2010 Memorial for the Montréal Massacre
This year was the 21st National Day of Remembrance and Action of the Montréal Massacre. Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter hosted a free public conference at the Vancouver Public Library.
The National Day of Remembrance and Action is a pan-Canadian response to the deliberate murder of fourteen female engineering students at the L’Ecole Polytechnique in Montréal. Marc Lépine, the man who carried out this attack, declared his hatred for feminists before shooting the women.
Some highlights from the lecture series and roundtable discussions were; a presentation by Jeanette Lavell, president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), “What Their Stories Tell Us” a NWAC research initiative about the missing and murders Aboriginal women, and an account by Trisha Baptie, founder of formerly Exploited Voices Now Educating (EVE), of her experience as a citizen reporter for the Robert Pickton trial. One of the roundtable discussions featured Bonnie Klein, director of “Not a Love Story: A Film about Pornography”, which addresses how images of violence relate to violence against women. There were roundtable dialogues amongst local, national and international activists on issues that local feminists have had to respond and act on this year. These included: the rape of a young girl in Pitt Meadows and public debate about the internet and society’s responsibility to end rape; the Ontario Court case challenging Canada’s prostitution laws; what anti-violence workers are doing about wife assault, policing violence against women (including feminist responses to Robert Pickton Inquiry) and how poverty undermines woman’s ability to escape an abusive man.
This year there was a feminist art display in the concourse. Drawing from our crisis work for material we presented a month of calls from women escaping male violence. While protecting the women’s identities, the display reveals the prevalence of male violence in Vancouver. The display also drew attention to the 49 women murdered by their male partners last year, to the over 582 missing and murdered Aboriginal women, and to the 14 women killed on the December 6th, 1989 by Marc Lépine.
A full schedule of the events is available here.
