No improvement 25 years after Montreal Massacre

[niyad]

No improvement 25 years after Montreal Massacre: Porter




A quarter century after Marc Lepine killed 14 women at the École Polytechnique, women are still being killed and abused in alarming numbers.
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“The War Against Women” was Parliament’s nod of agreement, one and a half years later. It was the title of a House subcommittee report. “We worried the title was so provocative, people would dismiss it,” recalls Dawn Black, a former NDP MP who sat on the subcommittee, which wrote the report after five months of hearing about the torture, murder, rape, poverty and struggles of women across Canada. “But we felt in the end, the reality demanded we recognize the deep and unacknowledged violence against women in our society.”


The 69-page report was filled with statistics the committee dutifully collected to support the war analogy. Many are maddeningly familiar:
One in 10 women were assaulted — physically or sexually — by their partner every year.
In 1989, 48 per cent of Canadians personally knew a woman being abused by her live-in partner.
In a recent study, 80 per cent of aboriginal women in Ontario said they’d been assaulted or abused.
One in four women had been sexually assaulted, half of them before they turned 17.

The committee quoted one rape crisis worker’s comparison of battered women shelters and rape crisis centres to unfunded, unrecognized Red Cross units in this war against women. Some of the 25 recommendations it made sought to bolster those facilities and to sensitize judges, Crown attorneys, police officers and others to the grave nature of the crimes.

What made the document radical, though, was its brief examination of the root causes of the war. Violence, it said, stemmed from inequality and traditional values that held men as the bosses and women as the servants. To end the war would require no less than a complete restructuring of society, in body and soul. The committee called for massive media campaigns, mandatory public school courses, more women in positions of power, notably in government (it called for gender-sensitivity training for MPs, ha!), and a national plan to build affordable housing “inextricably linked to wife assault,” since women who escaped their abusive husbands arrived at shelters with no money, no job prospects and no hope of paying rent. Poverty pushed many back to their abusers.

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http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2014/12/06/porter_no_improvement_25_years_after_montreal_massacre.html