When will the violence against women stop?
It’s time we listened to what survivors are telling us, Donna F. Johnson writes.
On Dec. 6, 1989, the Montreal Massacre plunged Canadians into a polarizing debate. Many saw the killing of 14 women at École polytechnique almost three decades ago as the isolated act of a madman. At the time, I had been working in a battered-women’s shelter for three years. By then I knew that normality can exist with bottomless cruelty — and that violence against women knows no bounds. I saw Marc Lépine as a symptom of a problem. For those of us working inside shelters, murder was but the most visible tip of a massive social crisis.
Twenty-eight years later, what strikes me about Basil Borutski, just recently convicted of the Wilno murders, is how alike he is to all the others. Self-centred, smug, entitled, lacking even the most basic knowledge about himself; unable to think from the perspective of others. Women are sluts, whores and liars and responsible for all his problems. He slaughtered three of them before his morning coffee with the ease of an angler gutting a string of fish.
Borutski’s actions were extreme, but his mindset is not; his rationalizations and justifications are no different from the many who make this planet a living hell for women. To borrow from Hannah Arendt, the trouble with Borutski is that there are so many like him — and that the many are not sick, but terrifyingly normal.
In the early stages of my work, I, too, struggled to understand what was going on. It took years of seeing the pattern repeated for things to become clear. Intimatepartner violence is a drama in three acts. It is only in the third act that the narrative draws to a chilling conclusion. It played out for me in a series of shocks.
The first shock (Act 1) was witnessing the extreme cruelty of so many men towards their partners. Women came through our doors in a steady stream bearing variations on a single story of abuse. They told of their partners degrading them as sluts and whores; of being choked, beaten, raped, threatened. They’d tried everything to make it work. When finally they took the decision to separate, their partners would not let them go.
The second shock (Act II) was seeing that threat, coercive control and violence increases at the point of separation. Women are kicked to the curb at the leaving stage, their contributions devalued, their share of the assets denied. They are depicted as lying, vindictive, unstable, unfit and often dragged through the courts for years. The message to women is that their lives do not belong to them. It is the time of highest risk.
The third shock (Act III) comes when the systems women turn to for protection — police, courts, child-welfare agencies, family court assessors — desperately fail them. They fail them through attitudes, policies and practices that minimize the violence, and through weak criminal law interventions. For abused mothers, our family courts are an unmitigated disaster.
Women are left to their own devices to deal with the violence as best they can. They are patronized with half-baked solutions to living in war zones: told to make safety plans; to teach their kids a code word for when daddy is escalating; to put money and keys aside for a quick getaway; to wear a panic button; carry bear spray; take a self-defence course; install security cameras and extra lighting; alarm doors and windows; disable GPS tracking devices; vary their routines; change their identities.
Three decades have passed since I began my work. I no longer think we have any intention of stopping this violence. I have come to view our offerings to women as appeasements. We’re happy to help women cope, adapt, hide and so on; we will counsel them when they are injured and console their families when they are murdered. But give them lives free of violence? That would be going too far. The poet Katha Pollitt observes, “It’s hard to see women as belonging to themselves.” Culture critic Ellen Willis writes that we live in a society “actively hostile to women’s ambitions for a better life.”
The great feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote that some things given to women are not better than nothing because they suppress women’s rebellion. Partial measures and small beginnings can be simply “bones to gnaw on,” “a mystification.” “In fact it’s a way of subduing (women) by making them think things are being done. It’s not only a way of co-opting women’s revolt but of countering it, suppressing it, pretending it needn’t exist.”
The first shelter opened in Canada in 1973. We now have more than 600. Shelters play an important role in keeping women safe. But shelters don’t stop abuse. We can rescue women until the cows come home; build 10,000 shelters. Misogyny, like a pernicious cancer, treated in one area appears in another. The violence is inside our men and inside our institutions, rooted in age-old prejudices transmitted thoughtlessly, generation to generation. It needs to be taken out at the root.
Keeping women alive is a bareminimum demand: Obviously these murders must stop. But all violence against women must stop. Male dominion over women’s lives must stop. Institutional support for men’s violence must stop. Rape and sexual harassment must stop. It’s all connected and it all must stop. These circumstances are dire, but they are not beyond human control, nor inevitable.
Key to ending this scourge will be tapping in to the expertise inside our shelters and rape crisis centres. Survivors and their advocates know this territory. They know where the landmines are hidden. They must take the lead in the development and implementation of all programs and policies that respond to violence against women.
It’s not just about monitoring and oversight of police or courts, though it will include this. It’s about privileging the knowledge and experience these women bring to the table — involving them at the front and working alongside them every step of the way until we get it right.
The systems women turn to for protection — police, courts, childwelfare agencies, family court assessors — desperately fail them.