Minnesota legislators are on a mission to address the alarming statistics surrounding the murder rate among Black women and girls with the intent to reduce – if not eliminate – the murder rate entirely.
The Missing and Murdered African American Women Task Force (MMAAW) was designed after the emergence of countless stories of Black women and girls who were senselessly and tragically murdered have begun to grip the nation and have robbed innocent victims away from their families.
Such is the case for Taylor Hayden, 25, a Black woman who was mistakenly shot and killed while waiting for an Uber while vacationing in Atlanta.
“In my case, my child, Taylor, 25 years old, a graduate from an HBCU – Prairie View – just a beautiful young lady, everything ahead of her, and she gets taken from us,” Hayden’s father, Peter Hayden told US News.
Data shows Black women are three times more likely to die from gun violence as opposed to their white counterparts. In 2021 alone, over 2,000 Black women and girls were murdered, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Furthermore, homicide was the second-leading cause of death among Black women and girls between the ages of 15 and 34. And the number of them dying are swelling exponentially, with murder rates 46% higher in 2019 than in 2010.
“In 2020, among cases where the relationship of the victim to the offender was reported, about 59% of Black women and girls were killed by a known acquaintance and over 30% were killed by a family member,” according to FBI data obtained by US News.
Additionally, “women are killed by partners or for other factors related to intimacy, in private and not during the commission of other felony crimes, unlike men who are more likely to be killed in public,” Shatema Threadcraft, a professor of gender, sexuality studies and political science at Vanderbilt University, told US News.
To quell these numbers, the MMAAW will work with legislators and other policymakers to inspect and report on systemic issues of violence against Black women and girls, as well as develop and implement new laws, policies and practices that will help in reducing murders among innocent victims who are taken away from all life has to offer all too soon.
To learn more about the Missing and Murdered African American Women Task Force, please visit here.
