Violence against women leaves no room for comfort or polite language
In Ontario, 30 communities have declared violence against women is an epidemic. Ontario is averaging one femicide per week in 2023. Ford has committed to exploring investments and opportunities.
Photo credit: Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses.
Language is important. In fact, individual words can literally make or break an article.
As a writer, it can be tough keeping up with, and aptly using, the newest terms and phrases. One faux pas and a writer could find themselves cancelled.
But what is a writer to do when there is a dearth of language to describe or explain societal aberrations? Or, when the issue in question is just so unbelievable that it exists in a void well beyond the realm of plausibility for the average person?
When public health nurses Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald started their counselling practice in Truro, Nova Scotia, they were contacted by a woman in her thirties. She told them that in a few days she was going to commit suicide.
As they spoke, it became clear that the caller had been tortured and trafficked by her family since the time she was a toddler. Her family had indoctrinated her to commit suicide rather than reveal their secret.
Sarson and MacDonald convinced the woman to meet with them. Thirty years later, she is free of her family but still recovering from the trauma.
Over the years, thousands of women from across Canada and around the world have contacted the pair with accounts of non-State torture.
First coined by Sarson and MacDonald, non-State torture is torture carried out by non-State actors including parents, spouses, neighbours, strangers, human traffickers, johns, pimps, and pornographers. They include premiers, judges, police officers, doctors, nurses, and social workers.
Canada outlawed state sanctioned torture in 1985 but consistently refuses to recognize non-State torture in the Criminal Code of Canada. Instead, victims of non-State torture have to charge each torturer for every individual act of aggravated assault or aggravated sexual assault committed over years, if not decades.
There in lies the great patriarchal divide. While state actors like peace officers, public officers or members of the Canadian Forces are usually charged with torturing men in their charge, non-State torture targets women and girls.
By making this distinction, Canada is essentially ignoring atrocious human rights violations and invisiblizing these women and girls.
When Sarson and MacDonald started sharing their ground breaking work, professionals ran from them.
Women living with, leaving, and recovering from non-State torture have reported trying to tell teachers, nurses or counsellors about the torture they experienced. Most were either not believed or were thought to be mentally ill.
Canadian media coverage of this gendered issue is appallingly sparse to say the least.
Despite numerous set backs here at home, these activists have made in-roads with the United Nations.
In the fall of 2022, their book, Women Unsilenced: Our Refusal To Let Torturer-Traffickers Win (2021) and their video, Persons Against Non-State Torture were featured as part of a four-day exhibit to raise awareness about non-State torture at the Rotunda in Vienna.
Sarson and MacDonald also addressed the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice to advance their goal of developing a UN Declaration on ending non-State torture.
Every act of non-State torture has the potential to end the victim’s life. Sometimes deaths are collateral damage. Other times, it’s the cost of doing business -- think snuff movies.
Generally, these homicides are misidentified by investigators and the media as murders or suicides when in fact they are femicides.
Femicide was originally defined as the intentional murder of women and girls simply because they are women and girls. But just as the language around non-State torture had to be created, established and refined, so too has the definition of femicide evolved.
Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses (OAITH) reviews media reports of femicides across the province in order to compile its Annual Femicide List. Those media reports often mistakenly use the term homicide, murder or killing rather than femicide.
Perhaps unwittingly, media coverage has expanded the scope of femicide to include women, children, trans women, 2-Spirited Peoples and non-conforming individuals.
Perpetrators may be a current or former husband, boyfriend, brother, son or nephew. They may also be a male co-worker, neighbour, friend or acquaintance.
Men may kill a woman’s children leaving her to live with the torment. Other times children get between their mother and her attacker. Sometimes, parents are killed trying to save their teenaged and adult daughters.
The most recent femicide list compiled from November 26, 2021 to November 25, 2022 included 52 names – some from the same family. The cause of death varied from use of a vehicle, to shooting, stabbing, and strangulation. The latter two methods are both very intimate, personal and violent means of carrying out femicide.
Victims ranged in age from eight years to 88 years. In each case, those charged with these femicides were men. Some cases involved more than one male perpetrator. In two cases women were charged with murder along with male suspects. In one case, two women were charged as accessories after the fact.
Since 1990, OAITH has been aware of over 980 femicide victims who lost their lives to men’s violence.
By following media reports OAITH compiles an overview of how criminal justice and public policy respond to femicide. But there are limitations associated with media reports.
Particularly insightful is who gets overlooked. This group consists of missing and murdered Indigenous women, sex workers and trans women.
The root causes of femicide are diverse and intersecting. They include discrimination, a culture of violence, poverty, a lack of personal or community resources, service providers who fail to believe women or to provide meaningful support.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and Ontario’s Domestic Violence Death Review Committee (DVDRC) established over 40 risk factors that indicate when femicide is immanent.
If the perpetrator is depressed, unemployed, owns a firearm, has made previous threats to commit suicide, has made previous threats to kill the victim, displayed sexual jealousy, and abused alcohol and/or drugs, then his partner’s life is at risk.
The threat escalates with an actual or pending separation, child custody or access disputes, or a new partner in the victim’s life.
Victims with an innate sense of fear of the perpetrator and those who disclose a foreboding of harm to herself, or her children, indicates a serious risk.
Seven or more risk factors were identified in 71 per cent of the cases reviewed by the Ontario DVDRC between 2003 and 2016.
These signs are always visible. Yet, friends, family, bosses, co-workers, lawyers and judges failed to pick up, or act, on them.
Reductions and stagnation in funding for shelters, transition housing and sexual assault centres underwrites femicide.
Unfortunately, the Ontario DVDRC has not published an annual report since 2018 so any impact the pandemic had on domestic violence-based femicides is not publicly available.
Over 30 municipalities in Ontario have declared intimate partner violence and gener-based violence an epidemic. That makes sense considering Ontario averages one femicide per week. Yet, Ford has only committed to exploring investments and opportunities.
According to the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability, every 2.5 days a woman or girl is murdered in Canada.
Women and girls are overwhelmingly killed by men they know. Men, for the most part, are killed by acquaintances and strangers.
While media has done an admirable job reporting the numbers and demographics associated with femicide, they often cover these well-planned, gender-based murders in a disturbing and distasteful way.
Sensationalizing these femicides will increase readership but the victim is often lost in the reporting.
Krassimira Pejcinovski, 39, was murdered by her boyfriend in 2018. Her 15-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter were murdered by him as well. One child was not home at the time of the murders.
The signs were all there. Her murderer was found guilty of assaulting a police officer in 2009. Her employer was very concerned about the murderer’s controlling nature and feared he would harm Pejcinovski.
The reporter covering the femicide for a Toronto paper included a quote from the son’s hockey coach stating, “If it happened in the summer it would still be a tragedy, but the fact that the team is in the high part of the season, it’s very difficult.”
How incredibly shocking and bereft of feeling or empathy that statement is. But how unbelievably dismissive and insensitive of the reporter to make the conscious choice to include it.
I’m sure this mother of three would have postpone her femicide – and that of her children – to a more convenient time if it had been in her control, because heaven knows abused women are always accommodating someone so why not the coach and hockey team?
Gender inequality plays a significant role in how femicide is reported. And, you may be shocked to find that Canada is not the progressive, feminist country we think it is.
An Inter-Parliamentary Union report on gender parity ranks Canada 60th out of 187 countries. Rwanda is in first place, followed by Cuba, Nicaragua, and Mexico tied with United Arab Emirates.
An Abacus Data study (2022), commissioned by Informed Opinions, revealed that two-thirds of Canadians are either concerned, disappointed, surprised or angry with Canada’s ranking.
Women make up 30.5 per cent of parliamentarism in Canada. Over the last two decades, female representation increased by mere 10 per cent. At that rate, it will be 2062 before gender parity is achieved.
That means almost 70 per cent of politicians will never be sexually objectified, harassed, assaulted or experience intimate partner violence. In other words, male politicians have little personal incentive to improve services, budgets or policies that address the root causes of gender inequality.
The old boys’ network often prevents women from entering politics. When women are recruited, they generally get less funding and are sacrificed in unwinnable ridings. Women running for, or holding, office also face greater criticism and toxic abuse.
Quotas may be the answer to this conundrum. Iceland and New Zealand have almost reached gender parity using voluntary gender quotas.
Ensuring a level playing field through quotas simply means unexceptional men are less likely to be elected because research has proven that women who run are generally more qualified than their male counterparts.
No less than 80 countries now have minimum targets for female representation.
Federal parties in Canada already appoint 83 per cent of candidates. Unfortunately, the process favours men. The one exception to this rule is the New Democratic Party who tabled a Candidate Gender Parity Act in 2016. Perhaps the prospect of a hard target could incentivize other parties to support more women.
At times like these, there is no room for comfort or polite language. This is about the lives and human rights of folk who are routinely silenced, othered, and considered less than.
While gender bias is at play, it intersects with ongoing colonization, genocide, systemic racism, classism, and various levels of government reducing access to essential social safety nets.
Majority rule has never guaranteed the protection of basic human rights, freedoms or equality.
An informed public is the only thing that will move us closer to truly representative democracy that will act meaningfully to end violence against women.
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November is Woman Abuse Prevention Month in Ontario.
Woman abuse is not a women’s issue, it is a human rights issue that affects all of us.
Every November, communities and organizations across Ontario create awareness to end violence against women and their children.
Find the Wrapped in Courage campaign in your community and buy several purple scarves for yourself, friends and family to wear as a show of solidarity for women living with, leaving, and healing from gendered violence.
The 2022/23 femicide list will be available on the OAITH website at the end of November.