For All the Targeted Women - Notes, and poems, on the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre

Today, Dec. 6, is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, marking the anniversary of the 14 women murdered at Montreal's École Polytechnique in 1989 by an armed gunman. The killer, who had a vendetta against feminists, entered a classroom, systematically separated out the women engineering students, shot them all, and then went on a rampage through the school, targetting more women and injuring 10 additional women and four men.

Like many others, I will remember those women today. I will also think about the murdered and missing women targeted on the Highway of Tears. At least 18 young women, most of them First Nations, have been killed or have disappeared along Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert since the 1990s. Other groups report that between 32-43 women have gone missing along the 700 kilometre stretch of highway since the late 1960s. The police have yet to solve any of the cases.

And I will reflect as well upon the women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside who were targetted by Robert Pickton and killed on his farm in Port Coquitlam. Pickton, currently serving a life sentence for the murders of six women, has been linked to the deaths of 33 women by DNA evidence, but may have killed at least 16 more, according to statements he gave to an undercover police officer.

Disparaged by those with duties to protect

The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry is investigating why it took Vancouver police and RCMP until 2002 to charge Pickton when there was sufficient and compelling evidence implicating him as far back as 1998. Earlier this fall, the Commission held informal forums in seven communities in northern B.C. to gain a broader perspective on how police conduct investigations of missing women in that region, and heard from various groups and individuals who described the indifference and ineffectiveness of the police when women were reported missing along the infamous Highway of Tears.

The Commission's formal inquiry into the conduct of the Pickton investigation began Oct. 11. So far, there has been testimony that the two Vancouver police detectives assigned to the investigation in 1999 commonly referred to sex-trade workers as "whores," made openly racist and homophobic remarks, and disparaged higher ranking female officers.

Also, commission counsel Art Vertlieb, during questioning of VPD deputy chief Doug LePard, read out portions of a report prepared by Peel Regional Police deputy chief Jennifer Evans that concluded that the VPD's senior management showed a clear lack of leadership and commitment in the missing women investigation. The former spokeswoman for the RCMP for the Missing Women Task Force, Catherine Galliford, who has recently been in the media with claims of sexual harassment, threats, and indecent behaviour on the part of top RCMP and VPD officers, including officers involved in the Pickton investigation, will be testifying before the Opal Commission in January about how information from witnesses and informants was ignored that could have led to a search warrant of Pickton's farm and prevented the deaths of 14 or more women between 1999-2002.

Every life is precious

Like the 1989 murders of the women at the Montreal's École Polytechnique, the murders of the women on Pickton's farm and along the Highway of Tears were targeted killings. Their lives were no less important, no less precious, no less worthy. But their deaths and disappearances were not the subject of emergency response police intervention, immediate headlines or national mourning. Clearly, poverty, social class, race, and cultural background rendered certain women and girls "disposable" or "invisible" to those in power, namely key segments of the police and the state.

How will the Commission's report next spring address discriminatory treatment and attitudes in our police forces? And how can the report's recommendations be implemented effectively when those deeply entrenched prejudices and stereotypes ultimately only represent and magnify the existing prejudices of a significant segment of society? Not surprisingly, it would appear that the deep-seated misogyny of some senior officers that led to the incompetent investigation of the DTES missing women was also reflected in the sexual bullying and coercion of Galliford and other women police officers and civilian staff who have recently come forward.

Today is a day to commemorate these women and all others who have been targeted for violent treatment, whether they are vulnerable by virtue of their class, race, ancestry, age, disability, or occupation, or simply because they are women.

Below are two poems that address different aspects of violence against women. The first one is about the missing women of the Downtown Eastside was written by local poet, Anne Hopkinson. It was published last year in an anthology of prose and poetry on the theme of violence against women, Walk Myself Home: An Anthology to End Violence Against Women. Hopkinson works with Elee Kraljii Gardiner in coordinating the Thursdays Writing Collective at the Carnegie Centre in downtown Vancouver. The second poem, "Thinking With the Heart" was written by deceased Ontario poet, Bronwen Wallace, and was published in her well-known book, Common Magic. Wallace was a long-time social activist and had worked for a number of years at a shelter for battered women and children in Kingston.

"A Number of Women Are Missing"
By Anne Hopkinson

She stood before the podium and called to one
hundred people gathered there for these two
dead women who walked the streets at three
in the morning never to return, so that by four
in the afternoon the neighbours made teams of five
who searched, and were filmed for the news at six.

Added to the missing women, now the six
of them named and photographed one by one,
reporters interviewed the parents and partners in five
minute segments, broadcast on channel two
to all corners of the city, a warning for
the population: one hundred to the power of three.

And prayers were prayed to the holy three,
candles lit and placed together for the six
women of the tribes and nations, from the four
closest reservations, and not a word or hint, no one
said his name, or his friend's name, the deadly two,
in for eight years for assault and rape, out after five.

Children called indoors for safety by five
o'clock, checking the gate and the locks three
times to be sure. Take a drink or two
for edgy nerves, it's like rolling double six
boxcars, and feeling crapped out, still alert at one
a.m. as the horsemen come riding in a line of four.

A year they lay buried through four
seasons of decay, quiet beneath five
feet of mud and rock under a one
metre wide path, where he walked maybe three
times a day, from patio to garden plot, to water his six
tomato plants, eating one or two

Fresh, as he thought how he had killed two
on the same day, how he was still hot and jumpy for
their fear. And already a stirring, a sixth
sense reminded him it only took five
seconds to drag another bitch into his three
year old blue van, not too clean, not too dirty, so no one

Ever looked closely, or remembered how one
slut was there and then gone. Two, three, four,
five, six of them, the first half dozen.

© Anne Hopkinson

"Thinking With The Heart"
By Bronwen Wallace

For Mary di Michele

"I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself." - Diane Arbus

"The problem with you women is, you think with your hearts." - Policeman

How else to say it
except that the body is a limit
I must learn to love,
that thought is no different from flesh
or the blue pulse that rivers my hands.
How else, except to permit myself
this heart and its seasons,
like the cycles of the moon
which never seem to get me anywhere
but back again, not out.

Thought should be linear.
That's what the policeman means
when I bring the woman to him,
what he has to offer for her bruises, the cut
over her eye: charge him or we can't help you.
He's seen it all before anyway. He knows
how the law changes, depending on what you think.
It used to be a man could beat his wife
if he had to; now, sometimes he can't
but she has to charge him
and nine times out of ten
these women who come in here
ready to get the bastard
will be back in a week or so
wanting to drop the whole thing
because they're back together,
which just means a lot of paperwork
and running around for nothing.
It drives him crazy, how a woman
can't make up her mind and stick to it,
get the guy out once and for all.
'Charge him,' he says, 'or we won't help.'

Out of her bed then, her house, her life,
but not her head, no, nor her children,
out from under her skin.
Not out of her heart, which goes on
in its slow, dark way, wanting
whatever it is hearts want
when they think like this;
a change in his, probably,
a way to hold what the heart can't
without breaking: how the man who beats her
is also the man she loves.

I wish I could show you
what a man's anger makes
of a woman's face,
or measure the days it takes
for her to emerge from a map of bruises
the colour of death. I wish there were words
that went deeper than pain or terror
for the place that woman's eyes can take you
when all you can hear
is the sound the heart makes
with what it knows of itself
and its web of blood.

But right now, the policeman's waiting
for the woman to decide.
That's how he thinks of it; choice
or how you can always get what you want
if you want it badly enough.
Everything else he ignores,
like the grip of his own heart's red
persistent warning that he too is fragile.
He thinks he thinks with his brain
as if it were safe up there
in its helmet of bone
away from all that messy business
of his stomach or his lungs.
And when he thinks like that
he loses himself forever.

But perhaps you think I'm being hard on him,
he's only doing his job after all,
only trying to help.
Or perhaps I'm making too much of the heart,
pear-shaped and muscular, a pump really,
when what you want is an explanation or a reason.
But how else can I say it?
Whatever it is you need
is what you must let go of now
to enter your own body
just as you'd enter the room where the woman sat
after it was all over,
hugging her knees to her chest,
holding herself as she'd hold her husband
or their children, for dear life,
feeling the arm's limit, bone and muscle,
like the heart's.
Whatever you hear then
crying through your own four rooms,
what you must name for yourself
before you can love anything at all.

© Bronwen Wallace

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