‘There absolutely should be a public outcry’
Advocates call for action after four women killed in Peel in span of two weeks
Activists fighting to end violence against women say the silence in Peel has been deafening after four women were killed in their homes in the span of two weeks last month.
“No one is saying this is shameful that this is happening in our day and age,” laments Sharon Floyd, executive director of Peel Committee Against Woman Abuse. “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done.
“There absolutely should be a public outcry.”
Instead, “there is a silence related to this.”
The string of killings was condemned by advocates on social media, but beyond that, there has been no outrage from the community.
“There is no social responsibility for these issues,” Floyd said.
Gurpreet Malhotra, executive director of Indus Community Services in Brampton, agrees.
“We generally don’t react as a community, get angry and fight back,” he said. “We bemoan it, say it’s a shame, and carry on. That has to stop.”
Gender-based violence in all forms — sexual harassment, sexual violence, physical abuse and homicide — is a deeply ingrained aspect of our society, according to Peel Committee Against Woman Abuse. The organization offers a crisis line and Interim Place, two 24-hour crisis shelters that provided safe havens for 116 women and 74 children experiencing gender-based violence in Peel Region in 2017. “We need to move away from the fact that this seems to be the norm. This is not normal,” Floyd said. But it is all too common. According to the Canadian Women’s Foundation, a woman is murdered by her intimate partner every six days in Canada. Half of the women in this country have experienced some form of physical or sexual violence, there are more than 1,200 missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and 46 per cent of Ontario school-aged girls report experiencing sexual harassment, according to the foundation.
The issue has come into sharp focus in Peel with the killings of Mississauga’s Elaine Bellevue, 61; Brampton’s Hoden Said, 30; Baljit Thandi, 32; and Avtar Kaur, 60, between Jan. 12 and 27. These were not “isolated incidents,” the PCAWA stresses, with Floyd calling them “heinous and unacceptable.”
Their deaths reflect the violent reality many women face every day, many of them in silence.
Malhotra of Indus Community Services said Thandi and Kaur were clients of his group’s settlement services, but they said nothing about potential problems they were facing.
“We’re deeply saddened by these losses and the increasing frequency that it seems to be happening,” he said. “I think we need to talk about these things more.”
And there is little in the way of preventative help for anyone looking for it, he added.
“Where can a 14-year-old boy go for help figuring out their angry emotions?” he asked. “If they’re watching TV, they’re certainly not learning how to do it right.”
The issue is social, political, economic — and requires the attention of the entire community, advocates have said.
That’s why the PCAWA launched the Sound Off Against Silence campaign Feb. 14, aimed at “sounding the alarm” about violence against women, co-ordinator Laura Hartley said.
“Everyone points to someone else,” Malhotra said. “But at the end of the day it’s really sad, because this hurts all of us.”