City
Take Back the What?
Saturday marked Toronto's 27th annual Take Back The Night protest and march. The Toronto Rape Crisis Centre hosted the event that went almost completely unnoticed in
local media.
It wasn't noticed on many "alternative" news sources either.
With so many students heading back to school, predators seem to be taking advantage on campuses across Ontario. Students at York and Carlton are reeling after some of their female students were attacked and raped recently.
Well, reeling may be a bit of an exaggeration. But they should be.
A recent Toronto Star article ends on a very low note, with two 18 year old, first year students stating: "We've become desensitized to it."
I cannot properly describe how angry and upset this makes me.
Maybe it's the fact that I'm a female student. Maybe it's the countless times I've been hassled by men after dark. Maybe I'm just bitter because many of the women I know roll their eyes when I make them use the term 'woman' instead of 'girl'.
I'd like to think of myself as someone who has a decent amount of 'street smarts'. I get my campus security to walk me to the subway when I work late, I avoid bad neighborhoods and parks after dark, and I never leave my drink unattended.
But since moving to Toronto two years ago, I've had a drink spiked and I've been jumped in a parking lot. I am not suggesting that Toronto is less safe for women than other cities in Canada, but I am shocked at how little anyone seems to care.
Two young women are at university for less than a month and they are already desensitized to rapes happening in dorm rooms on campus? We should be livid! Raving! Foaming at the mouth!
The York University website has a list of measures that it is implementing to keep students safer that includes doubling security and increasing staff at the residences. I don't think it's enough.
When I visited York campus to check out their astronomy department I was given a tour from a current student there. We visited the campus pub, some of the other buildings and the "rape tunnels". More security may keep the number of attacks down, but it doesn't tackle the larger problem facing women in this city: apathy.
Photo "Dead Woman Walking" courtesy of tanjatiziana at the BlogTO flickr pool
Discussion
14 Comments
Sort By Oldest First / Newest First
Subscribe
Seems pretty obvious to me. Of course it shouldn't be this way, and women shouldn't have to take such precautions, but we don't live in fucking Wonderland people.
I didn't find out 'til later that I'd already been proven wrong that morning...
A decent sized Toronto Police force (3x current levels) and minimum sentences for robbery, burglary, and rape of 25 years without parole would be an excellent start. Getting people focused on the horrors of violent rape, rather than on trying to expand the definition of rape, would also help. "Take back the night" and other activities are used as a cudgel to beat men, rather than being actual efforts to make our communities safe for everyone.
Finally, rape would be much less likely if women were able to carry handguns. A man is going to win nearly every physical confrontation with a woman unless she has superior firepower. The wisdom of the American Frontier still holds true: "God created man, Samuel Colt made them equal."
Yours, an angry feminist.
Would we have heard this story had one woman been raped at York? And if she had been raped by her boyfriend, for example?
To answer SH: keeping your doors open in residence is part of the res culture - especially on pub nights (in York's case: thursday evenings) where there's a lot of kids mingling and hanging about. If you keep your doors closed, you are viewed as being anti-social.
This weekend, I went to see the Evil Dead: The Musical and was shocked at the misogyny in the writing. I found myself sitting in utter disbelief while a packed theatre applauded and laughed about a woman being gang raped by demons (in the form of trees) in a forest.
And we ask ourselves: how did it get from bad to worse?
It seems like a practise which only considers the freedom of some men, and not the safety of vulnerable women.
I just got my own USB rocket launcher :-) Awsome thing.
Plug into your computer and you got a remote controlled office missile launcher with 360 degrees horizontal and 45 degree vertival rotation with a range of more than 6 meters - which gives you a coverage of 113 square meters round your workplace.
You can get the gadget here: http://tinyurl.com/2qul3c
Check out the video they have on the page.
Cheers
Marko Fando