In order to reduce domestic violence, one must first recognize and challenge the source, and those who agree to it. The latest campaign misses the mark, as usual.
“Women have been carrying, through community-based organizations, the burden of protecting women almost exclusively for far too long,” a man on the Mass Casualty Commission commented regarding ‘femicide’, the first problematic word I found connected to a new Canadian campaign to eliminate violence against women. The Commission just issued a report investigating a 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia committed by an established domestic violence perpetrator, although his rampage wasn’t about women specifically.
There’s a place for men, for sure, in preventing and reducing primarily male domestic violence, but a new campaign launched by grassroots women’s non-profit Aura Freedom International to bring attention to the ‘femicide’ problem in Canada typically fails to address the primary role women can and must take to end domestic violence.
Same Ol’ Shit Different Campaign. They offer no recognition of the real female power to leave early, or better yet, avoid abusers in the first place. The ‘reasons’ given for violence against women and domestic homicide are the same old tired excuses: Patriarchy, male entitlement, male privilege, colonialism, oppression.
What are they going to do about it?
Fuck all, as far as I can tell. Nothing new to see her.
Aura’s campaign fails to understand that victims drive change, not perpetrators, which is why they should be targeting women and their power, but never do. Anti-abuse advocates customarily deny that intimate partner violence, or IPV, is one area where women possess an ability to take back their power to change the world themselves simply by making better choices.
Like not allowing abusive partners into their lives. Like getting rid of them the moment they turn abusive. Like recognizing that controlling behavior, called ‘coercive control’, a behavior Canada is considering criminalizing, is an early warning sign to a woman that her partner may be or could turn abusive.
Laying down the rules early to a partner exhibiting ‘coercive control’ determines whether he’s a keeper. Is he willing to respect your boundaries? If not, find someone who does.
Enough already with ‘Don’t blame the victim’. I want to hear more, ‘Don’t BE the victim’!
I will keep asking the irritating question, “Why doesn’t she leave him?” until so-called feminist activist groups and non-profits recognize the power women have to avoid domestic abuse.
The earlier she gets out, the easier it will be, and less dangerous. This ain’t 1970 anymore.
Aura Freedom International is dedicated to ending violence against women including human trafficking. It employs all the usual emotion-laden words, and offers Indigenous women, who suffer IPV at much higher rates, nothing more than hand-wringing.
There are a few ways this campaign could have been so much more effective.
What is ‘femicide’, exactly?
Let’s start with Aura’s misunderstanding of ‘femicide’, which they define as ‘crimes committed against women and girls purely for the crime of their gender’.
Women in domestic violence environments aren’t killed because they’re women, but because they’re the physically weaker domestic partner. Homosexual male couples suffer the same dynamic, as do lesbians.
‘Femicide’ more appropriately describes Canada’s previous mass shooting record-holder, Marc Lepine, who gunned down fourteen female engineering students specifically because they were female in Quebec many years ago. He forced all the male students out first and mowed the women down like Al Capone, screaming about how feminism ruined everything, believing they were there and not him because of affirmative action, rather than that they might all have been better engineering students than he, a frustrated failed male.
Alex Minassian, the incel who attacked women with his car in Toronto a few years ago is another example.
And what is an ‘epidemic’?
Another closely related Aura exaggeration is calling the rise in Canadian domestic violence—which did occur during the pandemic—as an ‘epidemic’.
By their statistics, a woman is killed by a domestic partner every 48 hours in Canada, which works out to 182.5 women a year. Not good in the slightest, but it constitutes .0005% of the population in a country of 40 million people, roughly half of which are females.
It’s troubling, but hardly an epidemic, and I confess I can’t feel the urgency because I always have, and always will, regard IPV as being quite distinct from stranger danger - women choose their domestic partners but not their stranger rapists and killers.
If domestic violence is an ‘epidemic’, then it’s one 182 Canadian women a year agreed to every step of the way, for many complex reasons, rather than get out early enough.
It’s why I’d like to see more campaigns organized around prevention, and specifically women’s power to say no to abuse, to refuse a partner who starts to act like an asshole.
We see near-zero focus on the woman’s right, power, and agency to refuse abusive treatment, long before he comes to think he ‘owns’ her and can do whatever he wants with her.
Don’t abandon your Indigenous sisters
Aura refuses, with classically far-left cowardice, to call out the root cause of domestic violence for Indigenous women. Do identity labels really matter when we’re talking about IPV? What if the problem is less ‘intersectional’ than we think? It illustrates exactly why we need to retire these antediluvian so-called anti-female violence campaigns: They too often dance around the real problem.
Statistics Canada reports that Indigenous women are the victims of 21% of IPV, despite constituting only 5% of the national population.
Indigenous domestic violence rates are, in keeping with the required narrative of the day, attributed to prior genocide, colonization, mistreatment and forced assimilation. Never do we hear Indigenous ‘patriarchy’ suggested as a potential cause. That would ‘stigmatize’ Indigenous men, who constitute 80% of physical or fatal attacks on Indigenous women, but the illiberal left only cares about white rapists and gynocidists. Now, we don’t know what pre-Columbian domestic violence rates were here on Turtle Island, although archaeology and anthropology reveal North American Indigenous societies bore all the earmarks of traditional, male-dominated, patriarchal values and behavior, so let’s just stop pretending to care who’s raping and killing Indigenous women and show we care by naming the culprits:
Indigenous men who batter, rape, and murder women are no different from men in other cultures. They primarily kill their intimate partners and family members. They do it for the same reasons all other abusers do: Because they can. Because women are weaker, and men feel entitled to their bodies, and to ‘make her’ do what he wants if she resists his coercive control or fails to treat his needs and wants as primary. It’s patriarchy, plain and simple, but liberal anti-violence campaigns are shy about calling out non-white rapists, batterers and murderers for a lot of stupid, identity-driven reasons, which serves Da Indigenous Patriarchs very well, thankyouverymuch.
Grow some labia, girls!
All such campaigns outside Indigenous culture aren’t going to offer Indigenous women any support apart from the usual virtue-signalling. White feminists are NOT going to call out Indigenous men on their patriarchy and misogyny. You can shut them up pretty quickly with the whole oppression rap, as most white feminists are suffering from morally debilitating ‘white guilt’. They will, as ‘progressive’ feminists are wont to do, throw their Indigenous sisters under the bus where they can continue to suffer because their white sisters won’t address the primary cause of assault and murder among Indigenous women: Indigenous men.
Cultural history matters, but not when an Indigenous man makes the decision to smash his fist into a brown face, when he shoves his dick up an unconsenting Indigenous woman’s vagina or down her throat, when he picks up a blunt instrument and smashes her head with it. We shouldn’t give a flying fuck whatever his excuses - residential schools, hundreds of years of genocide, the Sixties Scoop, irritating sports team mascots or personal trauma. Those are topics for his therapist. First and foremost, he needs to take responsibility for his personal agency and choice to harm his partner or family member, who isn’t responsible for any of that.
There are no excuses for male battery. No, not even for Indigenous men.
Patriarchal domination is the primary cause of IPV, no matter what the culture or skin color.
So what is Aura Freedom Foundation doing to address this? With a typically but ultimately useless gesture to try and maybe kinda sorta get women to think about what the campaign should be screaming from the rooftops: DON’T WAIT. GET OUT NOW. AND NEVER ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN AGAIN. EDUCATE YOURSELF!
We see a similar dynamic in the shoddy excuses so-called ‘feminists’ use to excuse the gross slaughter and mass rape of Israeli women on Oct. 7. Ask them why Hamas was so horrendously cruel to women and they’ll give you their standard bullshit about ‘colonialism', ‘oppression’ and ‘settling’.
When in fact Hamas is a vicious, psychopathic terrorist group steeped in misogyny, as are, it seems, many ‘feminist’ groups and the United Nations, which currently refuses to condemn these war crimes against women.
Let’s be clear: The primary cause of IPV is men who make the decision to harm or kill, not their personal sob stories.
Don’t conflate transwomen and real women
Marissa Kokkoros, the executive director spearheading the Aura campaign, cited “an increase in homophobia and transphobia…an increase in misogyny and hate in general,” and made the mistake of including transwomen.
Transgender people do suffer an increased risk of IPV, particularly with a male partner (go figger), but it’s inaccurate to include them with violence against women statistics.
Transwomen are not the same as natal women, regardless of how they ‘feel’. Their lives are no less significant, but if Aura’s campaign doesn’t include gay and lesbian domestic violence, it should recognize that transfolk are a different class of people too - their lives no less important, but they’re ‘women’ with male bodies and brains who are in a better position to defend themselves against violence, if not always successfully. (After all, men are the biggest killers of other men, once again go figger).
The reason why women as a class shouldn’t be erased is because men and women are different and all the surgery in the world can’t change that, or the maleness that remains between the ears.
The challenges transfolk face from largely male partners are similar, but without the physical weakness challenge real women face.
If one wants to argue, “But transgender women are primarily assaulted by males just like natal women,” then include gay male domestic violence as well.
Take a cue from Nancy Reagan, Aura!
Aura created a video to make some sort of a point about violence against women.
Hey, makes a nice Christmas gift for the relentlessly clueless friend of yours who zeroes in on a bad man like a bloodhound on an escaped convict hunt.
Gender-based violence increased 14% in Canada over the pandemic, as women and girls were trapped with their abusers in lockdown. I wonder how effective a campaign might have been had it been offered at the end of lockdown, which in Ontario was the second quarter of 2022: Get Out Before The Next Pandemic!
Kokkoros complained to CTV News about the lack of proper data for “underlying sociocultural or systemic factors”, adding, “Prevention efforts really must be focused on the root causes.” Anti-IPV advocates love examining tangential ‘root causes’ because it excuses them from having to address what they can do to protect women better from men who don’t give a damn about the cute pink body bag campaign. If they feel entitled to hit, slam, rape, and even murder their partner, no anti-IPV campaign will stop it. They won’t even watch.
The people who will pay attention to it are women, and, hopefully, the ones who need it most - those who are or have been victims of IPV.
What if Aura and others organized their campaigns around a new message?
Kokkoros wants more men to speak up and be part of the change against male violence.
I agree, but I don’t think Aura is serious about wanting to push
it.
They’re willing to do anything except encourage the people with the most power to Just Say No to abusive partners.
That goes for everyone - not just female partners of domestic violence, but also for male victims, lesbian victims, and transgender victims.
In the end, we need to work together to eliminate intimate partner violence no matter who the victims or perpetrators are - all lives really are equal and even when females perpetrate domestic violence, the dynamics are frightening similar to traditional M2F violence.
I’d like to see fewer irrelevant labels and more recognition of female power. Like I said, this is 2023, not 1970. Not all victims agree to abuse. But after the first strike, if they stay, they’re a volunteer.
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