April Reign

Speak your mind even if your voice shakes

violence

December 6th. Just a date.

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rose in the snow
Don’t Mourn, Organize!

December 6th. Just a date. Maybe an early Christmas party or a school play. Perhaps a time to start putting out decorations or maybe – a time to purchase candles and roses. A purchase not made in anticipation of a celebration but one made in memorial of 14 women who were gunned down simply because they were women and they were there.

December 6th, 1989 at l’École Polytechnique de Montréal
Geneviève Bergeron
Hélène Colgan
Nathalie Croteau
Barbara Daigneault
Anne-Marie Edward
Maud Haviernick
Barbara Maria Klucznik
Maryse Leclair
Annie St.-Arneault
Michèle Richard
Maryse Laganière
Anne-Marie Lemay
Sonia Pelletier
Annie Turcotte

became victims of hatred. Victims of misogyny. Lights shining on the ugly truth that women had not yet been fully accepted as equals.

Twenty years on can we really say that much has changed?

In 1982 MP Margaret Mitchell rose to educate the house on domestic violence, she told them how one in 10 Canadian women were victims of domestic assault the response by the male MPs was laughing and shouting.

In 2009 during the height of the H1N1 Flu scare MP Carolyn Bennett rose to ask a question on behalf of a troubled constituent. The woman in question was pregnant and had received conflicting advice as to the safety of the H1N1 vaccine, she was looking to her government for help. The response? Laughter, derision, hooting and hollering. 27 years later women’s concerns are still seen as a joke.

When Margaret Mitchell was elected in 1979 [30 years ago] women accounted for approximately 10% of elected MPs. Today that number has risen to approximately 21% that is an abysmal amount of representation and a sad commentary on the last 30 years.

This year as you remember and mourn the loss of 14 of our sisters remember also the words of Joe Hill; Don’t Mourn, Organize!

Help Equal Voice to get more women elected, fight for strong gun control, support women’s reproductive choice, donate to a local shelter, help a woman or a young girl learn tech skills or use those skills to help others.

In the words of Emma Goldman;
“No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution… revolution is but thought carried into action.”

Two Year Old Killed Over Child Support

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Ja Shawn Powell
Ja Shawn Powell
My heart goes out to this mother who has lost her child to such cold calculated violence. Danny Platt slashed two year old Ja Shawn Platt’s throat because he was upset at being ordered to pay child support.

“There was an issue, believe it or not, with him (Danny Platt) recently being ordered to pay child support, and he had made some comments that he would he kill either the wife or the child before he paid child support,” said Riley at a press conference Saturday. “He was recently ordered to pay child support. Our understanding is he, for the first time in two years, picked up his son, who he had visitation rights for.”

Though Danny Platt had visitation rights the night of the murder was the first time he had ever come to pick him up according to mother Daniella Powell. She allowed him to take Ja Shawn, however, as he had visitation rights.

“Then he called me back at 11 p.m.,” she said. “And he was like,‘Your son was kidnapped, bye.’ He didn’t even say anything after.”

“I called him back and said, ‘How do you let a two-year-old get kidnapped? What was you doing that he got kidnapped?’” she said. “He said, ‘Why you blaming this on me? Why you blaming this on me? I ain’t got time for this, bye.’”

Powell called Platt back a third time and asked if he called police. “He said, “Yeah, I called the police. As a matter of fact, they’re here right now and I’m about to flag them down.” But Daniella said when she talked to police, they told her the father had not called them.

Because Powell had called police, officers flagged the father down, she said.

News video and more on this tragic story

Couple Assaulted at Son’s School

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Today’s Star carries a horrific story about an assault perpetrated upon two women because they are lesbians. The assault happened at an elementary school as school was letting out and many children, including the couples son, witnessed this hateful and unprovoked attack.

This is the result when fear and ignorance are allowed to run unfettered. No person should worry that their ‘lifestyle’ is going to put them in harms way. I personally do not like fundamentalists, nor do I like the way they whisper their hatreds into their children ears in an effort to raise another generation of people ruled by fear and ignorance, however, I would never assault them.

Mark Scott, 43, of Oshawa has been charged with this crime.

Insp. Brian Osborne, of Durham Regional Police, said last night that the department will investigate the possibility that the assaults could be classified as hate crimes. The decision to pursue those charges is usually made with the Crown attorney’s office, Osborne said.

The Crown must classify this as a hate crime. These women were attacked solely because of their sexual orientation. To not do so would be to give permission for these types of attacks in the future.

My warmest wishes to this family as they heal from this senseless and tragic event.

“Well, you’re not going to solve the problem if you even refuse to say what it is.”

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War on WomenThe Star carried this article yesterday about The War on Women: Elly Armour, Jane Hursham, and Criminal Domestic Violence in Canadian Homes, by Brian Vallée.

Stephen Lewis wrote an impassioned foreword for the book, urging the creation of a fully funded United Nations international agency for women that would provide “a tremendous force for advocacy and intervention” and would “inevitably move toward the recognition that domestic violence is its own holocaust….We’re not just fighting for women’s human rights; we’re fighting for women’s lives.”

[Read more…] about “Well, you’re not going to solve the problem if you even refuse to say what it is.”