Robert Pickton silenced up to 49 women forever, but many survive sexual violence who still aren't free to speak out
BY CONSTANCE BACKHOUSE, CITIZEN SPECIAL AUGUST 11, 2010 7:53 AMA woman lights candles at the courthouse in New Westminster, B.C., in memory of the victims of serial killer Robert Pickton after he was found guilty in December 2007. This month, the Supreme Court upheld the verdict in six cases.
Photograph by: Andy Clark, Reuters, Citizen Special
I opened my newspaper last week to full-page spreads of dramatic news on the Robert Pickton serial murders. The Supreme Court had upheld the findings of guilt in the murders of six women. The Crown Attorney had stayed all charges on 20 others. Now that the interminable appeals had lumbered to completion, the press was free to divulge the details withheld earlier under the trial judge's gag order.I hesitated. Could I bear to read about these horrific crimes -- the chainsaws, the slaughterhouse, the blood, the hair, the fragments of jawbones, the pieces of teeth, the freezer bags?
Some days it feels like the world is too much filled with the sexualized images of tortured women. Pornography assaults us from the Internet. Nightly TV features naked women, some duct-taped, others rigged out in sadistic fetish equipment or stretched flat on coroners' slabs, all packaged up as crime-show entertainment.
I took a deep breath and read on. Some newspapers were more discreet, some more salacious, but the coverage was still unbearably grisly.
In the end, what leaped out at me were the voices silenced in this frenzy of attention. The 26 dead women. The up to 23 others the police admit they believe Pickton killed. And these are only the ones we know about. What of the many other women who must have crossed Robert Pickton's path in his 60-year lifetime? Do we suppose he was a model of decorum in his dealings with the others? How many more were sexually abused, exploited, and assaulted?
Fifty-one per cent of Canadian women have experienced at least one act of sexual or physical violence. This shocking finding comes from Statistics Canada data. Do we suppose the government will ever allow the unfairly-maligned agency to update the survey?
We live in a culture where the imagery of sexual violence flourishes on every corner, but the gritty reality of it is almost never described. Fewer than 10 per cent of the women who are sexually assaulted ever report the crime. Treasury Board president Stockwell Day muses about unreported crime, but his solution of longer sentences and more prisons is laughable. It will do nothing to facilitate disclosure.
Perhaps what we need to do is to reframe this as a "free-speech" issue.
Maybe that would redirect attention to the real problem. The uproar that greeted Ann Coulter's purported silencing recently at the University of Ottawa was insistent in its message: Even hateful speakers must be given a platform, a room in a publicly-funded educational institution, and an audience. I thought at the time how unfair it was that some people's free speech gets protected and others' goes overwhelmingly silenced.
Look around you at school, the workplace, the grocery store, the street where you live. Half of the women you see have been abused. Why don't they talk about it? Why have we created a society in which the shame falls on the victimized? It makes no sense that people are embarrassed to speak about their sexual assault, child abuse, sexual harassment, and battering. The humiliation should fall squarely on the abusers. Why is it seemingly impossible to name names of the men who perpetrate this violence?
And why do the few brave women who speak out get spurned? Like the woman who managed to escape Pickton's murderous assault in 1997.
After valiantly resisting his misogynist rage, she lay unconscious in hospital for four days with stab wounds to her chest, abdomen, hands, and arms. Her credible story was buttressed by physical evidence and independent witnesses to her handcuffs and life-threatening injuries. But the Crown attorney thought her lifestyle was more important than her testimony. The case was never prosecuted because she was deemed too "unstable" to appear in court.
And sometimes others who dare to speak, to name names, are hit with slap-suits for defamation. Where are the civil libertarians then? Why are there no cries of "unfair, unfair?" Surely this is another free-speech issue.
Why does Ann Coulter get to speak, but we stand by while those who muster the courage to disclose sexual exploitation are intimidated by million-dollar lawsuits?
In the 1960s and 70s, a new wave of feminists started to hold consciousness-raising meetings, where many finally felt safe enough to talk openly about the violence they experienced. Hundreds of audacious women then stood up at "speak-outs" to identify themselves publicly as survivors of sexual exploitation and violence.
It was a moment when the culture might have shifted, opening up free speech for the masses.
We need to learn more about what made that speech possible, and how we can recapture the energy of those times.
Because when women and children are free to speak about sexual and physical abuse, our world will transform.
Constance Backhouse is a professor of law at the University of Ottawa and co-founder of the non-profit Feminist History Society, FeministHistories.ca.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
Comment: Renegade98
8:14 AM on August 11, 2010
Constance, your right in saying that free speech is protected for some and not others. I think we have all experienced that.You read about the woman that got spurned by the system, the crown see's her as not reliable because she was an addict, and we all know who she was, but her name is still under a media ban and we know Pickton definitely tried to kill her.
When you say that 51 percent of woman we see on the street have been abused sexually and other ways, well in the downtown Eastside, women involved in the survival sex trade, the rate according to stats through studies goes from around 80 to 90 percent.
My friend is one of the murdered. Pickton was charged with her murder, and now the charges have been stayed. In her own words, she was sexually abused as a child by her father, as she told me and many of her friends, she wrote about it and I have read those journal articles and it's disgusting, but it's not news, reporters asked me during the trial whether there was any truth to those
