Content Warning: This article contains mentions of violence against women. Please read with care.
Living the Institutions is a column about the institutions and norms that impact the experience of undergraduate students at UBC.
Marie Erikson is a fourth-year student in the philosophy honours program and author of the column Living the Institutions. In her work, she aims to mix theory, experience, policy and norms through clear and nuanced writing. She enjoys an engaging conversation about cats, coffee or whatever event or philosophical conception is deeply bothering her at the moment.
December 6 marks National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, commemorating the 35th anniversary of the École Polytechnique Montréal mass shooting, a misogynist and anti-feminist attack in which a man killed 14 women. Though the attacker was specifically targeting feminists and other women, it was called the result of psychological issues and even defended by some men at the time.
The City of Montréal did not officially recognize the attack as anti-feminist until 2019, a decade after the change was solicited by Québécois researchers in feminist studies.
The shooting and the lives of the women killed are remembered every year across Canada, including at UBC, where the Engineering Undergraduate Society and the Faculty of Applied Science host a ceremony annually.
Years later and from the other side of the country, the École Polytechnique Montréal massacre demonstrates the gravity of violence against women and attacks on feminist education, two phenomena that should disturb us regardless of our connection (or lack of) to engineering. We all can use the horror of this attack as a prompt to consider how we encourage and value feminist education (understood here as a collection of practices, concepts, information and methodologies used to support women’s liberation from patriarchal oppression).
We certainly value education as members of a university community — we all, hopefully, acknowledge that we are extraordinarily lucky to learn, to study and to research in a community of fellow learners. So if we are committed to the value of education and supporting women, we should naturally value educating women and studying feminism. This, of course, means working to end the overrepresentation of men in programs, in part through continuing and expanding programs that erode norms keeping women out of engineering.
Barriers to access are one of many institutional failures against women that no one person can resolve. Yet you, the individual reading this, are likely still culpable for not according your actions with these values you hold. We are, however, capable of curbing our personal support for these injustices.
If you support education on feminism and feminist issues, as you ought to, when did you last read a book on feminism? Have you at least read a feminist essay recently? If you think people should learn about feminism, you as a person need to make active efforts to learn about feminism, else you contradict yourself and demonstrate that your words do not represent what you actually think. This particular form of cognitive dissonance may be rather common, but a popular form of hypocritical behaviour is still hypocritical behaviour.
And we should learn about feminism. For women, it rectifies the injustice where we could not name or even know the struggles we have been facing throughout our lives. For men, it provides a glimpse into how they benefit from and perpetuate an oppressive society (but for heaven’s sake, just talking to a woman does not remotely suffice for deep education on feminism).
Feminism is necessary to analyze and address the normalized violence against women, beyond attacks on feminists like the one on December 6, that is normalized even in a country we may otherwise consider safe like Canada. Yes, we must remember the hate and loss of the École Polytechnique Montréal massacre, and we must also acknowledge the survivors of violence against women in our communities.
Violence against women takes many forms, including abuse, femicide and sexual violence, exploitation and harassment. In Canada, this violence is unconscionably common. Nearly half (44 per cent) of women have experienced psychological, physical or sexual violence from a current or former partner, a rate that raises to 61 per cent for Indigenous women, according to Statistics Canada. The impact is also higher on young women and university students, with three in ten (29 per cent) having experienced intimate partner violence within the past year and 15 per cent of female post-secondary students having been sexually assaulted in a post-secondary setting.
So little of what occurs, however, is reported to institutions like the university for no fault of the survivors. I, like surely many other women, have seen survivors of violence against women keep these injustices to themselves because they have no way to report them or no way to report sexual violence that keeps them safe in their communities. I’ve also seen reporting sexual violence hurt the women involved when the survivor becomes excluded and further isolated from a social environment while the perpetrator remains untouched.
Returning to education, easy first steps include researching how to recognize these phenomena, especially intimate partner violence, and how to support survivors by listening and supporting their autonomy. You as an individual can also work to increase social accountability within your circles. Naming and calling out a problem — with the consent of the survivor and your safety considered — is important, yet because this violence is normal in our patriarchal culture, creating accountability needs to go beyond trivial, meaningless acknowledgement.
We are often not in complete control of who we interact with, but when we do have control, our choices have consequences. Are you friends with perpetrators of violence against women? Are you providing known perpetrators social opportunities or career advancement support beyond directing them toward resources to prevent further harm? Such behaviour reinforces that there are no consequences for violence, because your uninterrupted friendship, support, etc. shows that nothing was wrong. Taking firm action against perpetrators may sound harsh to some, but the harm of denying someone unnecessary privileges does not even begin to match the harm of violence against women.
Excusing the brutality of the perpetrator’s actions when not constrained by safety or consent also rejects the survivor’s status as a bearer of knowledge. By accepting the perpetrator as a “good man” who could never commit such violence or even naming the violence while assuming a “neutral” position of normal behaviour, you dismiss the gravity and harm that the survivor shared and thus their ability to have and share knowledge. British philosopher Miranda Fricker refers to this sort of morally wrong denial of trust as “testimonial injustice,” which can cause the recipient of this injustice to lose confidence in their ability to know, creating obstacles in their general intellectual development.
Worse, the denial of someone’s ability to reason and work things out through trustful conversation also rejects their humanity and the opportunity to develop a sense of self, respectively. Fricker’s testimonial injustice may also arguably occur as a direct part of some forms of violence, such as psychological intimate partner violence. In such cases, your refusal to match your response to the weight of the situation would only multiply the injustice of rejecting the survivor’s personhood and identity.
Changing our culture and male socialization is extremely important, yet we need to pair these long-term, structural changes with efforts to manage the men who currently choose to act violently toward women. I know from my own experience that individual action can be emotionally and logistically hard, yet the challenge is better than consenting to violence’s continuation on our campus and in our communities. I’m only asking that you learn about feminism, work to support survivors well and refuse to accept or make excuses when men choose violence.
In 1989, it took the most extreme of a system of extreme attacks for much of Canada to abandon their false neutrality. With this day as a reminder, I ask you to join me in remembering these 14 women killed for their for being women but also continuing the crucial work of feminism. All forms of violence against women support the beliefs and system that contributed to the choice of the attack at École Polytechnique Montréal, but more importantly, every woman in her own right deserves to be free of the violence the patriarchy inflicts.
This is an opinion article. It reflects the contributor's views and does not reflect the views of The Ubyssey as a whole. Contribute to the conversation by visiting ubyssey.ca/pages/submit-an-opinion.
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