Mount Saint Vincent University invites everyone to its campus Friday Dec 6, from 12-1:30pm in the art gallery, to mark the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. This day is to remember the 14 young women who were murdered during a mass shooting while they were at school at École Polytechnique de Montréal on this day in 1989. Furthermore, it is a day to remember all those who have experienced gender-based violence and people who have lost their lives to it, including those in Nova Scotia. Just recently here, three women were murdered in three weeks in instances of intimate partner violence, or IPV.
Friday is both a day of remembrance and a call to take action.
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Meredith Ralston is a women’s and political studies professor at MSVU. She will be moderating Friday’s conversation and reflection.
“This is something the Mount has done every year since 1990, and the purpose is two-fold,” says Ralston. Friday’s event will begin with a ceremony to remember the 14 women murdered in 1989 by reading their names aloud and placing 14 flowers down. Then, Ralston will introduce the action portion, she says, by considering “What do we do?”
This will begin with a keynote address from Dawn Ferris, executive director of Autumn House—a transition house in Amherst for women and gender diverse people who have experienced IPV, that provides services for addressing and preventing IPV. Ferris will be talking about the work that Autumn House does and their program New Directions, which works directly with men who engage in abusive behaviour to change this behaviour through closed-group, confidential weekly sessions.
“This very innovative program for men, for people who do harm to others, has been quite successful and, I think, fairly unique in the province,” says Ralston, who also sits on the board of governors at Autumn House.
‘The other reason we’re both involved,” says Ralston, “is what happened in Nova Scotia. So, we have the Montreal massacre in 1989. Then, in 2020, we have the mass casualty here where 22 people are murdered, which is the biggest mass casualty in the country ever and the inciting incident for that was an act of intimate partner violence.”
Following this tragedy in April 2020, the Mass Casualty Commission was created to report on and offer recommendations for preventing and addressing what this tragedy highlighted: an epidemic of gender-based violence in the province. The head of the committee monitoring the government’s and RCMP’s response to the inquiry and recommendations said on Nov 29 that, yes, governments were making progress on putting these recommendations into effect. However, another member of the committee, trauma therapist and social worker Kristina Fifield, has raised concerns about whether meaningful progress is happening fast enough.
Ralston first met Ferris when she was participating in reporting for Nova Scotia’s Mass Casualty Commission, and Ferris was interviewed for her work running Autumn House.
She says the reason for marking the tragic massacre in Montreal 35 years later is “one, because it was such a horrific event, but, two, because it’s still going on. These issues have not been resolved. Perhaps there’s more publicity about them, but it’s still happening.”
Ralston was a student at Dalhousie in 1989 and says for anyone alive then, “you remember it. We just couldn’t believe the horror and, especially as a young woman at the same age, it was just absolutely shocking.”
Although most of Ralston’s students in gender and women’s studies courses weren’t alive in 1989, she says, “they’re all very aware of intimate partner violence and sexualized violence, which is something that age group in university takes very seriously.”
MSVU students recently participated in the return of the Take Back The Night March on Nov 27, which is an international rally against sexualized violence and is another component of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence annual campaign, which runs from Nov 25 to Dec 10, that works to raise awareness and promote action to end violence against women and girls worldwide.
The other connection Ralston makes between addressing and preventing IPV and gender-based violence is around the issue of “slut-shaming,” which her research focuses on. “We have a real issue with cyberbullying, with slut shaming, with the derogatory comments that young women, in particular, face,” says Ralston. “Almost always, to a person, they have some awful story about that, so that’s another way in to discussing these topics.”
Ralston says she’s interested to see where Friday’s discussion will go. She says she’ll make sure that herself or Ferris talks about the Mass Casualty Commission and “some of the recommendations people may not know, including many having to do with gender-based violence.”
Ralston says it will be an opportunity for everyone to talk about it and think about what is being done in the community. “As academics, as students, as community members—what can we do?
The Mount’s Alexa McDonough Institute for Women, Gender and Social Justice is hosting the event Friday Dec 6 from 12-1:30pm, in the MSVU Art Gallery at 166 Bedford Highway. Directions to the gallery can be found here.
For those unable to attend Friday’s event, other ways to honour the victims of the Montreal massacre on Dec 6 include wearing a white ribbon and observing a moment of silence at 11am.
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What you can do to remember gender-based violence victims on Dec 6
For anyone wanting to learn more about organizations in Nova Scotia working to prevent and address both IPV and GBV, a list of the province’s transition houses is here or head to the Transition House Association of Nova Scotia website here. Read the Mass Casualty Commission’s Final Report, Turning the Tide Together, released in March 2023 which contains 130 recommendations here.
For anyone needing immediate support, call or text the provincial toll-free line 1-855-225-0220 which operates 24/7, or reach out to a local transition house near you. If this is an emergency situation, call 911.
This article appears in Dec 1-18, 2024.
