Missing In Action

MISSING IN ACTION
by Dawn Atkins

Arlene Tsuji came home from work and went out for her nightly one-hour walk in her quiet Vienna Woods neighborhood in Northern California. She knew the area well as the room she rented was only blocks from her parent's house. At 7:00 p.m Arlene took her Walkman stereo and walked into the cool autumn evening -- and vanished.

Cindy Fawcett bought a soda at a gas station on Scotts Valley Drive, in Scotts Valley, California on her way home -- yet she never arrived home.

The War Against Women in this country is still largely unrecognized by mainstream Americans and the press -- and yet it is escalating. From the courts to Congress to the streets to our homes, women live with the realization that they may be the next casualty. Our rights to reproductive choices are being stripped from us, our dreams of equal pay have been slashed as we lose ground, our bodies are the property of the victors -- the media, the law and the men. In this assault on women, Arlene Tsuji, Cindy Fawcett and others like them, are the Missing in Action. They are our constant reminders that we are at war. That at any moment we might be next.

I have been a feminist and a writer for nearly my entire life and yet in that time, I have never been as frustrated and frightened by a story I covered than with a piece I wrote about the disappearances of Arlene Tsuji and Cindy Fawcett for The Mid-County Post in November 1991. As I went through the process of finding out all the "facts," I found I was groping for more. As I sat down to write the story, I found myself angry and confused. This "should be a simple news story" my editor told me and every part of me kept screaming that it should be more than that. As I read over all the articles in The Santa Cruz Sentinel, the police reports and interviews with police investigators, I felt the real story here was missing...

Missing... A threat that every soldier going into battle lives with, the fear that they might not just die but disappear without a trace. They might be captured by the enemy, imprisoned, tortured and killed, and yet their families and friends might never know what happened to them. That is the story that wasn't being told -- what these women's stories mean to all the women who read them.

Not a single story, not even mine, mentioned the political context of these crimes. Someone took these women and no one knows who. Yet, what we don't say, is that most of us realize it was probably a man or men who took them, that it may have been someone they trusted -- a "friend" -- or it may have been a man looking for "fun." It is the stuff of most women's worst nightmares. It is the stuff of men's entertainment in Hollywood movies like "Silence of the Lambs" and books like American Psycho. Most women read these stories and try not to let their minds dwell on what they believe happened to these women, their sisters.

We don't want to think about it because then we have to acknowledge that any of us may be next. We want to see this as an isolated crime so that we won't have to think about the war that we live in every day. There are no bomb shelters to protect us, no burned out buildings to validate the fear, no United Nations protections -- only the statistics to remind us that we are not alone in our fear. We know that men rape one out of every three of us, that most of us will know our attackers, that the people most likely to rape, beat and kill us are the men who claim to love us. The hypocrisy is sometimes overwhelming.
I don't remember when I lost the innocence of believing that men really loved us. I was abused by my "father" before I was old enough to know the lie. Years later when my mom was single, my mother worked for a women's rape hotline and we often sheltered women because they needed a place to stay with no men in it. I remember the vacant, shell-shocked look on one young woman's face who had been kidnapped by two men, held and raped for days, and then escaped.

I remember seeing a newspaper article about a woman's body found in the river and the artist reconstruction of her face. They wanted to know if anyone knew who she was. I still cry as I remember the fear and compassion that I felt when I saw that drawing. I wanted her to have her name back. I still wonder if they ever found out who she was.

I remember living with my two cats in a basement studio apartment in Oakland. I read articles in the San Francisco Chronicle about serial murders and women who disappeared and I worried that someday that might happen to me. I figured since I lived alone and my family was in another state, it might be weeks before someone looked for me. I was afraid my cats would starve so I bought automatic feed and water bowls for them.

All this came flowing up out of me as I tried to write the "simple news story." I wondered how many other women out there were afraid and angry when they read of Arlene and Cindy. I wanted to put some of that into the story but I realized my editor, who already said I was "too political," would not let me. I realized that some journalists would say we shouldn't frighten the family and friends of these women. How much more frightened can they be? Don't you think they haven't thought of the horrible things that could have happened to these women already? Don't you think they live with these unspoken fears as much as any of us?

Arlene's story is a classic woman's parable. A woman, walking alone at night. A good girl who was responsible and had no problems and yet she is gone. The story also hides the women who disappear and no one notices -- the ones who are homeless or teenagers presumed to have run away. Or the fact that most of us are more likely to be assaulted or killed in our own homes or some other "safe" place. It isn't just walking alone at night that we fear -- it is that this could happen anytime, anywhere to any one of us.

This is the story the media will not tell. The War Against Women is a covert one. The media must hide it so that women don't realize that their private fears are part of a political problem. We are all political prisoners and we must fight back if we are to be free. We must learn to defend ourselves -- take self defense classes, join the petitions to have the United Nations recognize violence against women as a human rights violation, work for and support the women's crisis organizations and political actions groups, and find a way to speak out. The silence will kill us --we must not let the issue disappear.