Do you remember Genevieve Bergeron? How about Anne-Marie Edward? Does Annie Turcotte ring any bells?
If those names don’t conjure information on who these women were, you’re not alone. I didn’t recognize their names when I saw them listed.
But how about Marc LePine?
His name will be back in the media this week because Dec. 6 marks the 25th anniversary of his rise to infamy. It was on that day, the 25-year-old walked into École Polytechnique de Montreal carrying a semi-automatic gun into an engineering classroom. After separating the women from the men, he murdered women and then wandered out to the halls, continuing to shoot before ending the rampage by killing himself.
In total, he murdered 14 women. And his reason? According to the suicide note he left, feminists ruined his life.
A simple web search for LePine is a stark reminder that often the killer is remembered long after the memory of his victims’ names has faded from our collective memory.
At the time of the killings, there was a debate about whether these murders represented the act of a deranged individual or whether they were symbolic of a much deeper society issue. Many women argued LePine’s actions were just an extreme expression of the violence against women in our society.
The women were right.
What caught Canada’s collective attention was not that a man was so angry with women that he killed. What made LePine memorable was he killed so many women and in a postsecondary institution – a place where young people come to mould their futures not meet their deaths. Every day in this country, women are beaten and sexually assaulted, too often killed, in their homes, usually by men they wanted to love them.
Ontario’s Domestic Violence Death Review Committee report, released earlier this year, looked at 20 instances of death resulting from domestic violence in 2012, involving 26 homicide victims and six perpetrator suicides. In 18 of the 20 cases the committee reviewed, the perpetrators were male.
This is not to suggest that men are exempt from domestic violence. Western’s Centre for Research & Education on Violence Against Women and Children (CREVAWC), with the support of the Canadian Labour Congress, conducted a Canadian-wide study into the impact domestic violence has in the workplace.
More than 8,400 people responded to the survey and, not surprisingly, the majority of respondents were women. Of the respondents, 37.6 per cent of the women and 17.4 percent of the men reported experienced domestic violence over their lifetime.
When asked about the high proportion of men who reported having experienced domestic violence, Peter Jaffe, CREVAWC director, said research has found when it comes to the broard category of domestic violence – pushing, shoving or throwing something men’s and women’s involvement is roughly the same. But women are five times more likely to experience repeated domestic violence to the degree that results in injury, living in fear, missing work because of violence or being killed.
As a society, we’ve responded by trying to take care of the victims. We will continue to pray over the dead and do our upmost to patch up the physical and emotional bruises surviving women encounter. We will continue to support shelters that act as temporary refuge to women and children.
But nothing is really going to change until the good guys decide they’ve had enough – until men not only say they’re appalled by domestic violence, but decide they no longer want to be silent bystanders. It’s when they begin to seriously challenge themselves, and each other, about the role of violence in society and the impact it has on the next generation of men, that we will see real change.
On Saturday, let’s pay tribute to the 14 women murdered in 1989. Let’s also spend a few moments thinking about the many women abused every day in Canada. And let’s hope this the year the good guys find their voice.