Rejection leads to a senseless death!

Last Friday night after a high school football game, Jazmine Thompson was in a car with three other female friends when Daniel Floyd Williams approached them, asked for sex, walked away, came back waving a gun and fired at the young women. Jazmine was killed . Her life is over. Daniel was charged with second-degree murder.

This is ridiculous! I’m tired of reading about boys and men who think they are so entitled to women’s attention and bodies on the street that they react with anger when the women reject them .

Jazmine is not the first (nor surely the last) female to be killed in such a senseless way by a man. Gender-based violence like this is most often (but not always) perpetrated by a man against his former or current intimate partner, often when he feels rejected or as though he’s lost control over “his” woman. But, as this story shows, such violence happens between complete strangers, too.  Here are stories about four other women who, like Jazmine, were murdered by unknown men after rejecting them.

We must all do our part to help end the idea that men can and should prove their manhood and masculintiy through sexual conquests and that rejection by a woman justifies retaliation in the form of insults, physical abuse, and murder. This mindset and behavior must end.

(cross-posted at Stop Street Harassment blog )