Remember when women unanimously agreed, when asked whether they’d prefer to be alone in the woods with a man or a bear, that the bear was the safer option? There’s a good reason behind the decision.
That fact is rather painfully underlined by TikToker and former coroner’s office employee Aisha (@aisha_brailsford), who’s been using her platform to share stories from her 16-year stint in the death-adjacent field. Many of her videos touch on particularly memorable tales from her decade and a half dealing with autopsies and investigations, and one video in particular zeroes in on the epidemic of violence against women.
It’s a well documented fact that an unfortunate percentage of men become violent when they’re rejected. Case after case showcase the consequences of a woman simply saying “no,” and — as Aisha outlines in her nearly three-minute video — that tendency stretches to men who are told “no” at the end of the relationship as well as the beginning.
Aisha delivers three gut wrenching stories, all of which zero in on the horrific revenge that the wrong spurned man will seek. Each end in death and horror, so they are not for the faint of heart. The first details a case in which a husband, eyeing an impending divorce, made the decision to kill not just himself, but also his wife’s two sons, all while their mother was just a few rooms away. She was the only survivor.
The second case also sees a poor heartbroken mother emerge as the only survivor, after her boyfriend — and the father of her two-year-old — tricked her into leaving him alone with their toddler. He proceeded to shoot both the boy and himself on the side of the freeway.
Aisha’s final story ditches the romance for fraught family strife. Instead of a boyfriend or husband, our attacker is a brother this time around, furious over his sister’s refusal to be bought out of a shared home. In response to that refusal, he broke into his sister’s family home while they were sleeping and shot everyone — his sister, her husband, and their two daughters — in their beds.
Each of the stories are truly horrifying, but they shine a light on a violence that plagues this nation. There’s not a single situation outlined in the TikTok that required even an ounce of the violence displayed, but far too often men are known to turn to violence when they get an answer they don’t like.
A United Nations study from 2020 discovered that a woman or girl is killed by someone in their own family every 11 minutes. In 2020 alone, around 47,000 women and girls were killed in a “gender-based” slaying by an intimate parter or someone in their family, and America’s numbers are only increasing. Even as other nations around the world see their numbers decline, the states are seeing more women, year over year, slain by the men in their lives.
It’s a devastating trend, and Aisha’s video only serves to underline how pervasive the issue has become. It’s commonplace, at this point, and it needs to be addressed. There are multiple areas that could be improved to help with this horrifying statistic, from access to guns — each murder outlined in Aisha’s TikTok involved a gun — to access to mental health resources and a societal examination of what is pushing our men to violence. It’s indifference, more than anything, that allows this trend to continue, and so long as we remain passive, women will keep dying.