Michael Kaufman and the White Ribbon Campaign
Dear HumanDHS network friends
Please find below an introduction to Michael Kaufman and the White Ribbon Campaign.
Kind regards
Brian Ward
December 6, 1989: The Day Canada Changed Forever
Michael Kaufman
On December 6, 1989, Canada changed forever. Until that day, thousands of women in our country suffered violence with little recourse. A woman beaten was a woman ignored. A woman raped was a woman who asked for it. A woman harassed at work was a woman who couldn’t take a joke.
The violence was treated as a family matter, a personal affair. A visit by the police brought a warning to settle down. Judges put rape victims on trial. Newspapers reported only the most spectacular of crimes against women.
In the face of all this, hundreds of women worked, often in obscurity, often in the face of ridicule and hostility. They provided shelter for women escaping abusive relationships and counsel for those who had been assaulted. They fought for legal reform. They tried to educate even when most of the pupils refused to listen.
Until December 6, 1989.
The murder of fourteen women engineering students – no, let me say it this way, fourteen of our sisters, fourteen of our daughters – simultaneously ended fourteen lives and began a national discussion, a searching of our souls.
Through our souls, other voices spoke. The voices of women who had been ignored, belittled, or silenced forever. The voices of women who had been told to lighten up or put up with it. The voices of women who had said “no” but had been told it meant “yes.” The voices of girls and boys who endured watching the abuse of mothers whose pain was their pain. The voices of women who for too long had lived their days in fear and their nights in terror.
We started hearing voices from farther away: Women trafficked into prostitution. Girls whose genitals had been sliced off in the name of culture. Women raped as a weapon of war.
But many of these same voices carried with them an undertone, for they were women who had defied this abuse. They were women who refused to cower, who refused to be shamed, who said they mattered, who said they deserved, who said they belonged, who said they would survive.
Years of patient, sometimes angry work by women began to bear fruit. Laws changed – now “no” legally meant “no” and it took an explicit “yes” to mean “yes.” Police were trained to intervene and arrest. New shelters were built, although seldom without a struggle. Sexual harassment was named and companies and governments passed new rules. Government statisticians surveyed and discovered the violence was even greater than most could imagine.
The pupils began to listen. Our attitudes began to change and more Canadians, both women and men, now knew that men’s violence against women was neither a private matter, nor something that affected only a few.
In all this, where were the men? True, a few of us had spoken out before and more of us could feel our attitudes changing. But it wasn’t for another two years, in the fall of 1991, that Canada – and the world – saw its first organized, large-scale, response by men.
Three of us, challenged by the women in our lives, sat down and decided that for too long women had stood alone. We knew that the majority of men in Canada did not beat their wives or sexually assault their girlfriends. But we knew we had been silent about this violence and through our silence we had allowed the violence to continue.
Full Article: www.michaelkaufman.com
Along with men in several cities, we started the White Ribbon Campaign.
Michael Kaufman is the co-founder of the White Ribbon Campaign and works with the United Nations, governments, women’s groups and other non-governmental organizations to promote gender equality and end violence against women.
www.michaelkaufman.com
This article appears in the Calgary Herald on December 5, 2009 and the electronic edition of the Toronto Star on December 6, 2009.
© Michael Kaufman, 2009
