Day 13
The following piece was written by a very close friend in Vancouver. It speaks to many of the issues brought up in yesterday's post and presents other very important points. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how we frame the role of men in violence and what we can do to improve this. The reason this is so critical is that if we don't address the ways in which gender violence is socialized, learned, and ascribed, we risk that we will continue to fight the same battle over and over again. I have much more to say on this issue, but I'd like to step aside for today and let someone else, whose opinion I highly respect and value, have her say.
On Violence Against Women
by K. Darch
by K. Darch
It has been twenty years since fourteen women were shot and killed by Marc Lépine at L’École Polytechnique in Montreal on Dec 6th, 1989. It’s now 2009, and former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, has said that violence against women is the most pervasive and destructive human rights violation facing the world today.
I grew up post-Montreal massacre on a military base in Kingston, Ontario, with the prospect of voting and going to university, but daily life played out in an atmosphere of the constant threat of sexist violence from male peers. Like many people, I had the impression that the Montreal massacre was the random act of a mad man. I never heard that in his suicide note, Marc Lépine had a list of other well-known Canadian feminists, and I had never understood the event to be a politically motivated strike against an ideology that moves myself and other women closer to equality.
The recent shootings at the LA Fitness Centre in Pennsylvania, the shooting of a mother, daughter and granddaughter by a husband in Alberta, and the murder by drowning of three teenage girls and their father's first wife in Kingston this summer preceded a similar response. The men were under financial pressure, they were racist, or they were “just plain crazy.” While these are often factors, what connects these killings is that in all of these instances it was women who were killed by men. To say the men are crazy is to exceptionalize them, in a world where violence against women is not the exception but the norm.
On average, a woman is murdered in Canada every week at the hands of her intimate male partner - this year, more than 30 women have been killed by their intimate partners in Canada, and a record of 69 wives were murdered by husbands across Canada in 2007. In North America today, the amount of men killed in firefighting, policing, and in war is still five times less that the amount of women murdered by their spouses.
Many of the perpetrators of male violence are fathers, husbands, roommates, and bosses. If they’re just bad apples, it seems that these apples are growing from the same tree. Twenty years later, we still live in a system of society and government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it, and violence against women is the most harmful result of this power imbalance. Everyone needs to act, because in the city, in the country, globally, other social issues cannot be solved until we address women’s inequality.
My limited understanding of the Montreal massacre and the fact that I didn’t link it to misogyny, or in any way to myself, shows how successful the general silencing about the aspect of misogyny in this event was - the same kind of silencing that women face when they speak out about their experiences with sexual assault and battery.
What are some of the ways we can make systemic change? By fighting for a guaranteed livable income, better policing of violence against women, funding for women’s equality groups, and supporting women of colour formations worldwide. These conditions are transformable. We need to remember, but we also need to resist.
I grew up post-Montreal massacre on a military base in Kingston, Ontario, with the prospect of voting and going to university, but daily life played out in an atmosphere of the constant threat of sexist violence from male peers. Like many people, I had the impression that the Montreal massacre was the random act of a mad man. I never heard that in his suicide note, Marc Lépine had a list of other well-known Canadian feminists, and I had never understood the event to be a politically motivated strike against an ideology that moves myself and other women closer to equality.
The recent shootings at the LA Fitness Centre in Pennsylvania, the shooting of a mother, daughter and granddaughter by a husband in Alberta, and the murder by drowning of three teenage girls and their father's first wife in Kingston this summer preceded a similar response. The men were under financial pressure, they were racist, or they were “just plain crazy.” While these are often factors, what connects these killings is that in all of these instances it was women who were killed by men. To say the men are crazy is to exceptionalize them, in a world where violence against women is not the exception but the norm.
On average, a woman is murdered in Canada every week at the hands of her intimate male partner - this year, more than 30 women have been killed by their intimate partners in Canada, and a record of 69 wives were murdered by husbands across Canada in 2007. In North America today, the amount of men killed in firefighting, policing, and in war is still five times less that the amount of women murdered by their spouses.
Many of the perpetrators of male violence are fathers, husbands, roommates, and bosses. If they’re just bad apples, it seems that these apples are growing from the same tree. Twenty years later, we still live in a system of society and government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it, and violence against women is the most harmful result of this power imbalance. Everyone needs to act, because in the city, in the country, globally, other social issues cannot be solved until we address women’s inequality.
My limited understanding of the Montreal massacre and the fact that I didn’t link it to misogyny, or in any way to myself, shows how successful the general silencing about the aspect of misogyny in this event was - the same kind of silencing that women face when they speak out about their experiences with sexual assault and battery.
What are some of the ways we can make systemic change? By fighting for a guaranteed livable income, better policing of violence against women, funding for women’s equality groups, and supporting women of colour formations worldwide. These conditions are transformable. We need to remember, but we also need to resist.
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