To celebrate our 35th anniversary and respond to our changing context, we hosted an international gathering of women from English-speaking welfare state countries undergoing similar neoliberal political changes, including England, Scotland, New Zealand, Australia, the United States and Canada. They joined us in considering the challenges currently facing our movement and in recommitting to the transition house as a strategy for women’s liberation.
We recognized just how many demands made several years ago to improve police responses have still not been met and recommitted/ decided that they are still worth campaigning for. One such simple example is that 911 calls, initial police responses be fully documented as public records.
I have considered myself a feminist for more than half my life, since I was thirteen. It’s only my definition of feminism – and my related perceptions of capitalism, men, and violence – that has continued to change.
It is well known that men pose a higher level of danger to women in the first eighteen months after choosing to end the relationship. On average, women requesting police help have experienced multiple attacks by their husband. Calling the police is often a last resort. In my ten years as an anti-violence worker, numerous women told me that police instructed them to report again “when things get really bad.” Generally, in those cases, as in Sherry’s case, things were already bad enough to warrant an arrest and charges.
An investigative report into one hundred cases of violence against women; in all cases the women tried to get help from the system.
It is a harrowing account of individual women's stories, their understanding of the danger they faced, their attempts to get help, the incompetence and/or indifference they met, and, in those cases where someone was willing to prosecute, their vulnerability under/within the law.
Abuse works because many of us continue to pretend it does not happen to “good” women. So anyone who is abused must be “bad”! We blame the victim for her own abuse by calling her codependent. We expect her to prevent the abuse instead of why the abuser chose to abuse. In short, we collude with the abuser. Abusers succeed because they are not abusive all the time. In fact, sometimes they are fun and charming. They are almost always charming around other people.
By Linda A. Osmundson, Community Action Stops Abuse (CASA)
I hop in my car and head from the college to Rape Relief, as I have heaps of work to do. I’m stuck in traffic, as per usual, so I have a good chance to think about the film I saw the night before. I borrowed the National Film Board film Not a Love Story from the college library, as it critically examines the pornography industry. My mum and I watched it together and to say the least, we were both disturbed.
On paper, women may have achieved formal have equality. Feminists won laws on violence, affirmative action, and charter protection for equality. A government approved red light district will reverse that legal ground. Anti-Sexual harassment policies are impossible to apply when the woman’s job is to be nude and available to any man in the establishment.
Women are going to go out and party. Some of us are going to use GHB willingly. But what we came to understand by telling each other about GHB is that too often the circumstances are quickly out of our control, even when we are with friends
