of violence, especially against women have occurred and are continuing to escalate.
In Detroit, Mary “Unique” Spears, a mother of three, was murdered after she rejected a man’s advances towards her.
The man approached Spears asking for her number and after she denied shot her three times, striking her twice in the head, according to newsone.com.
And the mere fact that a woman made a video of her walking down the street to show how men catcall and ridicule women for no reason other than to boost their own confidence; and there are still people like Steve Santagati (author of The MANual) who still claimed “there is nothing more that a woman loves to hear than how pretty she is,” according to nymag.com.
Did anyone ever think maybe all a woman wants to do, while she is walking down the street is to get to her destination without being harassed or killed?
Almost 13 transgender women were found murdered in 2014, and already in 2015 two have been killed, and all except one of the women were either black or Latina, according to hrc.org.
“[Trans-phobia] is a range of antagonistic attitudes and feelings against trans-sexuality and transsexual or transgender people, based on the expression of their internal gender identity,” according to wipeouttransphobia.com.
Transgender people are sometimes pushed towards committing suicide by the prejudice and bullying they experience.
“People inherently fear what they cannot understand, and because of that the transgender community is misunderstood and targeted so often,” said Navarro.
When the media shows us the deaths of transgender individuals more often than not, they are misgendered, misnomered, and misrepresented.
Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group in Nigeria, are claiming lives left and right and it seems as if no one is helping the thousands of innocent people they are murdering, raping, kidnapping and dislocating in Nigeria.
The groups name literally translates to “Western education is sin,” according to newsweek.com
Boko Haram does not employ traditional Islamic values, instead they say “haram means forbidden, for Muslims to take part in any political or social activity associated with Western Society,” according to bbc.com
In my opinion by keeping the people out of the loop, Boko Haram grows in power, quite obviously, by rampaging villages and killing them.
“We must address some of the cases of violence in our society if we wish to do away with the violence we face on a daily basis,” said student Nicholas Rayo.
All of these instances need to be discussed more seriously by the media. As a society, we should start discussing more events that we do not see on the media.
We need to see these disturbing images on-screen, blasting from our radios to incite some sort of fire in our citizens to ask for something to be done.
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