bittersweetcountess

If you ever dump a dude, and he wants to meet up with you in private afterwards, the answer is "no".

If he shows up at your place of residence or work (esp. when you are alone) to "talk it out" or "apologize", the answer is "no" and "I'm calling the police".

Half of all female murder victims are killed by intimate partners. The most dangerous time is immediately after the break up.

so as much as I love to make a joke on here, I'm going to retract my last comment and replace it with:

12/10/2018.

... Numerous Roma women who fled hospitals told the AP they were tied up and beaten, shouted at, or ignored when they needed medical attention, including during birth. Some said there were often two women and babies squeezed into a single bed; others said the health care staff laughed at them, saying they were dirty and had too many children. Many women declined to give their names, fearing retribution from local authorities.

"For Roma, they treat us worse than dogs,” said Krcova, who was only allowed to see her newborn babies two days after they were born. She is no longer afraid of her local hospital since she isn’t planning to have more children, but worries about her daughter Ivana, who she says was also slapped by nurses when she previously gave birth and is now pregnant again.

One Roma woman tearfully told the AP that when she escaped from Kezmarok hospital after giving birth to twins four years ago, she got sick and couldn’t retrieve them for 10 days. By that time, the institution had given away her baby boy and girl to an orphanage. She has not seen them since. She would not give her name, fearing the hospital would refuse to treat her family.

Also, as the Auschwitz Memorial Book points out, Romanies were murdered unrecorded, sometimes by the hundreds, outside the camps, in the most numbers in the eastern territories, for which only scant records exist.  As research continues, for example that being undertaken for Czechoslovakia by Polansky (Strandberg, 1994) or for Serbia by Ackoviƒ (1995), the figures rise steadily higher.  In order to estimate the percentage of total losses, we would have to know, in addition to the number of dead, the number of Romanies throughout Europe before 1933, and this we will never be able to determine accurately, although both Colliers Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Americana list the pre-war European Romani population as 700,000.  A guess as good as any is that there were perhaps three million Romanies throughout the German-controlled territories at the period of their maximum extent, between one and one and a half a million of whom were murdered, i.e. between a third and a half of the population.  The world population at the same time was probably ca. five million.

Only a few thousand survived in the Nazi-controlled territories, and none was asked to testify in behalf of the Romani victims at the war crimes trials.  Reparations to Romanies as a people have yet to be made by the German government, which has only in recent years even admitted the racial motivation of the Nazi genocidal campaign against the Romani people.

The massive increase in neo-Nazi activity since the reunification of Germany and the collapse of Communism need not be elaborated upon here; it has been documented in a series of book-length treatments published by Helsinki Watch, and in a 50-page report by the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Commission.  And in poll after poll, the Romani population in Europe stands as the prime target of both sanctioned and unsanctioned discrimination.  In 1995 alone, in the Czech Republic alone, there were over 450 documented attacks against Romanies, several resulting in death; those were only the reported incidents.  There have been rapes and house-burnings in Romania and Bulgaria; letter bombs and booby-trap explosives have killed four Romanies and blinded and maimed many more.  At the October, 1995 OSCE meeting in Warsaw, one of our delegates was hit and robbed by four youths on the street shouting racial epithets; another was turned back at the Polish border simply because he was a Romani, and as a result was not able to attend the meeting.  The previous year, in the same city, a group of nine of us, all Romanies, were refused service in a restaurant. 

One of the issues at the 1995 conference in Warsaw was the official protest of Romania’s resolution to replace the words Rom and Romani with Úigan in all official documents.  The word, which was a synonym for “slave” during the five and a half centuries of Gypsy slavery in that country, is as offensive for Romanies as the word “n*gg*r” is for African Americans.  The Romanian government’s reason for this is that Romani sounds too much like Romanian, and outsiders might think that Romanians were Gypsies.  In November, 1995, Amnesty International released a 62-page document on human rights abuses in Romania which referred in part to “reports about torture and ill-treatment by police officials [and their] violent abuse of power . . . Massive arbitrary measures against the Romani minority and the lack of protection of this group against racist attacks have continuously posed a problem since March, 1990.”  The Romanian government has responded by declaring that “hereafter, slandering of the state and the nation will be prosecuted by imprisonment of up to five years” (Romnews, No. 46, November 19th, 1995, p. 1.).

-- Ian Hancock, The Roots of Antigypsyism: to the Holocaust and After.

While having a beer with a friend, Ruiz, an Indigenous Mixteca woman and a single mother from the state of Oaxaca, met a man she had seen around the neighborhood. After hanging out, he offered to walk her home and later asked to stay the night because it was late and he was far from home.

Ruiz agreed to let him sleep on a mattress on the floor. But while she slept he climbed onto her bed, hit her, tore off her clothes and raped her, according to Ruiz's legal defense. Ruiz fought back, hitting him in the nose. He threatened to kill her, and in the struggle to free herself she killed him in self defense.

In a panic, Ruiz put the man's body in a bag and dragged it out to the street where passing police arrested her.

Despite telling police she had been raped, Carrera said a forensic exam was never taken, a crucial step in prosecuting sexual violence cases. Instead, an officer responded that she probably wanted to have sex with the man at first and then changed her mind, he said.

"I regret what I did, but if I hadn't done it I would be dead today," Ruiz told the AP in an interview last year, adding, "It's evident that the state wants to shut us up, wants us to be submissive, wants us closed up inside, wants us dead."

Women's rights groups have repeatedly accused Mexican authorities of revictimizing survivors and failing to judge cases with a gender perspective.

Ruiz spent nine months in jail on charges of homicide with excess of legitimate self-defense, and was finally released to await trial.

Nearly half of Mexican women have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime, government data shows.

In 2022, the Mexican government registered a total of 3,754 women – an average of 10 a day – who were intentionally killed, a significant jump from the year before. Only a third were investigated as femicides.

The doctor jokes, “Don’t worry, we have some medication for that.” (read: sedative)