FAILURE OF GOVERNMENT TO ADDRESS VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AN OUTRAGE
On Monday night, four of the people vying to be prime minister of this country provided videotaped answers to questions about violence against women, making varying degrees of sense. The man who is currently prime minister didn’t even bother to participate.
The following morning, three women were found killed in a rural area about a two- hour drive west of Parliament Hill. Anastasia Kuzyk, Nathalie Warmerdam and Carol Culleton were killed in three separate incidents before police arrested a suspect who knew all the victims.
The outrage that this country has failed to address is not, strictly speaking, the murder rate of women.
In fact, women are much less likely than men to be the victims of a homicide, and the murder rates of both women and men have declined over the last couple of decades. So has the rate of intimate- partner homicide in particular, albeit with some fluctuations.
No, the outrage is that violence against women is a particular kind of crime with characteristics that connect these murders to larger social structures, even within public institutions, that our governments steadfastly refuse to acknowledge and address. Violence against women is fundamentally a different problem than violence against men — not a worse one, but a different one, and connected to an entire set of gender- specific policy failures.
That makes it the sort of crime that might respond to policy changes aimed at those systems. Rates of violence against women — and even changes in those rates — vary widely across the country, which suggests it’s not an inherent fact of the human condition but connected to what Stephen Harper might call, with a sneer, sociology.
If we understood that variance better, that might give us information about the causes and possible solutions, if we were the sort of country that paid attention to such things. Instead, we get the former chief of defence staff speculating about “biological wiring” over here, and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau speculating about music lyrics and absent fathers over there.
“In general, the nature of violence against women is distinctly different from violence directed at men,” explains a 2013 Statistics Canada article. “In 2011, intimate partners, including spouses and dating partners, were the most common perpetrators in violent crime against women.… This contrasts violent crimes against men, where intimate partners were among the least common perpetrators.”
Most spousal homicides, the same report shows, happen after a history of violence in the relationship. The problem of intimate- partner homicide is a failure to identify serial recidivists and prevent them from reoffending.
The murders of women by their spouses or men they’ve dated tend to come out of predictable sets of circumstances, over and over again.
As for the men who murder women they don’t know, we’ve seen several cases recently in which they openly displayed common misogynistic attitudes before the killings.
The murders of women are very often connected to how women are seen, by men and by the institutions of the state.
Aboriginal women are disproportionately likely to be victimized.
The man charged in the Wilnoarea slayings, Basil Borutski, has not yet had his day in court and we cannot know if he is guilty. We do know some things about his past. Court documents related to his 2011 divorce show that his wife alleged he was chronically violent and mentally abusive, which he denied. The judge wrote that the testimony of their daughters “confirmed that Basil was violent, easily agitated and tyrannical toward his family members.”
We also know that he was charged in 2012 with assault against Warmerdam. That charge was stayed but he was convicted for threats against Warmerdam’s son. In 2014, he was convicted of assault against Kuzyk. He recently got out of jail after serving his time.
While the horrific story was breaking on Tuesday, Green party Leader Elizabeth May was meeting with the editorial board of the Ottawa Citizen.
I asked her what she thought had changed since the only leaders’ debate Canada has ever had on women’s issues, in 1984.
“What’s changed since 1984 is we won’t even have a debate,” she said.
It would be nice to think that’s because we don’t need one. Tell that to the women at the sexual assault centre that was in lockdown in Pembroke on Tuesday as this horrible news broke.