Sally Armstrong is a journalist, author and human-rights activist whose books include Power Shift: The Longest Revolution.
There are two questions to ask after the dreadful killings two weeks ago of one woman and three children, and the wounding of another woman, in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., by a man who killed himself soon after.
The first question is: why are we only talking about how to better protect women? The second is: where are the men, and, in particular, corporate and political leaders, in responding to this abomination that has been going on as long as we’ve been tracking crime? Women have done an enormous amount of work to protect their daughters, their mothers, their sisters and friends. We changed the laws, we opened shelters all over the country, we increased awareness at every chance we had. We wrote papers, gave speeches, raised funds and begged for change. But in the decades since femicide (the intentional killing of women or girls because they are female) was first coined in 1976, and the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women in 1993, the rates of intimate partner violence have hardly budged.
Today, women occupy some of the highest positions of power. They are CEOs and heads of state. But they are still not safe. Nor are their daughters.
In the furor that has followed the murders in Sault Ste. Marie, commentators and police chiefs have called for increasing the number of shelters, allowing women to stay longer until they have a safe place to go, and naming intimate partner violence an epidemic. While we do need these things to happen, not a word has been spoken about the perpetrators. Nowhere is anyone talking about men, who commit the vast majority of these crimes. Is it not time for men to take responsibility for a problem that costs $7.4-billion a year in Canada?
When did anyone hear a CEO speak to employees about the consequences of the crime known as intimate partner violence (IPV), or gender-based-violence (GBV) or violence against women (VAW – we’re never short on acronyms.) What if the CEOs of Canada’s largest corporations, who collectively employ millions of people, were to issue a statement and say: “If you are harming your partner, I will fire you because you are committing a crime. If you need help, we will provide it. But if you don’t want help, you are not part of this organization, because we don’t employ criminals.”
For decades, IPV has been seen as a private problem. For even longer, women were blamed for it, seen as somehow deserving of being beaten, threatened, or murdered. While the status of women has been altered dramatically – the number of students enrolled in law and medicine is now gender equal – the number of women in this country suffering from IPV remains a disgrace. One woman is murdered every six days by her partner. During the pandemic, women were locked down with partners they were afraid of, partners who would beat them and claim the beating was the woman’s own fault. The Assaulted Women’s Helpline in Toronto reported a 400-per-cent increase in calls.
I once gave a speech in a church with a very large congregation in Toronto. Afterward, the pastor asked me what on Earth the church could do about violence against women. If religious leaders stood in their churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples, and told their followers on their holy day that harming your partner is a sin against God, that would be doing something. If corporate Canada made it clear that IPV will not be tolerated, that would be doing something. If all of us who know someone who’s getting “slapped around” or “put in her place” – codes for being beaten, terrified, or possibly murdered – responded by saying, “I will not play golf with you if you are doing this to your partner,” “I will not sit at this family reunion table with my cousin who is beating his wife,” “I will not employ you if you are guilty of this crime” – if all of us made it clear in a bar, in a café, at a basketball game, at the office, that those who refer to women with degrading or violent words are not welcome to sit beside us or dance with us or work with us, we would all be doing something.
Now it’s time for the men to act. Our sons and our brothers and the leaders and icons of men – the coaches, the professional athletes, the CEOs, the politicians – their voices can alter these repulsive statistics. We need men to talk about femicide, to help society hold perpetrators responsible, to hold any political or judicial structure that reinforces misogyny to account.
Stop making this a women’s problem. It isn’t. It’s a men’s problem.