COMMENT
Another young woman is dead and she should not be. Another in Melbourne for a woman who travelled toward home but never made it there – because of by men’s violence.
Tonight’s vigil, at 6pm on the steps of Melbourne’s Parliament House, will honour Aya Maasarwe, the 21-year-old Palestinian woman who was murdered in Greensborough as she alighted the 86 tram on her way home. Tonight, an 86 tram, travelling that same route, will be filled with flowers to mark her death.
Maasarwe, an exchange student in Melbourne, will never return to her family and friends in Baqa al-Gharbiyye. Her sister, who was reportedly mid-phone call with Maasarwe when she was attacked, will not speak to her again.
Maasarwe has lived her final moments - in Melbourne, which I too adopted as home, at 19 - in the most awful way imaginable. The crime scene was described by police sources as “”. A by Victoria Police over the killing.
Maasarwe has been killed just six months after Eurydice Dixon was raped and murdered in Melbourne’s Princes Park, where another vigil was held for the community to come together in solace and support.
Maasarwe’s body was disposed of in such a careless, sickening way – reminiscent of the dumping of , which sent police on a lengthy hunt for her remains. And the horrific details of the attack, most of which are being withheld by police sources (), remind me of the way news of gruesome attack initally traveled around Brunswick bars like a warning.
It’s grim to imagine how these women are all connected by their final moments, but in my mind, and in the minds of so many women, we have catalogued these murders as “the worst that can happen”. They are the unforgettable stories of bad things that can befall us just because we are women.
Aya Maasarwe is the latest in a in this country – and there will be many others after her. These are women who are killed not just by a stranger in the park, or an “opportunistic” bogeyman on the tram (though to describe a violent killer who stalked a woman for several kilometres on her local tram line “opportunistic” is flippant at best, irresponsible at worst), but by a partner or flatmate or family member in their own home.
I am 28 years old and I am bone tired of saying over and over again: we deserve to live. We deserve to not be killed. We deserve to get home safely.
When , – of fighting against the male structures in our world engineered to harm and kill us. Just six months later, my will to fight has dimmed. As I read reports of Aya Maasarwe’s murder, I felt a visceral nausea.
How could it be that, just days ago, we were all that asked men to consider their relationship to their own machismo?
And perhaps it feels like the response to Maasarwe’s murder has been slightly more progressive than the deaths that came before hers: there are no , and the consensus appears to be moving (if painfully) toward the idea that male violence is destructive to our general mobility and wellbeing. But what is the cost of this awakening?
Some things are too big and too brutal for easy answers and punchy calls-to-action. Like the fact that Maasarwe was still alive, just barely, when she was found on Wednesday morning. She died soon after.
But changes that are slow and painful are the ones that are really worth it. So I’ll keep repeating myself if you keep demanding that you deserve the right to move through the world and get home safely. And one day, perhaps that will prove true.
Vale Aya Masaarwe, I’m sorry this is taking so long, too long to save you.
