Catherine Murray and Jen Marchbank

Remember Canada’s fallen women next Tuesday. Despite our peaceable self image, Canada has been home to femicide, appalling massacres, and serial killers. December 6 is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women in Canada.

But unlike November 11, this national day of mourning has not achieved the same symbolic recognition. Yet, for many women, gender war has bloody consequences. The Parliament of Canada set aside December 6 as a commemorative day in 1991.

December 6 marks the anniversary of the murders in 1989 of 14 young women at l’École Polytechnique de Montréal. The news stories of the day wrestled to tell the truth but had trouble saying these women died simply because they were women. Media tried to pin their murders on deviant psychological causes, rather than exploring the underlying factors which promote hatred against an identifiable group.

Stories of gender violence abound even today. They include the Kingston trial against so-called “honour killing”, the suicide of the Ottawa teen Jamie Hubley due to homophobic bullying, or the “punking” of cyberstalkers looking for sex with young girls online in Chilliwack.

The most epic and chilling local tragedy is the Oppal commission’s dedication to dodging even broader issues of human loss connected to the disappearance of women in the Downtown Eastside and on the Highway of Tears. Such terrible news in Canada is too frequent and too systematic over time to be mere aberration.

We allow a culture of gender violence to grow on the underbelly of our society, and cultivate a determined oblivion. We turn away from what is happening under the cloak of a globally intensifying obsession with security. We focus on “macho” masculine war cultures and we increasingly resort to rape as a weapon of civil war.

The World Health Organization has found:

• On average, between 30 percent and 60 percent of women surveyed experienced some form of intimate partner or sexual violence. This figure ranges from 15 percent in Japan to 71 percent in Ethiopia.

• Many women’s first sexual experiences were forced: Peru, 24 percent; Tanzania, 28 percent; Bangladesh, 30 percent; and South Africa, 40 percent.

• In South Africa, two in five youth (ages 13 to 23) reported being a victim of physical violence during dating.

In 2009, in Canada, Statistics Canada found that 67,000 aboriginal women reported being the victim of violence during the last 12 months. Aboriginal women are three times more likely to be victimized than other Canadian women. Men too can be victims of sexual assault, and rape and murder victims are men. However, on average, one Canadian woman dies every other day—and one in three die at the hand of their partner.

And homicide death rates are higher for girls aged 15 to 24. No wonder we see a steady rise of shelters and transition houses. There are a total of 593 women’s shelters operating in Canada, with a capacity for 11,500 beds, up some four percent from 2008. But cutbacks (there is no federal status of women’s office in Vancouver, and more and more downloading of the duty of care to community not-for-profits) are jeopardizing government sponsored anti-violence programs. Two of the women’s groups trying to influence the Oppal commission on the inquiry into the Robert Pickton murder investigation are now on life support.

Let us leave aside for the moment the argument that our government in Canada has a duty to protect our citizens’ right to live without sexual violence. Certainly, the much reduced role of the Conservative government’s secretary of state for women is a signal that this is not a hot topic in Ottawa. Let us leave aside the fact that all provinces have left Quebec—where gender equality is valued as a social good—alone on protesting the issue of the gun registry, which was created after the Montreal Massacre to reduce violence. Let us also leave aside the question of whether the Tories’ crack-down-on-crime legislation will help or hinder violence against women or other at-risk groups, including the disabled, aboriginal women, or gay and lesbian youth.

Gender violence doesn’t only target women but also those whose gender or sexual expression appears to offend others. Studies have shown that hate crimes in 2009 related to sexual orientation in B.C. rose.

Perpetrators of violence are disproportionately young and violent within their school environment. Egale Canada reports that 75 percent of lesbian, gay, or bisexual Canadian school students (in a survey of 1,700) reported feeling unsafe at school. The figure for transgendered youth is even more frightening, with 95 percent reporting school as an unsafe space. How are children to learn in an atmosphere of fear?

We are all potential or actual victims of gender-based violence and we are all responsible for acting individually and collectively to end it. We need to question how we can stop this culture of gender violence. Here are some calls we can make:

Call 1: Encourage everyone to learn about and challenge gender violence; see the B.C. Lions’ “Be More Than a Bystander” campaign.

Call 2: Model ways of being a man that eschew violence as an aspect of masculinity and most importantly speak out against sexual and gender-based violence.

Call 3: Support changes to the Family Law Act that define family violence for the first time and require judges to take evidence of violence into account when deciding what is in the best interest of a child.

We’d like to adapt a line from an SFU social psychologist who gave a lecture recently on prejudice among social groups. Stephen Wright called the phenomenon “a compelling human problem”. However, he says research shows that “friendly contact between members of different groups can lead to reduction in prejudice”.

We’d like to take that thinking a little further with this thought. Though humanity is gender variant, all of its genders are in the same boat when it comes to being victimized potentially based on gender. That commonality should be enough to make us befriend and want to protect each other regardless of gender or sexual orientation.

Catherine Murray and Jen Marchbank are professors in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies teaching at SFU Burnaby and SFU Surrey.