In August 2009, Bob Herbert wrote an article in the New York Times questioning why people were not more enraged after the 2006 rural Pennsylvania hate crime against a schoolhouse full of women and girls, nor after the 2009 Collier Township shooting. Herbert remarked, “We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.”
After a Not In Our Town screening at American University, graduate student and former high school and journalism teacher Mandy Toomey raised the question: why don’t we hear more about hate crimes against women?