“Despite advances we’ve made, the attitudes that gave rise to the murder of 14 women at École Polytechnique are still very much alive,” said Jill Arnott of the U of R Women’s Centre.
As Jill Arnott watched 14 candles lit one by one, she thought about 14 women who lost their lives to a man with a gun.
Friday marked 35 years since the campus shooting at École Polytechnique in Montréal. The University of Regina Women’s Centre, helmed by Arnott, held a vigil to honour the victims on the solemn anniversary.
The centre is “a place to study, to gather, a place to seek support that can be difficult to access,” the executive director described to those gathered. “We experience violence every day in our communities and until that is not the accepted and expected norm, then it’s important to gather. It’s important to remember.”
During the vigil’s moment of silence, Arnott thought about the advances that have been made to protect and support women experiencing gender-based violence.
And she also thought about how in 1992 — just three years after the Montreal massacre — the U of R Students’ Union held an emergency vote amid the first-and-only attempt to defund the Women’s Centre since it opened in 1969.
The vote failed, but the message resonated.
It still resonates, even as Arnott thinks about how a man who walked into a gender studies class at the University of Waterloo last year and stabbed a professor and two students.
“I think often we’re lulled into a sense of security, believing that events like the Montréal massacre could never happen again because we are so much more aware now than we were — and we are,” she said. “But despite advances we’ve made, the attitudes that gave rise to the murder of 14 women at École Polytechnique are still very much alive.
“In 25 years of activism and speaking out against gender violence publicly, I have never felt more targeted as I do today.”
Saskatchewan remains the province with the highest rates of police-reported domestic violence against women in the country — double the national average. For Indigenous women, the rate is five times the national average.
Approximately 80 per cent of the women who come to YWCA Regina are seeking safety, said senior director of programs Megan Moore, who also attended the vigil.
Gender-based violence “increasingly happens behind closed doors,” Moore said, adding to difficulties in exposing the issue more broadly.
“This is a movement that needs systemic change. It needs visibility, it needs voices, but it also needs women and gender-diverse folks to understand that they deserve safety.”
Taking time to light a candle and honour victims is one avenue, said Arnott and Moore, because it opens a door to talk about the continued pervasiveness of violence that impacts so many women, children and families.
“Talking is so important because when you bring something out of the darkness and into the light, it loses a lot of its power,” said Arnott.
“Gender violence is not a women’s issue. We often talk about it that way, but it’s not. The complete story is that this belongs to all of us and it’s on all of us to make a change, to make a world where this is not what we expect.”
The Women’s Centre hosts a vigil each year on the anniversary to make that statement. YWCA staff and volunteers were also on campus earlier in the morning to hand out 200 red roses to students passing by in the halls and offer discussion on the topic.
Flags at Regina City Hall were also lowered to half-mast — for the women of École Polytechnique and for all women experiencing violence.
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