Who Disappears From the Sentence

Passive language does not merely describe violence. It decides where responsibility is allowed to remain.

A woman was murdered.

The sentence is grammatically complete. It has a subject and a verb. It tells us that a woman is dead. It does not tell us who killed her.

Sometimes that omission is honest. The person responsible may not be known. An investigation may still be underway. A careful reporter should not turn suspicion into fact simply to make a sentence feel morally satisfying.

But sometimes the actor is known, and still he disappears.

The woman remains in the sentence as the person something happened to. The man who acted upon her slips out of its structure. We are left looking at her body, her choices, her location, her history, while the force that put her there becomes atmosphere.

This is not only a question of grammar. It is a question of attention.

A Girl Named Cake

Heather M. Edwards begins her essay by refusing to let the headline swallow the girl at its center. Drawing on reporting by ABC journalists Natalie Whiting, Supattra Vimonsuk, and Sinthana Kosolpradit, she gives us her name: Tunchanok Donhomla. Her family called her Cake. They remembered her as fun and cheerful. Her uncle said she liked to smile.

In Heather's account, Cake does not enter the story as a suitcase, a price, or an international crime statistic. She enters it with a name.

Heather also names the man Thai police have charged: Simon Peter Carman, an Australian national. He denies the charges. He has not been convicted. That distinction is not decoration. It is the difference between reporting and judgment.

But watch what a sentence can carry even so.

Police allege that an Australian man killed a seventeen-year-old girl.

The uncertainty survives intact. The actor does not vanish.

I put his name here deliberately, because I nearly did not. My first instinct was restraint, and restraint is usually right. But an essay about who disappears from the sentence cannot be an essay in which the accused man disappears. The caution that keeps us accurate and the caution that keeps us comfortable can look identical on the page. They are not the same thing.

The language surrounding violence has a way of making the harmed person carry the entire sentence. We say a girl was killed, a woman was assaulted, a wife was abused. Even when those statements are factually true, their construction can make violence sound like a condition the woman acquired. The girl becomes the site of the crime. The person accused of committing it becomes secondary, delayed, softened, or absent.

Vinanti Sarkar, writing in response to Heather, asked writers in different cultures to consider a deceptively simple question: do our words reveal responsibility, or quietly hide it?

In the United States, we hide a great deal inside sentences that appear neutral.

Acts Without Actors

An officer-involved shooting occurred.

A domestic incident took place.

A child was failed.

Mistakes were made.

Not all these constructions are technically passive voice. Some use nominalization. Some rely on vague subjects, compressed labels, or euphemism. They share a function: each creates the impression of an event without making anyone fully responsible for producing it.

The harm arrives already formed, like weather.

Institutions are especially fluent in this language. Their statements are often packed with nouns — incident, encounter, tragedy, failure — because a noun can sit quietly on a page without having to answer for what it did.

"A woman was murdered" can be accurate. It can also be incomplete in the precise place where public attention is most likely to stop. The woman is named as the object of our pity, but the act is detached from the person who chose it.

Researchers have documented the effect. In 1995, Nancy M. Henley, Michelle Miller, and Jo Anne Beazley examined passive constructions in reports of violence. Their experiments found that passive phrasing affected judgments of harm and responsibility; male participants attributed less harm and less perpetrator responsibility under passive wording, while both male and female participants showed greater acceptance of violence against women. A later study by Alexandra K. Frazer and Michelle D. Miller found that passive voice appeared more often when writers described male violence against women than when they described comparable violence by female perpetrators.

The verb form does not cause violence. It directs the eye.

We tend to inspect the person left standing in the sentence.

What was she doing there? Why did she trust him? Had she been drinking? Why did she stay? Why did she leave? What was she wearing? What kind of mother was she?

The grammar has already placed her beneath the light. Culture supplies the interrogation.

Neutrality Is Not the Same as Accuracy

There are good reasons for restraint. Journalists must distinguish among an allegation, an arrest, a charge, and a conviction. Courts are supposed to protect the presumption of innocence. Families should not learn invented certainty from a headline. Words such as alleged and accused are not cowardice when they preserve the boundary between what is known and what has not been proved.

But legal care does not require grammatical disappearance.

A sentence can identify the known action and preserve uncertainty at the same time. Police say a man killed a woman. Prosecutors allege that he assaulted her. A court convicted him of murder. Each sentence tells the reader who is making the claim, what is known, and where responsibility is being examined.

The choice is not between reckless accusation and actorless prose. There is a third possibility: precise language.

Precision also means refusing to make the victim explain the crime. A woman's work, poverty, immigration status, sexual history, addiction, or decision to trust the wrong person may be part of her life. None of those facts performs the act committed against her. Context can help us understand vulnerability, but it can become an elegant form of blame when the accused person's alleged choices receive less examination than hers.

We should notice when a woman is given a biography only so readers can decide how much grief she deserves.

The Grammar of the House

Newsrooms are not the only place this happens. The same evasion runs through the way families, neighbors, congregations, and courts describe harm that occurs inside love.

We had a fight.

Things got out of hand.

He has a temper.

It was a troubled marriage.

He snapped.

Each sentence reduces the specific act. Some remove the actor. Others replace his action with temperament, atmosphere, or mechanical failure.

"He snapped" comes closest to naming him, and it can still function as an alibi. It converts a choice into a malfunction — something that happened to him first and only afterward to her.

This is the grammar I have spent years reading, because coercive control is almost never described as an act. It is described as an atmosphere. He was controlling. Things were tense at home. She was walking on eggshells.

Notice that the last sentence puts the labor back on her. She is the one performing a difficult, careful action, while the person who made the floor out of eggshells is nowhere in the sentence.

Then there is the compound noun murder-suicide.

The term conveys two deaths, but the hyphen compresses acts that are not morally or humanly symmetrical. A man murders a woman and then kills himself. The first act is not explained by the second. The person whose life he took should not be fused with him so completely that his final act becomes the frame around her death.

Sometimes compression is necessary. But when space allows, write the sequence at least once.

He murdered her. Then he killed himself.

Two acts. Two deaths. Responsibility kept in order.

The Sentence He Chose

I did not expect the clearest example in this essay to come from the accused man.

In video recorded while he was in Thai police custody, Carman addressed Tunchanok's family while continuing to deny the charges. He said he felt bad for "what happened to your daughter." He called it "out of my control." He said "it shouldn't happen." Then he asked the family to tell other girls to be careful.

Read those phrases as grammar.

Out of my control. An event without an identified actor — and in the one place a person appears, he appears as someone to whom the event also happened.

It shouldn't happen. A grammatical subject, but no human agent. A general regrettable occurrence, the kind of thing that visits a town.

Tell other girls to be careful. Responsibility relocated onto seventeen-year-olds who have not met him yet.

A few paragraphs ago, I listed the questions we ask the woman left standing in the sentence: What was she doing there? Why did she trust him? Why was she not more careful? I did not need to supply that interrogation. His recorded message offered its structure as advice.

I do not know everything that happened in that room. Any criminal responsibility must be determined through the legal process. My subject here is not whether his phrasing proves guilt. It does not. My subject is the language he used and the work that language performs.

It is the same available construction a newspaper uses, a neighbor uses, an institution uses: a terrible event occurred; nobody is placed securely inside the action; girls should protect themselves from whatever happens next.

He did not have to invent that construction. It was already there, waiting — the most available way in English to describe a terrible thing without allowing responsibility to settle.

That is what I mean when I say language decides where responsibility is allowed to remain.

The sentence was built long before he needed it.

What Texas Said About a Dead Girl

Sometimes the sentence does not remove a man. Sometimes it invents a woman.

In September 1986, in Montgomery County, on the other side of my state, sixteen-year-old Deanna Marie Ogg was sexually assaulted and murdered.

In 1990, Roy Wayne Criner was convicted of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. His conviction rested largely on testimony from three acquaintances about statements they said he had made. No physical evidence tied him to the crime.

In 1997, Criner's family paid for DNA testing of the semen recovered from Deanna's body. The result excluded him. The district attorney demanded a second test. The State's test excluded him too.

A trial judge recommended a new trial. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused relief.

The State argued that Criner still could have assaulted Deanna without leaving the semen — that he might have used a condom or failed to ejaculate, and that the DNA could have come from a consensual partner. Judge Sharon Keller wrote the controlling opinion accepting that the exclusion did not establish his innocence.

Then the argument left the opinion and entered the culture.

Asked about the case on Frontline, Keller called Deanna "a promiscuous girl." The program reported that police had reconstructed the final two days of Deanna's life and found no evidence that she had been sexually active during that period.

The sex life used to explain away the DNA did not come from proof presented to Criner's jury. It arrived when the State needed a new story capable of surviving the test result.

It would be comfortable to make this one judge's failure. It was not. Prosecutors advanced the alternative-partner theory. The state's highest criminal court ratified it. A woman who could not answer was made to carry an explanation the evidence had taken away from the man in prison.

Criner was pardoned in 2000 after additional DNA testing further dismantled the case against him. In May 2026, Texas authorities charged Bobby Charles Taylor Sr. with capital murder following forensic genetic genealogy testing. He was extradited from Mexico and remains in custody in Montgomery County without bond. As of August 2026 no trial date has been set and the prosecution remains unresolved.

Earlier I wrote that we should notice when a woman is given a biography so readers can decide how much grief she deserves.

Texas wrote one for Deanna Ogg.

Some sentences surrounding the Carman case remove the accused man from the alleged act. The sentences surrounding Deanna moved the act onto a girl who could not answer them. The machinery is the same. Only the direction changes.

What Distance Does

I write from Marfa, in far West Texas, in a county with nearly twice the land area of Delaware. Out here, the sentence that hides responsibility is often shorter than the ones a newsroom would use.

He's just like that.

That's their business.

She knew what she was getting into.

They're going through something.

I am not interested in the story where the countryside is quaintly barbaric. What rural distance changes is the arithmetic of who is available to notice.

Out here, distance is a factor in every emergency. Isolation is not merely a metaphor for control. It is a physical condition control can use, and the land supplies it for free.

Distance does some of the work grammar does elsewhere. An agentless sentence removes the actor from the reader's view. A hundred miles of highway can remove him from everyone else's.

The language adapts to fit. In a small town, naming a man is not an abstraction. He is somebody's cousin, somebody's employer, the man who fixed your well. The euphemism is not only protecting him. It is protecting the speaker from what naming him would cost.

That's their business is a sentence about the person saying it.

I understand the impulse. I am not above it. But I have learned to hear it as information. When a community reaches for language without an actor, it is usually telling you what it has already decided not to look at.

The Second Disappearance

UNODC and UN Women estimated that approximately 83,000 women and girls were intentionally killed worldwide in 2024.

A number that large establishes scale. It also risks becoming a place where individuals vanish.

Statistics are necessary. They reveal patterns a single case cannot prove. They can force governments to acknowledge that what appears private, isolated, or accidental is occurring across borders and inside homes with terrible regularity.

But a statistic has no kitchen table. It has no uncle remembering a smile. It has no nickname.

Cake does.

There are two ways for a person to disappear from a public account of violence. The first is to be reduced to what was done to her. The second is for agency to be removed from the telling — even when a known person has been charged and can accurately be named as the accused.

Those disappearances can occupy the same sentence. She is made visible only as a victim while the agency under investigation is allowed to fade.

That arrangement protects more than an individual. It protects the surrounding structures from scrutiny. If violence simply happens, nobody has to ask who was permitted to move freely, who was treated as purchasable, whose warning signs were minimized, whose testimony was doubted, or which institution learned to describe its own inaction as an unfortunate outcome.

This is what I have elsewhere called the spell of unseeing. It is not always silence. Sometimes it is an abundance of words arranged so that the most important fact is difficult to see.

Put the Action Back

I do not want every account of violence rewritten into a slogan. I do not want certainty where the evidence does not support it. I do not want a dead girl's name used as proof that the person writing about her is one of the good ones.

I want the sentence to carry what we actually know.

Name the woman when her family has named her. Name the responsible person when responsibility has been established. Name the accused person as accused when a charge remains unresolved. Name the institution that declined to act. Name the policy that left an opening. Name uncertainty too, but do not confuse uncertainty with the absence of agency.

When the actor is unknown, say that plainly. Police have not identified who killed her tells a different moral truth than she was found dead. The first sentence admits that a person acted and has not yet been held accountable. The second can leave us with nothing but a body and a location.

Even the headline phrase sex tourist deserves that attention. It names a real form of exploitation, but tourist can also make predation sound like an itinerary. It does not erase the man. It relocates him into a word with a suitcase already packed inside it.

Words do not prosecute a case. They do not bring a girl home. They cannot restore the years Cake should have had.

They can refuse to assist in the disappearance.

The sentence may be passive. The decision not to look is not.