The fact that dangerous offender Blane MacDougal was able to walk away from the minimum security Ferndale Institution in Mission on Monday punches home the point that violence against women still isn't being taken seriously enough by the courts or the justice system. It seems to defy logic that a 60-year-old man who has a criminal history of murder and rape going back 40 years to when he was a youth would be put in a minimum security prison. In fact, it's crazy when you consider that this man had already escaped prison once in the past and that for reasons beyond the imagination had been paroled twice. During both his paroles, he managed to rape three women. The justification for why he was in a minimum-security prison was that he had learned to hide his dysfunctional fantasies. All this information has been reported by the Lower Mainland media since Monday. What wasn't reported are the reasons that led prison officials to gauge that this man was not a safety risk, that he had stopped being a dangerous offender and that 40 years of crimes against women would not be repeated yet again.
Violence against women is very real and immediate, even though there seems to be a strong community silence and lack of motivation around Violence Against Women Prevention week, April 22 to 28. However much my ire and my blood pressure are raised by still hearing too many stories about women cut down through violence by a man, that is by no means the whole story. Because we aren't paying attention to the whole story, violence against women is still a daily part of our lives, even when we pretend otherwise.
From all my research, combined with professional and personal experience, it remains very clear that violence against women hasn't decreased much during the past 30 years of targeted programs, increasingly better laws, educational campaigns and public awareness. Even more blatantly, smack-in-your-face obvious, is that whatever we are doing isn't working because we keep raising new generations of young men who are violent. Obviously, our stratagems are flawed. So why do we persist in banging our shins in the same place on the same thing week after week, year after year, decade after decade? Even though there have been studies ad nauseam done on the fact that men who have been abused tend to abuse while women who have been abused tend to fall into a pattern of being abused, we still aren't putting in place services for boys and men. No, for men we send them to "anger management programs." We don't acknowledge their abuse, the fact that they have been mentally, physically and sexually abused not just by other men, but also by the women in their lives, their mothers and sisters, just like women have been abused by the men and women in their lives. When people, men or women, have historical trauma in their lives they suffer damage that impairs and impedes their abilities on all sorts of levels. We seem more willing to recognize this trauma in women and have far more options and support services for them. For men, however, we seem to negate their trauma and chalk their behaviours up to being violent and abusive, and that's it, folks. But that isn't it - and until we take the gender out of violence and start calling it violence against humanity and recognizing that both men and women share differently in the responsibility for violence in our communities and in our lives, and share differently in the effects of this violence, we aren't going to start putting in place the systems and supports needed to heal ourselves and each other.
