Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms grants equal rights to all Canadians . But it’s not working in the case of women and Aboriginals, who are treated shabbily.



The torrent in the media of women being abused was unleashed by the case of CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi, who pursued numerous women for sexual gratification and slapped, choked and hit them for his morbid pleasure. Fifteen women have leveled such charges against Ghomeshi and the police are looking into it while CBC has fired him.



The case triggered an avalanche - women who had nothing to do with Ghomeshi are speaking out about the abuses they suffered, and these are powerful women, even members of the provincial and national parliaments. Women in Canada are cabinet ministers, premiers, members of the House of Commons and of Senate, ambassadors, deputy ministers and have even been governors-general.



Canadians this month are observing the 25th anniversary of one of the ghastliest crimes in the country’s history - the cold-blooded murder of 14 women in Montreal by a deranged individual.



Marc Lepine lined up female students at the Ecole Polytechnique, said he hated feminists and he shot them and then himself. It was the biggest mass murder in Canada.



Though the crime was the work of a sick person, it’s clear that he was not the only male who saw women as less than human. Women across the country wept and cried for justice.



Parliament was shocked and began to study the problem. After a year and a half, a House subcommittee issued its report, entitled, “The War Against Women.”



The report’s 69 pages provided 25 recommendations to rescue women from their agony. The report was a harrowing one, though not a surprise to those who follow the media and the agencies that help women.



One in four Canadian girls is sexually assaulted, it said, half before they become 17. One in ten women is assaulted physically or sexually or both every year by her partner. Eighty percent of Aboriginal women in Ontario said they had been assaulted or abused. Almost half of Canadians know women who are being abused by their partners.



The report called for a restructuring of society to erase the male view that they are the bosses and can do whatever they want with women. It also called for more funding to help women and a national housing plan because women who escape abuse go to women’s shelters with no money, job prospects or hope for a better life. With shelters themselves underfunded, many women end up returning to their abusers. The report also called for training judges, crown attorneys, police officers and others to sensitize them to the grave crimes committed against women.



Responding to the report, Parliament adopted a plan, called “Living Without Fear,” that emphasized an education campaign and created a panel to study the problem seriously and suggest answers.



At the 25th anniversary of the Montreal massacre this month, the consensus is that not enough has been done and that women continue to be abused and battered. For one thing, guns like the one that Lepine used to kill his victims are still easily available to the public. The government had toughened gun laws in 1991 and created a gun registry. The number of suicides and shooting by hunting rifles declined. But the government dismantled the registry two years ago and earlier had removed the word “equality” from the mandate of Status of Women Canada.



Mary Clancy, a former member of Parliament and of the House subcommittee that studied the problem, stated recently that “the war is still going on. We are still an occupied country.”



In his book called The War on Women, Brian Vallee stated that while 44 Canadian soldiers were killed on duty between 2000 and 2006, 500 Canadian women were murdered by their partners during the same period. The Montreal Massacre Anniversary Commemoration Committee stated that in the last 25 years, 1,500 women have been killed across Canada by their partners or ex-partners.



The Toronto Star saw some hope in that women are now fighting back and that several men are supporting them. But this is scant comfort in a situation where women continue to be brutalized in one of the world’s best countries simply because they are women. Statistics report that 15 percent of girls are raped on university campuses across Canada.



The Ottawa Citizen reported that 460,000 sexual assaults take place every year, that 90 percent of assaults are not reported to police, that only 12 charges are laid for every 1,000 sexual assaults, that it takes 300 days for a sexual assault case to make its way through the judicial system, that only three convictions result from 1,000 assaults, that 90 percent of victims of sexual assault are women, and that 75 percent of the assaults on women are committed by someone the victims know.



Women in Canada also earn about 31 percent less than men for doing the same job. But that is another sordid story.

 

— Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan is a retired Canadian journalist, civil servant and refugee judge.