Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice are three victims of police brutality and, to some, the martyrs of the Black Lives Matter movement. But men aren’t the only victims. What about Janisha Fonville, Alexia Christian and Natasha McKenna? What about the women? 

While the Black Lives Matter movement focuses on police brutality against black men, it almost completely ignores the brutality that black women face.

The Black Lives Matter movement should place equal emphasis on the maltreatment the police force puts on black women.

“The Black Lives Matter movement started as an outcry to police brutality amongst black men and male youth,” said Maranda Ward, creator of Promising Futures, a nonprofit helping youth development among teens. “In many ways, it’s a gendered movement in favor of men.”

While there are a few exceptions, like Sandra Bland, plenty of brutality cases against women aren’t getting enough attention in the media. People see current events through the media, and if the media only shows male martyrs over and over, the female voice gets lost.   

A police officer pulled over Bland for a minor traffic violation in Prairie View, Texas and arrested her after she refused to put out her cigarette. A video of Bland’s July arrest shows her repeatedly demanding to know why she’s being arrested and ends with her screaming, “you just slammed my head into the ground.”

Three days after the arrest, Bland was found dead, hanged in her prison cell.

Bland served as a guide for the Black Lives Matter movement, but her case was still unable to raise further brutality awareness for black women.

“I often hear reporters say: ‘this movement is because black men have been killed at the hands of law enforcement,’ but we’ve never said that, that’s never how we characterized this movement,” said Patrisse Marie Cullors, one of the three black women that originally founded #BlackLivesMatter, in an interview with Time Magazine.

Along with the police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, 2014 also marked the unjust police killings of a number of black women. This includes Gabriella Nevarez, Aura Rosser, Michelle Cusseaux and Tanisha Anderson. The number of black women killed by the police continued to rise in 2015 with the killings of Alexia Christian, Meagan Hockaday, Mya Hall, Janisha Fonville and Natasha McKenna.

“When you ask people to name victims of police brutality, for the most part nobody will give you a woman’s name,” said Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, who co-authored a report on female voices in the Black Lives Matter movement in an interview with Time Magazine.

Black women don’t only have to deal with the same racial profiling as men, but they are also more likely to be sexually assaulted when arrested, according to Crenshaw’s report. Around 10.9 percent of reported misconduct by police officers are sexual assaults, according to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service’s website.

It is important to realize that men in particular tend to be more disproportionately targeted by police than women. But the fact is police do target women. And while these instances may not be proportionally as high, this does not mean the media and public can disregard these attacks on women as if they are nothing.

The role black women play in the Black Lives Matter movement is greater than most expect. Not only do black women bring attention to the sexual violence of police officers, they make the issue more rounded and more applicable to all people.

People voice their support or opposition of the movement. People create new ideas off the movement, creating their own coalitions, holding demonstrations, and picking apart the movement altogether, while forgetting about half the problem. What about the women?