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Before we leave March and International Women's Day too far behind us, I want to take some time to briefly revisit the progress women have (and haven't) made toward full equality. Two trials currently in the news have been a particular source of concern to me.

The first one is the trial of police officer Daniel Montsion, who is being tried in connection with the death of Abdirahman Abdi. Montsion's actions have been portrayed in the court of public opinion as a shocking example of police brutality and institutionalized racism and racial profiling, not to mention discrimination against the mentally ill. "Justice for Abdi!" the protesters proclaim. But what about justice for the six or seven women - and that's just the ones who've been brave enough to speak up - who were sexually assaulted by Abdi before he was restrained by police?

Apparently Abdi managed to grope or otherwise inappropriately touch six women in a Bridgehead coffee shop before the police swooped in and did their thing. In addition, a woman in her car who was stopped at a red light in the area was also victimized by Abdi, who reached into her car window on that fateful hot July day. I suspect there may well be other victims out there who didn't step forward, who just wanted to put the unpleasantness behind them, rather than reliving it all in court and being accused of somehow "asking for it"!

Now, it may well be that Abdi could not realistically be held responsible for his own actions - but if that was the case, then who and where were his "minders"? Should he not perhaps have been locked up somewhere, or put on more or different medication, or been otherwise cared for, both for his own safety and security and that of his family, friends and the public at large? I'm not normally a particularly fervent advocate for the police but it does seem to me that they lack the necessary resources to deal with situations such as that one.

The second trial now unfolding is that of Joshua Boyle, who has pled "not guilty" to 19 charges of assorted violent behaviour, most of it towards his estranged wife, Caitlan Coleman. We don't know who the second victim is because there's still a publication ban, but I certainly hope it's not one of his kids, all of whom are very young (and scarily, Boyle has said he always knew he wanted a large family). In this case, I don't think there's any doubt that Boyle was fully responsible for his own actions and I hope they throw the book at him and lock him up for a very, very long time.

In other news, there have been serious allegations of sexual abuse at Ottawa Community Housing. More broadly, managers of women's shelters have pointed out the dangers of social media and smartphones - apparently aggrieved ex-partners can easily track these women, and who knows where that may lead - will we see more Basil Borutskis and Russell Williamses in our midst?

I'm not in favour of the death penalty. So I think the most pressing question here would be: How can we rehabilitate these violent people (usually men), if indeed they CAN be rehabilitated? It's all very well to talk of sensitivity training and anger management classes, but the folks taking the training may be pretty adept at giving the answers and making the noises the teacher wants to hear, regardless of what their true feelings and beliefs may be. Moreover, they may simply not show up for the required training (as was apparently the case with Borutski) and there are no consequences whatsoever!

Societal attitudes clearly need to change - but that tends to be a longer-term thing. Meanwhile, we may need to stop the violence using more direct intervention. How do we achieve that balance between reactive and proactive measures?

NOTE: This entry was begun on March 10 but substantially amended and completed on March 11.

Friday was International Women's Day. Is the western world in the "Third Wave" now? We have certainly made progress since the first International Women's Day in 1911, both here and in less propsperous countries. But we've still got plenty of ground to cover and we've got a few rather striking blind spots as well. For example, our attitude towards Muslim women who opt to wear burkas or even just hijabs. In my view, it probably makes them more confident and sets them further along the path to self-actualization if they do not, along the way, have to worry about unwanted attention (or even just PERCEIVED attention) from men. Yet women (not to mention men) who have grown up here are often all too anxious to yank those comforting garments off them (whether literally or figuratively) on the grounds that they are symbols of women's oppression. Rather an ironic or circular rationale, wouldn't you say?

And the fact is, that even when we're just dealing with women who have lived here all their lives in the most predominant Canadian cultural settings, far too many women are abused by their husbands or boyfriends, usually just when they are trying to extricate themselves from the relationship. For the most part, I don't think we have appropriate models and mechanisms in place to handle this. For example, if a woman makes a complaint against her husband and then recants once the police arrive, they may still arrest him and slap a restraining order on him. Or they send the woman and the children to a shelter (why should it be the VICTIMS rather than the perpetrators that have to leave their own home?) Anyway, it's still totally REACTIVE as opposed to PROACTIVE. It's like putting out the fire but then not moving on to install fire extinguishers and smoke detectors or practising proper fire prevention in the first place! Because studies strongly suggest that abused women do not necessarily want their husbands thrown in jail for years so that they have to end up as single parents working on minimum wage or being on welfare because their job doesn't cover child-care costs. What they would like, preferably, is for the abuse to stop. And for that, we need at the very least to help these men to properly manage and channel their anger or mental health issues (In some case it may even be primarily a matter of getting them on antidepressants - unlike women, who tend to turn their frustrations inwards on themselves, men are much more likely to take it out on their nearest and dearest, who may or may not remain near and dear once that's happened!) Ultimately, we're looking for a culture change, but that can take time. The real culprit, as I see it, is that men (at least of my generation) have grown up with that Male Sense of Entitlement. And women, being products of their culture as well, have often unconsciously bought into it too. They have higher expectations of themselves and other women than they do of men, and are much more inclined to accommodate the man and dance to his tune.

Now, I must hasten to add that I know the vast majority of men do not abuse their partners. Nor are men always the abusers (as a recent storyline in Coronation Street points out), and nor are gay and lesbian couples immune from abusive relationships. It can be dangerous to generalize, as I know I'm doing. Still, I did hear even back in the 1970s or 80s of a rather progressive movement underway in parts of Ontario. If there was a domestic abuse incident, the first response in most cases would be for a community service worker to approach both members of the couple TOGETHER and say something like "I'm so sorry this happened," not initially attributing the blame to either party, and take it from there. This avoided creating or exacerbating an adversary situation and got the parties involved to work together with the help of an impartial intermediary. Now, perhaps there were and are situations where this type of intervention would be impracticable, but it seems to me it still might be a good tool of first resort.

Everyone feels sorry for the "single parent", usually the mother; yet there's precious little support for the woman who thinks things through, weighs the pros and cons and decides that on balance, it might be better for her children as well as herself to stay and make a go of things. "Doesn't she have any self-respect? Is she NUTS?" people ask. And years later her grown children may try to take her to court for not protecting them from their father, in a bizarre blame-the-victim scenario. Not that I'm condoning abuse, but definitely things that were considered a normal part of growing up for previous generations - the strap in schools, corporal punishment at home, and so on - would tend to be considered abusive in this day and age, so you can't really judge the conditions of several decades ago by the standards of today. Moreover, while I'm not exactly seeing a "false memory syndrome" behind every tree, I think it's undeniable that we perceive things very differently at different points in our life, so it's easy for children and adults alike to, um, get the wrong end of the stick.

A lot of the progress women still need to make relates to their role in the workplace. The wage gap, for starters, is still a reality, even though it has narrowed. I think that when I was a kid, I just assumed that if I decided to get married and have kids, I would have the CHOICE whether to stay home with them or go out to work. But as it happened with me - and I know I'm not alone in this - I never really felt I had any choice BUT to go out to work. I was the main wage-earner for a large part of my working life but even when my partner earned more, I was always the one with the SECURE job so I didn't feel I could just quit, even at points where I really disliked my job and was intensely stressed out. And while they DID offer maternity leave when I needed it, the paid benefit was only 15 weeks of the amount offered under unemployment insurance, offered after a two-week waiting period. If you wanted to take longer off than that, it was totally unpaid, though they did keep your job open for six months after the birth.

The women of the generation before mine, of course, were also lacking in choice, except that it was the reverse choice. They would be required until the mid-1950s to resign upon marriage; and pretty much throughout the 1960s, it was game over (or at least career over) if they got pregnant. Still, for women who WERE and REMAINED in committed relationships in that era, I'm going to go out on a politically-incorrect limb and say that in many ways, I think they had it better than my generation. The reason? Their husbands were in a booming market and their starting salaries tended to be more generous (adjusting for inflation) than they are today, in part because it was just expected that they needed, on that salary, to support a wife and three or four kids as well as themselves. If they had a university education, they were part of an elite and commanded a higher salary; but even if they didn't, often they were able to pursue higher education at the employer's expense. And the minimum wage back then (again, obviously adjusting for inflation) went farther than it does today. I know there were downsides. It was the era of Organization Man and employers just assumed (usually correctly) that they could relocate their employees and uproot the entire family at a moment's notice. And I think it's also true to say people's expectations were lower. They didn't just assume they'd be able to buy a house right away, have a bedroom for each child and maybe a spare room left over, two or three bathrooms, a playroom and a garage. Even so, I think that for women at least, it was from post World War II to the mid-1960s that was really the age of leisure - not the future (which is now the present), when we were supposed to be working far less and having more time to pursue our own interests and having technology as our servant instead of ourselves being slaves to technology!

When women entered the workforce en masse, the assumptions were very different. It was assumed that they were working for "pin money" to buy a few nice little extras. I think it's partly because of that that minimum wages and average starting salaries eroded over time. Pay equity legislation rightly stipulated that employers couldn't just lower the men's salaries to match the women's but I would argue that over time, that's precisely what started to happen. Even in two-parent families with fewer children, people decided that they couldn't manage on just one salary yet even on two, they were worse off than their mothers and fathers before them. There were a lot of other factors at work too, of course - stagflation, the erosion in the value of higher education as well-educated baby-boomers flooded the market, the oil-price shocks, free trade and technology and the increasingly open economy, draft-dodgers, immigrants and refugees (some of them illegal) who were willing (or at least compelled) to work for subminimum wages for fear of extradition... the list goes on. To me, these are simply FACTS. I'm not arguing that they're bad or good or right or wrong, nor am I suggesting we can or should go back to the past. And obviously, having spent my entire adult life (until my recent retirement) in the workforce, I most emphatically would NOT want to go back to the era before we had pay equity, parental benefits, and so on. The fact is, I really don't have very many answers or solutions.

I will make one last politically-incorrect statement before I sign off, though. Unions, while they have certainly been part of the solution, have also been part of the problem. In part, I think that's because historically, a lot of the union movement has been very much a part of the hard-hat and lunch-bucket culture, of construction workers and truck-drivers ogling and harassing women. Even in white-collar unions, union conventions, rallies and other events are often held on weekends and during non-working hours - which can often preclude the full participation of busy working mothers. And often, even when a weekend event is in the members' own city, the union encourages participants to stay overnight in a hotel room so they can sit around the bar and get drunk, or whatever other socializing they want them to get involved in. Unions are, in my experience, often much more apt than employers to feel that they somehow "own" their members (employees in the case of employers) and can tell them what to do with impunity - walk the picket line or not, withhold extracurricular activities in the case of teachers, etc. And quite frankly, that's antithetical to family life. The union-executive to rank-and-file relationship, like the employer-employee relationship, should be a mutually beneficial one, an exchange between equal parties, whose interests coincide in some respect even as they may diverge in others. I remember telling one woman who was a devoted unionist, some time in the 1980s or 90s, that I was working part time. She looked at me inscrutably for a second or two and then said something like: "I don't know how I feel about that because I sort of feel we should ALL be working shorter hours." I guess she thought I was almost a scab for voluntarily working shorter hours for shorter pay. A response I thought of only later was along the lines of "Well, my child isn't going to put her growing-up years on hold until the union manages to negotiate shorter hourse for everyone!" Let me tell you, for part of that time period, my partner was unemployed and I was actually supporting a family of three (and a half, if you count the cat) on ONE part-time salary!! And people like her wonder why they don't get more female involvement in unions?

I'm bothered by male discrimination against women, but I think I'm even more bothered by WOMEN who fail to support OTHER women, who don't see us as capable human beings who differ in our needs and interests and make decisions and often difficult choices in life based on a variety of factors. For example, we have to stop this business of stay-at-home mothers who put down "working" mothers, or employed mothers who put down the stay-at-home mother. And there are many other examples out there. It's silly, it's unproductive and it stands in the way of real progress. We don't have to all think alike or speak in unison - we just have to respect each other's differences and choices and points of view.