


The song was created for women who are victims of violence, like Gabriela Sifuentes Castilla, who was shot and killed at her home on Oct. That is, you can work to ensure a safer society for the women you love.While cars whizzed by on the street, the lyrics of “Canción sin miedo,” or “Song without fear,” reverberated through the courtyard of the Taylorsville Municipal Justice Court.

What we do know is that if you find yourself concerned about the Petito case and the rates of violence against women, the best thing you can do is to hold yourself and your peers accountable. Intimate partner violence ends in two ways for women: in death, or in escape – and those who are lucky enough to escape find themselves in a whole other world of trauma.Īt this point, we don’t yet know if Gabby Petito was a victim of abuse, and I don’t seek to assign that label to her in death. The fact of the matter is that these relationships do lasting damage to your self-perception and your perception of truth. And you believe them, because you feel that you’re the reason for the violence. They work to gaslight and convince you that the violent behavior is isolated, that you somehow caused it, and that it won’t happen again. It always starts the same: building tensions escalate to violence, the abuser apologizes and works to rectify and reconcile, and then you return to the honeymoon phase where everything is fine. People who haven’t endured intimate partner violence fail to realize it is a pattern of behavior, a cycle of abuse. We are asked why we didn’t leave sooner, why we hid bruises, and why we didn’t speak up rather than the focus and accountability being on the men who performed these actions. We live in a society that accuses women of being complicit in their own abuse. I watched as “friends” supported my rapist and continue to do so, asking me why I stayed if it was true. I experienced sexual, physical, and emotional violence in one of my college relationships… and yet, I struggled to leave. Someone you know, someone you love, has faced this. If you stood in a room with four or more female family members, the likelihood of one of them being an abuse, rape, or assault survivor is nearly 100 per cent. More likely than not, at least one woman you know, whether that be your mother, sister, cousin or a friend, has faced violence at the hands of a man. In tandem with the one in six women who report rape or sexual assault, it’s not all men – but it’s more common than you’d think. 35 per cent of those women are left with injuries, and half of all female homicide victims are killed by current or former partners. Just ask those who knew Sarah Everard, Miya Marcano, and Sabina Nessa.Īccording to the Centers for Disease Control, one in four women experience physical, sexual, or emotional intimate partner violence in their lifetime, and that’s only what gets reported.
GABY EVERYONE HAS A STORY FREE
While many may view femicide as a “third world problem” due to the focus on it in Latin America in particular, women aren’t free of this epidemic in any nation. Women are threatened with death and violence for simply existing, dating, refusing, and/or being in proximity to men. While national attention is on this case, we need to discuss Gabby Petito’s death by strangulation – the perpetrator is not yet known – as representative of a much larger global issue: sexual, physical, and emotional violence towards women, often culminating in femicide. People are eagerly consuming any media on or about the case, commenting as if they’re observing a murder mystery fantasy or a true crime podcast in real time. Nearly any person on any form of social media knows of how the young woman was traveling with her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie, before he returned home without her and disappeared soon after. The Gabby Petito murder has everyone captivated. Gabby Petito speaks with police responding to an altercation between her and her boyfriend in Utah (Moab City Police Department/AFP)
