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New York|Sexism, Hate, Mental Illness: Why Are Men Randomly Punching Women?
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Big CITY
SEXISM, HATE, MENTAL ILLNESS: WHY ARE MEN RANDOMLY PUNCHING WOMEN?
Conversation about the attacks on the streets of New York have centered on
mental illness, but the offenses seem to have their roots in hatred of women.
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Halley McGookin, in a still from her March TikTok video after she had been
punched in the head on a Manhattan street.Credit...Halley McGookin
By Ginia Bellafante
Ginia Bellafante writes the Big City column, a weekly commentary on the
politics, culture and life of New York City.
April 12, 2024Updated 1:02 p.m. ET
Before her trip to New York a few weeks ago, Lisa Pires, a South African living
in Amsterdam, encountered a series of videos on TikTok in which young women had
filmed themselves after getting attacked on the street in New York. Most were
punched in the face — unprovoked, at random — in Manhattan south of Midtown and
during the day. “I remember thinking it sounded so absurd that it couldn’t
really have been a thing,” Ms. Pires, who comes to the city often, told me
recently.
Many others appeared to share her reaction. Women were calling City Council
members, wanting to know if the videos were part of a prank, social media having
complicated the relationship between the reality of crime and the perception of
its prevalence. The beauty of an accuser all too often breeds suspicion, however
prejudicially, especially if the accuser is a TikTok influencer with more than a
million followers. In this instance, the tousled blond hair, long nails and
laugh-crying on view in one of the most watched videos surely helped sow doubt
on a take rendered in a bracing “Clueless” argot (“literally I fell to the
ground and this giant goose egg is forming on my head and I’m like ‘oh, my
God,’” Halley McGookin said into her iPhone). On March 27, the Council’s Women’s
Caucus issued a statement confirming that reports of these attacks were not a
hoax but instead part of “an alarming trend in violence against women.”
Despite her skepticism, Ms. Pires made a note to be vigilant when she was in New
York. Heading to lunch on a bright and chilly afternoon at the end of last week,
she was standing at an intersection on Delancey Street waiting for the light to
change when she noticed a man, walking in the opposite direction, “studying”
her. She registered that he was “quite well dressed,” but almost nothing else
made an impression.
Before she knew it he struck her with his fist, hitting her on the right side of
her head. He fled uptown on Essex Street. She reported the incident at the
Seventh Precinct, where a detective told her that these type of attacks had
become “kind of a big deal at the moment.” She was left with swelling in her
ear; her face turned black and blue.
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What was provoking all this? Fourteen women have reported getting punched out of
nowhere by strangers since mid-March, leaving at least one of them with a broken
nose, according to the police and city officials. So far there have been two
arrests: In each case the assailant was charged with misdemeanor assault, a
category in which judges are generally barred from setting bail and one that has
risen 13 percent over the past two years even as major crimes have fallen. The
man arrested in the case of Ms. McGookin, a 40-year-old occasional fringe
political candidate from Brooklyn named Skiboky Stora, has a criminal record and
his own active internet presence, maintaining an Instagram page with provocative
images of young women and pictures of himself standing in front of a “Trump:
Make America Great Again” sign. He wears a baseball cap with an inscription that
claims he is the great-great-grandson of Marcus Garvey.
Were women panicking needlessly? It was hard not to interpret these recent
offenses within the broader context of a roving and seemingly
ever-more-insidious misogyny. In 2022, the most recent year for which there is
available city data, women were killed by intimate partners at a rate 30 percent
higher than the previous year. Reports of domestic violence also increased
during that period, and nationwide, between 2018 and 2021, incidents of domestic
violence involving guns went up by more than 7 percent. According to a survey
from the Pew Research Center, a third of women under 35 report having been
sexually harassed online. And this is to say nothing of the less manifestly
aggressive, if pervasive, abrasions — the distillation of any middle-aged woman
who complains about anything to the favored signifier of oblivious bourgeois
entitlement, the “Karen.”
Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.
Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big
City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has
also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine. More
about Ginia Bellafante
A version of this article appears in print on April 14, 2024, Section MB, Page 3
of the New York edition with the headline: Why Are Women in New York Being
Punched at Random?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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