Why Law and Order Won't Stop Violence Against Women: But Undermining Patriarchy Will.
SUMMARY: Twenty-five years after the first wife abuse shelters in Canada opened their doors, Lee Lakeman of Vancouver Rape Relief took a hard look at the original goals of the shelter movement to see how far society had come in addressing violence against women. This article is based on a speech she made in 1999 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Woodstock Women's Emergency Shelter in Oxford County, Ontario. It was first published in the Fall of 2000 issue of Herizons.In 1974, when a group of us established the Women's Emergency Shelter in Woodstock, Ontario, we were part of a movement that realized, even then, that the enemy had many faces. It was not only the individual man who battered, but also the patriarchal society that allowed him the extra power and status to get away with it, and the underside of the hierarchy that kept women vulnerable, dependent, undervalued and unbelieved.
Part of the problem was the legal system that refused to censure perpetrators. Another was that social service practices treated the woman as damaged goods, or as a temporarily injured accident victim who, with professional care, could go back to being "normal." Under those conditions, however, recovery means readjusting to unequal access to safety, employment, power, status and resources.
In the early '70s, we failed to reveal the extent of the problem: We increasingly talked in a public-policy way about how sexism offended women, instead of about how sexism enabled men to dominate women through violence. Sexism still pays off for men. At birth, they face a future of better wages, less domestic labour, and more social and sexual freedom than they would have if they were women. Yes, there are men who would gladly relinquish their illegitimate privilege in order to free women, but to this day it remains voluntary. And there are too few men who are demanding the changes needed to actually dismantle patriarchal power.
The public now accepts that violence against women is unjust. However, the public still does not appear to grasp that violence against women is not a string of unconnected incidents committed by individual crazed men or five bad guys. Rather, each incident is supported by, and part of, the social order keeping all of us in our place. And most politicians do not see it as a problem that men are endowed with extra status and power that they can use to get away with assaulting and intimidating women.
It is much more politically expedient to promise to punish five bad guys than it is to talk about how women's poverty keeps them economically dependent, or to see that economic discrimination puts women at risk of assault--by leaving them in darkened streets waiting for buses or cabs and by making them rent inadequate housing in ground-floor and basement suites with inadequate locks.
In those early days, it looked as though creating political will was simply a matter of addressing community ignorance. Transition houses and rape crisis centres sprung into existence almost overnight. In the five-year period between 1973 and 1978, Canada, along with the United Kingdom, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, established the first emergency services for assaulted women. It is important to remember that these initiatives were the result of the yielding of government to extraordinary pressure from below--from us! And they were a small concession, since most wife abuse shelters have budgets of less than $500,000 a year, and rape crisis centres operate on even less. To this day, governments refuse to fund shelters and centres adequately so that they can meet to cooperate nationally.
The '70s into the early '80s were heady days for feminism. We imagined not just improved employment and welfare policies but an end to poverty. We imagined not simply better "race relations" but an end to racism. Our goal was not simply to have crisis services for rape victims but to end rape, just as our goal was not simply to "rescue" battered women, but to end wife abuse. We imagined a straightforward process in which we would demonstrate how much violence there was, organize women to deliver public services, train key officials, lobby key politicians. Surely social change would follow.
From very early in this work, we came to see the necessity of advancing the whole feminist agenda at once. We needed equal pay in order to have the influence over tax and budget decisions that would get us child care and transition houses. We needed welfare standardized across the country in order to leave abusive men and in order to prepare ourselves for jobs and to sustain ourselves between jobs. We needed health care policies that would care for the sick and the old and the newborn, so that we were not individually burdened with each need as a family emergency. If we are not to treat each human need as a surprise and an emergency, then we need to invest and to plan for a community of equals.
It is now evident that, although politicians of the '90s knew the impact of their decisions on women, improving the status of women was not a priority. Instead, the federal government engaged in a relentless shift to the right. Government vocabulary changed. There was less talk about community and more about stakeholders. Government intervention was used less to protect human rights and more to protect corporate rights. The discourse changed on every basic level. Social services were suddenly luxuries. Trade deals made corporations more powerful than national states. The pressure to devalue social programs, cut social spending and dismantle the universality of programs followed.
Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government ignored the 1991 federal report The War on Women, which was produced by the Standing Committee on the Status of Women, which concluded that stopping violence was dependent on women's equality. Although we had managed to convince voters about the importance of policy changes and the spending needed to eradicate violence against women, the Mulroney government was not moved to take action. The Liberals went so far as to make a Red Book campaign promise that sounded like a promise to fund shelters and rape crisis centres. Later, they would claim that our centres are the exclusive domain of the provinces.
We asked for peace and justice and equality, and the Conservative and Liberal governments offered us "law and order." Law and order is shorthand for more power to the cops, the courts and the corrections system. Conservatives package it as victims' rights, while the Liberals spin it out as crime prevention. And voters repeatedly fall for it. It rests on the myth that our quality of life would be just fine if only we could keep down "the criminal element"--those five bad guys.
We have seen what a disaster this approach has been in the United States. In California, the father of a murdered girl was convinced that his daughter would have been safe from violence if her attacker had been held in jail on a previous conviction. He organized a barbecue, to which he invited a few prosecutors, a few judges and a few politicians to help him design a strategy for the five bad guys. They wrote the now infamous three strikes law, which was sold to the American public as a way to permanently jail repeat killers and rapists. Today, California's violent crime rate is the same as those of many states without the law although its rate of incarceration has increased. A horrifying number of nonviolent crimes became the third strike. The number of African Americans in jail increased. The number of prisons increased. And California had to slash spending on universities and public schools to pay for its industrial prison complex.
The biggest problem with passing off law and order as a social policy agenda is that it entrenches the same old patriarchal order: men over women, rich over poor, whites over all others. Now, there are certain appeals that can be made to feminists about upholding the law and keeping good order. However, even if women can beat the odds and there is a conviction, the system often finds a way to refuse to censure or restrain perpetrators.
When British Columbia bishop Hubert O'Connor was convicted of sexual assault, he was eventually offered a sentencing circle, as though by raping the young Aboriginal women he had himself become Aboriginal. After Gilbert Rozon pled guilty to sexually assaulting a young woman while he was head of the Just for Laughs comedy festival, he was given a complete discharge because to do otherwise might have meant embarrassment at the U.S. border when travelling on business.
Meanwhile, provincial attorneys general, under pressure to "get tough" on violent offenders, have introduced mandatory arrest policies that increase the number of domestic assault charges being threatened or laid against women who defend themselves. This practice gives abusive men a way of bullying women ("I'll have you arrested, too") or pressuring them not to testify ("I won't testify if you don't"). No one bothers to tell these women that self-defence is not a crime.
Our call was for the public trial and accountability of men who violate the rights of women and children. Our call was for the resources to cope with attending to and organizing victimized women to advocate on their own behalf. Our call was and is for leadership from men to divest themselves of illegitimate privilege over women by demanding and securing the social changes that equality-seeking women say will put women on an equal basis. Our call was for social development as the intentional progress toward equality
Instead, federal justice minister Anne McLellan delivered an agenda of crime prevention and victims' rights, although the federal ad hoc committee on crime prevention (on which I represented the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres) recommended against it. The committee suggested that, instead of building a whole new bureaucracy based on crime prevention, government should simply get on with preventing violence by equalizing society.
Although McLellan secured the right of victims to be notified of criminal justice proceedings or if someone they testified against is to be released, and for some victims to submit a victim impact statement, none of these measures will better the lot of women or change the outcome of a case.
Equality-seeking national women's groups see that women are just pawns in a law and order agenda that will sacrifice a few disposable men instead of giving us what we want: a radical reorganization of power between men and women. It is not vengeance or special status as victims we seek, but equality.
A funny thing happens when you settle for "victims' rights" instead of women's rights. It sounds like it would be more inclusive, as though you mean women's rights with the addition of other victims. But that is not the case. Most victims' rights groups tend to focus on the rights of families. The leadership figures are usually surviving family members of girls or women who have been killed by someone other than a family member. Yet the vast majority of victims are maimed or killed by male family members. Of course, surviving family members are distressed and angry. But you almost start to believe that it is the relatives who are the victims. The media adds to this by seeking out distraught surviving relatives and asking what could have been done to prevent the tragedy, instead of asking the experts who have developed policies and legislative reforms and who have sheltered victims for decades.
Law and order proponents believe that accused and convicted people have too many rights. We are baited to believe that the only way to get higher conviction rates is to undermine the rights of the accused to protection from police misconduct, or their right to legal aid. As feminists, however, we want a justice system that not only protects the rights of the accused but also the rights of the woman complainant, the woman witness, the woman prosecutor and the woman judge.
The conviction rates for crimes of violence against women and children are now so low that they flaunt the systemic bias of the system. Importantly, we are against all unfair applications of the law, including the fact that Aboriginal people, people of colour and people with the lowest incomes are disproportionately convicted. We must get on with the humanitarian project of eliminating the classed, racialized and gendered society.
Inequality can be measured in violence. Without a systemic understanding of the massive scope of the problem, well-meaning folk settle for measures that change nothing, out of the belief that anything is better than nothing.
A comprehensive intervention to reduce violence is needed, one that will place women's advancement at its centre. Governments must invest in equality-seeking women's groups. And the justice system must investigate, arrest and prosecute to conviction those who use sexist violence against women. It must do so in such numbers that the result is a critical mass of men interested in change. It can experiment with sentencing, as long as both the safety and the freedom of women are assured. It simply means guarding less property.
I urge you, as individuals, as neighbours and as a community, to make your weight felt, not only in your provinces and territories but in Ottawa. They must hear and feel an informed demand for the development of citizens as equals. They must hear that we know our well-being depends on it--and that we won't settle for anything less.
UPDATE: Forty years after the first shelters opened their doors to battered women, there are 500 shelters and crisis organizations operating across Canada. According to Statistics Canada, Indigenous women are 3.5 times more likely to experience violence than non-Indigenous women. Sixty percent of women with a disability experience some form of violence. The cost of partner violence is $7.4 billion a year.
In Canada, federal, provincial and municipal governments spend more than $150 million annually on women's transition homes and emergency shelters. More than 100,000 women and children stay in shelters each year according to Statistics Canada.
"Neo-liberalism continues to reproduce and expand documented class and race and sex hierarchy within a law-and-order agenda," according to Lee Lakeman. The result, she says, is to "disbelieve and dismiss women's complaints." Lakeman asserts that the solution is to critically challenge race, class and sex bias, police misdirection, minimum sentences and the jailing of assaulted women.
Caption: Lee Lakeman, of Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter, in a 1980 photo.
Caption: Lee Lakeman of Vancouver Rape Relief addresses a crowd of antiviolence protesters circa 1980.
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| Title Annotation: | DATELINE: 2000: VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN |
|---|---|
| Author: | Lakeman, Lee |
| Publication: | Herizons |
| Geographic Code: | 1CANA |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2018 |
| Words: | 2440 |
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