Violence Against Women Hurts Us All

Violence against women is often just the beginning.

Now that we know the three worst mass murders in Canada — the shootings at L’École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989, the van attack in Toronto in 2018 and now the murders that began in Portapique, Nova Scotia — all have a clear connection to misogyny (a perpetrator’s hatred of women), what do we do with that information? Does it even matter, when both women and men lost their lives in two of the three cases?
The answer to that is yes. It matters a lot. Acknowledging the role of a killer’s rage against women, something that is often explored online and escalated in real life, is actually critical to ensuring that our Canadian community is safe not just for women, but for everyone.
We know that when a man takes out his anger on a woman in his life, it often doesn’t end there. When a boy lashes out and punches his mother, he’s much more liable to hurt his sister, too. When a man cruelly belittles his partner, he treats the kids in the house the same way.
The abusive behaviour starts there, but it doesn’t necessarily stop. In many cases, it erupts at a friend’s house, in a workplace, a school or public places from parks to restaurants to malls. Naturally we should want to stop such behaviour before it happens, but when we see the signs of an abuser, we need to make the link between home and community.
Gender- based violence should be stopped for its own sake, of course. Again and again, when the police investigations are concluded, they show that mass murderers’ first targets were the women close at hand, often long before they turned their sights on the outside world. With so much evidence to show that men who start out by beating, cheating or killing the women in their lives are likely to be violent in the community, too, now is the time to act.
The links are clear: Men who hurt women hurt other people, too. Exactly what happened in Nova Scotia when a man shot or burned 22 innocent people may never be known, but we do know that the trail began, as it so often does, with a terrorized woman as his first target. When we acknowledge the reality and extent of violence against women, we can ensure that our laws and our police and our communities will act swiftly at the first signs of a man’s abusive behaviour to keep it from affecting children, neighbours, colleagues and complete strangers.
How many more mass murders by men who want to punish women are needed before we finally realize that violence against women hurts us all?

By Nancy Payne