TDSB, trust your students
The Toronto District School Board learned a lesson over the past week: tangle with Marie Henein, perhaps Canada’s best known criminal defence lawyer, at your own risk.
The board got itself embroiled in a controversy over, of all things, a book club for teenage girls run by a Toronto woman named Tanya Lee. For several years it has partnered with Lee, encouraging students to read the books and take part in the club’s monthly discussions.
Sounds like a fine project — until last week, when, according to Lee, a TDSB supervisor told her it would not support two books, including a new memoir by Henein entitled “Nothing But the Truth.”
The reasoning, again according to Lee, was that Henein defended former CBC broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi at his 2016 trial for sexual assault, and “how do you explain that to little girls?”
The answer to that is, or should be, “quite easily.” In our justice system defence lawyers play a vital and honourable role. Their job is to make sure everyone gets a robust defence, to ensure the state is forced to prove someone’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt — no matter how heinous the crime they’re charged with.
Pulling support for Henein’s book, if that’s what really happened, suggests she somehow doesn’t deserve to be read or heard because she’s tainted by the alleged crimes of her clients.
Especially, one presumes, because she’s a woman who represented a man charged with assault, and high schools girls couldn’t handle all that.
To be fair to the TDSB, it says the supervisor’s comment as reported by Lee didn’t represent its official thinking. It says it’s reviewing Henein’s book and another by Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad about her experience as a prisoner of the Islamic State terrorist group.
The board’s director of education, Colleen Russell-Rawlins, even issued a statement in which she apologized to Henein and Murad, “both of whom have powerful stories to tell and from whom we believe students would learn a great deal.”
If the TDSB does come around to that conclusion in the end, it will be a good outcome. But it should not have taken a sharp rebuke by a prominent woman with a powerful megaphone to bring the board to its senses.
It’s still troubling that the first reaction of a high-level official at the board was to withhold support for books by two accomplished women for profoundly misguided reasons.
In the case of Henein’s memoir, it reflected a misunderstanding of the role of defence lawyers in the criminal justice system, coupled with an overly cautious approach to issues connected with the #MeToo movement.
In the case of Murad’s book, “The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State,” it appears to be a result of fear that it might fuel Islamophobia. At least that’s what Lee says she was told.
There’s no reason for that concern. Murad’s story of kidnapping, escape and testimony against oppression should be inspiring for the girls in Lee’s book club. Confusing the “Islamic State” terrorists with actual Islam is downright ignorant.
In both cases, the instinct to shy away from these books seems to reflect a desire to avoid controversy in the name of an antiseptic version of “diversity” and to protect students from the complexity of real life.
Henein herself expressed that well in an interview with the online publication The Hub. Trying to shield students, whether in university or high school, from people with different views and complex lives, she said, is wrong for many reasons.
For one thing, “it infantilizes everybody. We aren’t triggered constantly; we aren’t falling or passing out every time someone says something that we don’t agree with. We can sustain conversation and we can withstand opposite views.”
This incident presents the TDSB with an opportunity to embrace that view. It should trust its students and encourage them to learn from Henein, Murad and many others. It’s a learning opportunity for students and administrators alike.