"On September 14, Jackie Vandagriff's body was found burned and dismembered at Grapevine Lake...." It's a lead I've read over. And over again.
The public knows she was a student at Texas Women's University, a nutrition major, a cocktail waitress and every other mundane fact your distant family members ask you about at every holiday even though you've told them thirty times already. That's all they had to humanize her.
I met Jackie on Twitter in 2012. She loved my sassy political commentary and I loved her wild anecdotes. I was 16 and she was 21. She was my big sister at a time in my life where I needed it most. We squealed together when Wendy Davis announced her gubernatorial candidacy, talked on the phone for hours, playfully argued about whether college or high school boys were worse (I never got the chance to tell her that she won that one). We lost touch when her adult life began to take off and I became preoccupied with my mediocre then-boyfriend; the friendship faded the way most do when you're young. But the way i remember Jackie is so much of myself. So much of every other girl I know: beautiful, flighty, giggly, confused, insecure. Excited for the future. She went out. She drank. She did what people who are twenty-four do.
Jackie wasn't murdered because she met up with a stranger or because she was at a bar. She was murdered being twenty-four year old girl isn't punishable by death.
"That's why you don't talk to strangers or go to bars!"
Well, okay. I have two questions for you.
1. Did you know 93% of women who are murdered by men knew their attacker (vpc.org)?
2. Are adult women not allowed to go into public spaces at their leisure?
And BONUS ROUND:
If women have to stay indoors, never meet anyone new, not drink, wear only modest clothing and use their keys weapons at the risk of being murdered or attacked by men, when does our culture start discussing why men don't seem to have to bear any responsibility in this dynamic? Why is it a woman's responsibility to not get murdered and not a man's responsibility to...ya know...not kill women?
Women are robbed of youth, if you think about it. It starts in kindergarten when boys pull our hair and we're told it's because they like us. That boys can't be courteous or respectful of girls because it's not in their nature. Obviously, not all of them are going to grow up to be violent. But we have a problem. Boys are allowed to run around at all hours of the night, not haunted by cautionary tales of boys like them who were attacked or killed. Boys don't have to travel in packs. Boys can drink and be stupid and free and meet whomever they want and statistically, they're going to live to tell about it.
It's become so easy for people to say they're too afraid to have daughters, yet they won't raise their sons to make the world a safe place for girls. This dynamic is not natural.
