Guest post: Thoughts on the Realengo Girl Massacre
Translated by Lauren Asrael, who provides this preface:
Last Thursday morning, a 24 year old man entered a public school in Realengo, a suburb of Rio de Janiero, Brazil. A former student, he told the staff that he was there as a guest lecturer.
He entered a classroom, pulled out his gun, and shot over twenty students, mostly girls. Wellington de Oliveira killed ten girls and one boy, and wounded thirteen girls and three boys. He shot the girls in the head and the boys in the arms and legs, telling one boy, “Don’t worry, fatty, I won’t kill you.” The media refuses to call this a misogynist crime or a hate crime and continues to use the word ‘alunos’ (male students in Portuguese) when talking about the girls and boys. The girls and boys murdered and wounded were between the ages of 11 and 13. Wellington de Oliveira shot himself. He left a suicide note about sexual chastity and purity.
This is a response to the shooting and the sexism by Brazilian blogger Valéria Fernandes of Uma Voz Feminista.
Thoughts on the Realengo Girl Massacre
Valéria Fernandes
I’m writing this with anger and resentment. The crime in the Realengo public school, eleven ‘alunas’ dead – yes, female students – because it was ten girls and just one boy, leaves me deeply saddened and bitter. We’ve made it to the First World, we now have our own version of Columbine. The number of girls murdered compared to boys (10-1) and wounded compared to boys (13-3) leaves my hair standing on end. The suicide note, full of religious cries (Christian, not Islamic, as some were hoping) of sexual chastity and purity leaves no room for doubt. This was a misogynist hate crime. It is reminiscent of the shooting at the University of Montreal in Canada and at the Amish school in the United States.
In 1989, in Montreal, a guy entered the Polytechnic School, went into an engineering classroom, pulled out a gun. He separated the women from the men and said he was fighting feminism. He shot nine of the women, six of them died. In his suicide note was a list of famous feminists he wanted to murder.
The case of the Amish school is more recent. In 2006, a guy entered an Amish school (doesn’t this just remind you of the film “Testament”?) held a class of students hostage, kept the girls at gunpoint, let the boys go. He killed five girls, and had meant to kill them all, but when he saw the police coming he shot himself.
Someone please tell me where you can find a classroom (excluding Nursing school) with ten girls to every boy. I’m a teacher, and this may be true for some schools, but it was not the case in Realengo. Some are saying, “he shot more girls than boys because girls sit in the front row.” I teach teenagers, and I can tell you that both boys and girls sit in the front row.
I just do not believe he shot randomly. I don’t think anyone is at fault – this is not something you would ever imagine happening in a Brazilian school. No one can buy guns that easily unless they are involved in organized crime. I am praying that this does not become a trend. I sincerely believe this was a misogynist hate crime, and the patriarchal view that hides the number of female victims – girl victims, is deeply offensive. I can only hope that the wounded survive and do not join the numbers of the dead.
9 Responses to “Guest post: Thoughts on the Realengo Girl Massacre”
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Violet Socks says:
My thanks to Lauren Asrael for translating this and working with Valéria to have it republished here.
April 14th, 2011 at 1:20 pm EST -
Delphyne says:
It was most certainly a misogynistic hate crime done by a fucking coward.
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anna says:
I doubt it’s a coincidence that Brazil recently elected its first female President. I hope her security is good.
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quixote says:
1) Lynched.
2) Ignored.
And I can’t even figure out which is worse. I have to go wrap a belt around my head to keep the pieces together.
Thanks for breaking the silence.
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julia says:
I was living in Rio de Janeiro when Columbine happened here. Everyone I knew in Brazil was in shock. And the State Senate of Rio made stricter gun laws there, because of what happened here. When I found out about the massacre last week I felt the ground slipping out from under me.
I can not imagine what this will do to the freedom of girls in Brazil. They have much less than boys as it is. I wonder how many parents will be afraid to send their daughters to school.
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Violet Socks says:
julia, has there been any improvement in the press coverage this week? Are the Brazil papers starting to acknowledge that girls were targeted?
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Branjor says:
Final count is 12 killed, 10 girls, 2 boys. This was definitely a misogynistic hate crime. The killing of the two boys was probably accidental.
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AR says:
Most shootings, indeed most school shootings leave more male pupil dead than female. It doesn’t seem like they go out of their way to point out the gender of the majority.
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julia says:
I don’t think it’s accurate to say that most school shootings don’t kill girls. First off, almost all the murderers are boys. The overwhelming majority. Second, if you look at this one and one in Germany and the one in the Amish country it’s mostly or all girls. I have yet to research this but maybe I should.
As for the Brazilian press, I haven’t been following it much the past few days. Valeria wrote on her blog as of Monday that they have not called it a hate crime. Of course, from TV and newspapers, you see the girls’ families and read their names. So they are hardly invisible, everyone knows it was mostly girls. The cover of ‘Veja’, the Brazilian version of ‘Newsweek’, had angel’s wings and listed the names of the girls and boy. ’12 dead, 190 million injured’ was the headline from a major paper in Pernambuco (NE Brazil). The 190 million means the entire country.
