Introduction
This book encapsulates a small part of the thirty years of our Canadian women's rebellion. It centers on the mechanisms of indifference, tolerance and sometimes complicity of government in maintaining men's power over women. The book focuses on the government responses to that part of the power of men over women exercised in criminalized brute force: rape, wife assault, incest, and sexual harassment. It counter poses the direct action of women to aid one another and to enlist the support of our community.
This is not another story of the individual men brutalizing told by the valorous women escaping them. But it is of course impossible to tell this story without reference to both. And ordinarily those abuse/domination/escape stories are those that I and other women like me are most likely to tell. In my anti-violence work in transition houses and anti-rape centers since 1973 I have heard and witnessed more than anyone in the world needs to know, of what harm men do to women. My personal knowledge includes branding and hidden bruising, broken jaws and burned flesh, broken psyches, mutilation. It includes callous indifference, excesses of rage and willful destruction of bodies and minds. It involves damage to old women and babies and practices of cruelty quick and vicious and it involves those cruelties to captives, especially wives and daughters carefully maintained over years.
Many individual women's stories have moved me deeply. In fact, I have a practice that sustains me when I am least sure of what my life's work has achieved, I recall the names of raped and battered women and children who inspired me, who made me weep with helplessness or with relief at being able to help. I recall those rebels who encouraged me: those who bid me to stand up. I recall them with gratitude and pride in our solidarity. These are women with whom I continue to stand. This book is an expression of that solidarity: between women threatened, raped and beaten and that overlapping group of women working to end such terrorism.
The book is focused closely on only one of our joint set of expectations, frustration and strategies: to make fair law, to make police come when they are called, to make them protect us, to make the detectives do an adequate legal investigation, to make the prosecutors effectively put the facts before the courts, and to make judges and jailers and probation and immigration officers hold the abusers humanely in community or if need be, in state custody, until all women and children are safe from them and until society imagines and successfully executes plans to change the conditions of women and to change men.
I have had the great fortune and tenacity to live and work among the righteous women of my generation who rebel against the violence that dominates the lives of women worldwide. Even the research, speech and judgments emanating from the capitals of the world must now concede the reality of women's oppression that we exposed. We the women who created the anti-violence wing of the movement in Canada have mobilized thousands of women to consciousness, self-help, mutual aid, demonstration lobbying and direct action both mass and anti-mass in form. We committed our lives and linked many others to the long-term multi-faceted struggle for social transformation.
Our women's rebellion identified, named and organized to stop that violence. Among those I know are women who rescued those attacked, sometimes by getting between angry men with guns and the women they wanted to shoot. We opened our own houses and "kicked back" our small salaries to invent feminist shelters: institutions in which women could hide each other and our children. None of us got rich. Many of us got no salaries. And of the few who were paid, I know of none who got a pension. Some wore out with the enormity of our project. Some died trying to escape and trying to help others to escape. We persist.
We invented, reinvented and coined words to describe our reality. Femicide among them. With almost no money we launched messaging campaigns on fences, on billboards, with little stickers in washrooms, on video and public television, on fax machines, and computers. After Take Back The Night, one of my favorite campaigns, from my own work is a one-month installation on a construction hustings in my False Creek neighborhood. We were linking welfare rates, health issues and violence against women in this show case federal housing development. I faithfully repainted and repaired the message wall everyday using my baby buggy full of staplers, paint brushes, posters and fabric after the nightly destruction of it by young men. Another favorite is a scripted bus trip around our city of Vancouver on an old yellow school bus on which we took media personalities in 1980, to educate them about hospital shift workers and sweat shop workers and what they needed to be safe from abuse. We talked about domestic workers forced to live in and then attacked on the job in the palatial areas, about women trapped in prostitution and pornography about wives and children with no where to go and about the deaf student residents at the mercy of their teachers etc. We called it a women's Tour of the War Zone.
Because of that work, expressions like violence against women, battering, sexual harassment, incest, transition houses and rape crisis centres, have gone from being vague and shameful notions whispered between women to becoming the commonly spoken international political language of human rights. We have spread important information throughout the country so successfully that virtually every college age woman can cite violence statistics and recognize many dangerous situations. We have made our organizing centres and our political thinking available back and forth across race class and regional barriers not adequately but with enough success that women tell on the sexist violence they have endured from every demographic group within the borders.
Our movement of feminist anti-violence initiatives mushroomed in the Canadian political boom time of the seventies. We had enormous public support. The national federal government was forced to respond to us with some funds and policy and law changes. I, with others, had some success on changes to rape law including that criminalizing rape in marriage, the No Means No Law and practices about consent and the Rape Shield Law procedures regarding women's private records and the use of women's herstory in rape trials, all of which have been heralded internationally.
Based on our work Canada claimed to the international community, exemplary government willingness and expertise in combating violence against women. On the basis of that self- generated and self-promoted reputation, Canada has recommended, even pressured with funding arrangements other national governments for changes in law, in domestic policy and in their relationship to women's NGO's. While doing so internationally, it co-opted our domestic anti-violence movement substantially. It devastated our network of anti-violence activists. Recently it has reversed much of the government policy that could be a source of pride to any equality seeking bureaucrat or politician. We have now witnessed criticism from the United Nations of the Canadian treatment of women.
Finding solutions is not easy. Our joint plans as a movement and my personal politics reject "Law and Order" right wing strategies that violate the human rights and human potential of men even of accused men (not the least of reasons is the impact on women). But so do we reject the abandonment of women and children to the lawless sexism of men's current inhumanity. We actively oppose the racism and class bias of the current selective state law enforcement. But in a similar vein we serve notice to the men of the left that we reject the romanticism of an anti-authoritarian "community justice" or "restorative justice" relying on community as it is, with no affirmative action component (nor even commitment) to advance community organization toward either women's equality or race and class equality.
This book has a special and particular herstory: it began life as only a dull obligation of mine to report back to Allan Rock, a progressive Justice Minister (now Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations) and to the Justice Department of the Canadian government for a small nationally funded project of which I was coordinator. But all the women involved worked above and beyond the legal obligations of the project to tell the truth of their and other women's enforced situation. They insisted with me that we think about what could be done for the women contacting us for help.
That expanded our work and our report into a contemporary analysis of the relationship between the federal government in the widest sense and the anti-rape movement we lead in Canada. The frontline workers involved in the project valued it. The collective in which I work, at Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter decided to translate, publish and distribute more than fifteen hundred copies of the report across the country. A wider group of frontline workers and then academics relished it and began to use it in their centers and schools. Demand exceeded that publishing run.
Now it is a report finding relevance in the international community. This runaway report, now book, continues to gather steam along the way to a better future for women.
Precisely, this is the story of a group of women over five years who try to enlist the Canadian government (provincial, federal and international) to aid women like ourselves, to face down, restrain, escape and correct the violent abuses of power inflicted on women by the men in their lives. But those five years were the culmination of thirty. Women in Canada were, those thirty years, in unique and privileged positions to develop and experiment with strategies to end sexist violence that involved the state.
Like women in England and some commonwealth countries we had the social safety net of the welfare state. Besides entitlement to education and health services for all, that welfare state allowed routes to possible state- subsidized incomes for women and their children escaping violent fathers and husbands and bosses. It also allowed specific funds targeted for transition houses from that same social welfare pot. Most women including American women had no such source or social tradition.
Add to those material conditions, the "baby boom" population burst and the social democratic job creation schemes like The Company of Young Canadians and the Local Initiatives Project grants reminiscent of the American New Deal. Mix with masses of women on the rise. We had fertile soil. The capitalist economy was booming. There was seed money available for new social projects and much needed social development and some of that was directed toward women the poor and aboriginal people. Partly this meant that individual women, me among them, could design the work we wanted to do like anti-violence programs and seek government funds to do it. There was more than enough meaningful work to do for most who wanted work, both paid and unpaid. And however unfairly accumulated and unevenly distributed, the country had more than enough resources to sustain everyone and to deliver all needed goods and services.
American women struggled to reform their constitution, as had the black community before them. That civil rights approach didn't yet exist in England or Canada. But the repatriation of the Canadian constitution and the creation twenty years ago of The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms opened that avenue to us too. We had the example of the Black Liberation struggle and a new mechanisms of government put in place nominally devoted to establishing the equality of women and mandated to screen all law, policy and procedures for compliance with women's promised equality. That approach is being reapplied in South Africa, Australia and other parts of the world. While the Equal Rights Amendment failed in the USA, Canadian women thought we could move ahead securing, then using, a new legal guarantee of equality and our growing analysis of the relationship between men's violence and our position as women in society.
The courts were inherently more closed, appointed, elite and therefore theoretically more regressive than the parliament. Still we saw some opportunity in the Supreme Court after the institution of The Charter and, especially once Madame Justice Claire L'Heureux-Dubé was appointed and the critical mass of baby boomer feminist lawyers took their places in academe as well as in the courts.
Even internationally violence was being recognized as part of the source and maintenance of the oppression of women. UN conferences like Beijing focused on women and the new international agreements fostered there as well as the initiatives toward a world court held promise as did the World Social Forums and the so-called anti-globalization uprisings.
Within Canada we had a mostly literate population, a publicly funded media system operating relatively freely and a public education system that could carry information of women's rights. Both could carry back to government elevated community standards: an increasing expectation of fairness to women, of state action to end the brutal unfairness of violence against women.
In these conditions we needed to answer the question that remains: Why is it so hard, so rare, for Canadian women who tell on their abusers, who ask for help, to get an effective conviction against the men who commit violence against women? And what will we do about it?
With belief in the diversity, splendour and potential of the Canadian Women's Movement
Lee Lakeman