Why So Many Endangered Women in 2006?

In its end-of-year retrospective, The Boston Phoenix has produced one of the most scathing cultural critiques that strikes on a local and national level. David S. Bernstein asks hard questions about the public's fascination with brutalized, abused, missing, and murdered women.

With a cover image of a battered woman, it seems that the Phoenix is exploiting the women-in-peril theme just like the Herald does. But the whole article asks why, if there are so many women in peril, why don't we do anything about it through changes in public policy?

Bernstein focuses on the awful incident of a man who murdered five Amish girls to show how the press described the violence as an Amish tragedy. The exhaustive media coverage barely suggested this was a tragedy for women as a whole, and Bernstein asserts that the shootings (and there were many school shootings this year that targeted women) were clearly hate crimes against women.

It's a strange contradiction. The media obsesses over the welfare of women. Magazines, websites, and talk shows ask, Is Miss USA snorting cocaine? (A certain local newscast that debuted a few days ago blatantly aimed for the lowest common denominator by making that their top story.) Is Nicole Richie too thin?

When murder becomes part of the storyline, an empty frenzy erupts. Clearly people know something is wrong. All you have to do is look at the Phoenix's long list of violent episodes against women this year to know that - but we haven't quite made the next step, which is figuring out who to prevent those crimes. Do we as a society love reading about women in peril so much that deep down we don't really want to stop those crimes? Bostonist doesn't think so, and Bernstein's story should help nudge its readers into action for 2007. Then, maybe his list of violent crimes against women will shrink.

Image of the Entwistle family taken from CBS4Boston. Neil Entwistle was recently denied bail for shooting his wife and baby in January.