Every day Tom Meagher lives with the haunting reality of his wife’s murder. Jill’s life was taken by a stranger, a serial rapist, who attacked her as she walked home in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick on September 22, 2012.
Consider living with that horror, that grief, and reading headline after headline reporting the slaying of yet another woman. Seventeen-year-old Masa Vukotic. School teacher Stephanie Scott. Comedian Eurydice Dixon. And this week, Aiia Maasarwa, 21.
After news of the Isreali student’s death in Bundoora broke on Wednesday, Tom spoke up. Enraged, exhausted.
“I am so thoroughly sick to my stomach of men murdering women,” he tweeted. “The human cost of male violence is staggering, the incalculable social trauma & human misery it engenders is soul destroying. It’s [sic] weight is intolerable #EndMVAW [men’s violence against women]
“RIP Aiia & love to her family.”
Jill and Aiia's deaths are disturbingly similar.
Both were walking home after a night out with friends; Jill, 29, from after-work drinks, Aiia from a comedy gig to her college at La Trobe University. Both were talking on the phone prior to being attacked; Jill to her brother, and Aiia to her sister via Facetime. Both were close to home.
We can only hope now that the student's family achieves a similar sense of justice. As much as can be felt from a conviction, at least.
A 20-year-old man named Codey Herrmann was today charged with the rape and murder of Aiia. Jill's killer, Adrian Bayley, was locked behind bars in 2013 with an earliest possible release date of 2055.
Bayley's imprisonment, sadly, is only a small victory in a much larger fight. One Tom Meagher calls "the war on women".
In a stunning Facebook post acknowledging the ten-year anniversary of his marriage to Jill in July 2018, he wrote of the pure light and goodness of Jill and "the red-faced, steroid-riddled, dead-eyed individual misogynistic rage" of her "evil" killer. But it's what exists in between, Tom wrote, that chills him the most.
"In the war on women, [Bayley] exemplifies the extremist wing of the hateful and pervasive ideology of male sexual terrorism, but it's the everyday spectrum of male violence that disturbs me even more," he wrote.
"In a culture where the death's of most women are not newsworthy, are so commonplace that they are seen as incidental, expected and simply inevitable, he certainly does represent the extremist wing.
"But it's the many silent foot soldiers, supporters, cheerleaders, beneficiaries and bloated, self-righteous guardians of male supremacy who vocally claim to despise the extremist wing, while essentially supporting the underlying ideology that chills my blood."
Top Comments
I can’t believe Bayley even *has* a possible release date, no matter how far into the future it might be. Should have been life without parole. Must be incredibly hard for Tom and all the other families to see this hideous behaviour continue.
Why is everyone leaving Melbourne pastry chef Renea Lau (raped & very brutally murdered in June 2014) off these lists? I’m yet to see anyone mention her. That case probably has the most striking similarities to what happened with Aiia (that we’ve heard so far)
Yeah, you're right, that is a strange exclusion. I sure hope it's not because she's Asian... Qi Yu's name is also not on this list, though I have seen it on others. I guess there has to be a point somewhere or other when you stop naming the simply staggering amount of women who have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and paid for it with their lives.