Thursday, December 24, 2009
Sara Kruzan, at the age of sixteen, sentenced to die in prison without the possibility of parole, for murdering the man who raped and pimped her
I found this on the blog "keep your coins -- I want change" here.
There are so many forms of patriarchal injustice; locking up a teenager for killing her rapist-pimp of three years is one of them. Because, after all, pimps raping, turning out, and killing "their" girls and women is no crime at all.
What makes me sad and enraged while watching this is not only that her life is being wasted in prison. It is that Sara Kruzan was even sent to prison, as opposed to being patted on the back by the judge, jury, and attorneys, all telling her "Way to go!" She has to actually absorb and internalise that she did something very wrong. She didn't do anything wrong. She only waited three years too long to do the right thing. Her life and the lives of all the girls he later raped and seasoned would have been spared from his abuses if she'd done that back then. Maybe she wouldn't have been imprisoned at thirteen years old, for the rest of her life.
Pimps who take girls in for seasoning to be turned out onto the street should face prison without parole, including corporate pimps.
To the few mostly white, mostly male U.S. folks who have the power to do so:
Release all arrested and detained prostitutes and women working in or enslaved in sexxxism industries. Arrest the procurers instead; THEY are the criminals--they rent and buy human beings as things and treat them that way, for an hour at a time, more or less; sometimes possessive procurers don't let them go, and continually rape them and murder them.
Sweden figured it out; you can too. We're supposed to be a "moral" country, right? What's moral about locking up a young woman for taking the life of the man who kidnapped her at thirteen, then raped her, and then turned her out onto the streets? If putting her in prison until she dies is your idea of morality, then you're probably also incapable of legally defining rape as a hate crime against women by men. And you're probably very capable of continuing cultural, psychic, economic, and physical genocide against the people whose homeland white men stole.
To all the men who kidnap, rape, season, turn out, and make a profit off of girls and women by allowing men to rape them: FREE THOSE GIRLS AND WOMEN.
Hey Arnie S. of California: like it or not, you are a role model for your children and the young citizens of the large state you govern: FREE SARA KRUZAN!!
Sign the petition at this website: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/free-sara-kruzan
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I disagree with you here quite strongly. Kindapping , rape , enforced prostitiution are all terrible things and crimes that should be punished.
ReplyDeleteHowever advocating murder against anyone that does it?
Murder is always wrong no matter what the situation, what happened to the little girl was tragic and the guy should have got life. However he shouldn't have been killed. However I wouldn't have given the girl life either despite the gravity of the crime she commited due to the mitigating circumstances. But she should have had a few years in prison.
Murder is not a solution it is one of the worst problems
Hi Rotifer,
ReplyDeleteMurder is being committed by you and by me--by proxy. So we can't hide in the illusion that we're pacifists, and be honest about who we are.
The structures and systems and institutions we are embedded in and are actively part of are killing the planet, non-human animals, and lots and lots of people, daily. Disproportionately poor people, and children and women of color.
Our tax dollars are being spent on murdering and raping, raping and murdering children and women in Afghanistan and Iraq, and more covertly in other places around the world.
Our civilisation necessitates genocide, rape, and poverty, and Indigenous North Americans are experiencing all of the above.
So my response starts from the premise that we don't have an option to not murder. We simply may choose who we murder.
Those of us with various privileges are often in denial about this reality: we are murderers.
So you buying clothes, getting gasoline, drinking water, using a computer, and any number of other activities, are blood-soaked, again, by proxy. In your name and in my name.
Given that, why should those most harmed be told "don't kill" when those with the most power kill indiscriminately and callously, NOT in self-defense, including after the assault?
I support any oppressed person, especially anyone being beaten, raped, incested, pimped, procured, or sold by one man or many, doing whatever they need to do to be free of those men. And that's not a popular stance, and I'm not running for office and we can agree to disagree. But please don't think you aren't committing murder of human beings, mostly poor girls and women of color.
It's like buying commercial meat. You can say "I'm against killing animals" but if you eat meat, you're killing animals. And if you're vegan you're still eating animal products and are responsible for animals dying. (See Lierre Keith's book, The Vegetarian Myth, for more.) We can choose to kill less. And those of us who are oppressors, by social position, not by will necessarily, can pressure those who are also oppressors to change the systems of harm that benefit some and kill others.
I believe that rather than trying to be "good" we need, instead, to be "responsible" and responsibility requires knowing what is going on. If you don't know, you can read these authors:
Andrea Smith, Derrick Jensen, and John Perkins. Do a Google Video search on Derrick Jensen, and watch his two hours of speaking called "Endgame"--in two parts, approximately one hour long each. And/or read his books.
Those authors' books will knock most white and male U.S., UK, and Aussie privileged people out of denial that we live in anything remotely close to a "civilised" country, if by "civilised" we mean humane. Those of us with race, class, and gender privileges are savages on Earth. So let's be honest about that, and go from there.
I do not support white men being in denial about the many ways we are killers and don't even know it.