Radical Vixen asks a rhetorical question
Wayne Ryczak, a 56-year-old surveyor from St. Catharines [in Ontario, Canada], pleaded guilty to manslaughter in May and was sentenced to one day of jail after being given 30 months credit for 14 months of pretrial custody.
The controversial sentence sparked a public outcry and eventually an appeal launched by the Ministry of the Attorney General in June. “
Pop quiz! If the victim was a 56 year old man and the murderer was a prostitute do you think the sentence would be the same? Extra points for those who detected my sarcasm immediately.
Rhetorical because, of course, the answer is obvious: no, if instead a prostitute had strangled a 56 year old man and dumped him in a snowbank, with his pants left pulled down and his shirt left pulled up she’d have gotten a sentence far more severe than a day plus time incarcerated. Nor would the judge have ruled the sentence was appropriate since since there was nobody (or nobody left alive) who could contradict her claim of self-defense. Nor is it likely that the court would have been mollified by the prostitute’s protestations that the levels of cocaine in his body would have been lethal anyway so what’s the big rip? Nor would it have mattered that the prostitute said she only strangled him the second time she tried choking him, not the first.
Nope. Because as we’re regularly informed by prostitution opponents anti-feminist and feminist alike, it’s natural for prostitutes to be hapless, will-less, soul-less, helpless, agencyless, dehumanized victims for whom murder and dumping is just the natural order of things for prostitutes and so it’s just hard . Meanwhile, perhaps because there’s so much antipathy towards the idea, a prostitute who shows sufficient initiative to kill a customer, that of course a judge would throw the book at her.
$(#*~@!!!
Submitted by 2659 (not verified) on Mon, 2009-01-26 17:50.
Well, certainly, but in that case it'd be hard to tell if the bulk of the discrimination would be because she would be a prostitute... or just a woman.
From what I've heard, when a woman commits a very violent crime, it is such a rare event that the shock of the occurrence is enough for a lot of people to think that something must *really* be wrong with her. Because men do that occasionally, but women just don't. So the punishment tends to be much harsher. For example, if a man kills someone and claims "preemptive self defense" and either there's some justification or no evidence to contradict the claim, he's likely to get off with second or third degree murder. But if a woman does the same, it's first degree almost every time.
It'll probably lessen in a generation or two as people get more used to the idea that women can inflict violence too, but I would tend to think that being a prostitute in that case would merely be icing on the cake.
[Yup, it's like men are *supposed* to kill so it's no big deal. But not the other way around. Eww. Thanks, Nightfall. --fl]