Husband Shoots Wife on Brooklyn Street as a Community Watches

Husband Shoots Wife on Brooklyn Street as a Community Watches
By Byron Hurt

On Tuesday, September 1, I spoke to more than 2000 incoming freshman students at Montclair State University in New Jersey. The Department of Student Development and Campus Life invited me to campus to show clips from my documentary film, Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, and address the issue of men's physical and sexual violence against women as part of their New Student orientation. In my speech, I spoke about the urgent need for men to act as proactive bystanders in the face of such violence.

As I spoke to the students about gender-based violence in north Jersey, in Brooklyn, NY, Lenox Ramsey, 25, taunted, chased, and then finally shot his wife, Kaidan Ramsey, 22, in broad daylight near Brooklyn's Medgar Evers College. Surveillance tapes show a terrified Kaidan running for her life as people on the street watched, doing nothing.

Our communities cannot remain silent and tolerate this kind of violence. We must speak up loudly and boldly when men physically or sexually assault women. We also need to ramp up efforts to educate boys and men about patriarchy, sexism, male privilege, and how men's violence against women is ultimately about men maintaining power and control over female bodies.

This has to stop. Men's violence against women is pervasive worldwide, and we can no longer deflect this issue onto women as if they are the cause of the problem and should fix it by themselves. Each day, new stories emerge about men who abduct, rape, beat, harass, and kill women. We do not need any more statistics or empirical data to prove or legitimize that men's violence against women is a real problem. It is real, and it happens each and every day, all over the world.

Men, we cannot be silent anymore. Non-abusive men who respect women and who disrespect men that abuse women have to speak up when incidents like this occur. You do not have to be an expert or know the latest statistics. All you have to do is care, have courage, be a leader, and speak up in defense of the women you love. (Read Jackson Katz' Ten Things Men Can Do to Prevent Gender Violence at www.jacksonkatz.com)