Women’s Safety in the Workplace is Our Business
December 6 is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. As Status of Women Canada explains, December 6 marks the anniversary of the murders in 1989 of 14 young women at l'École Polytechnique de Montréal. On December 6, we remember lives lost to gender-based violence, and we take a hard look at what we can do better. We think about how far we have come, and we realize how far we still have to go.
We remember that misogyny kills. The 14 women killed on December 6, 1989 were killed because they were women. Because they were women who were working to become engineers, and were, therefore, women who Marc Lepine felt had no right to male-dominated space.
We remember that violence against women is not a private, individual, or isolated problem. Violence against women affects all of us, and we all have a role to play in ending it.
We remember that women experience violence differently, and in particular, that racism, colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and classism (among other factors) impact women’s experiences and vulnerabilities to violence.
As we remember, we look to the dedicated work of survivors, activists, and advocates in creating change, and think about how to support and build on these efforts in inclusive, sustainable ways. In past decades, survivors and activists worked to bring sexual violence and domestic violence out of the home and into the open, acknowledging that this violence was not a private matter to be covered up, but a serious social problem requiring systemic change.
In recent months in Canada, we have talked a lot about Jian Ghomeshi and sexual violence. These conversations have been critical and massively important. Collectively, we are outraged. But to ensure that change happens as a result of this outrage, our conversations need to go beyond Jian Ghomeshi as an individual to talk about the collective and systemic processes that allowed this abuse to occur. Because it is becoming increasingly clear that people knew something was wrong. That, as Kathryn Borel tells us in her recent Guardian article, power and inequality, celebrity status, stigma and rape myths, toxic workplace culture, and inadequate corporate and institutional response worked to silence survivors and enable abuse.
Workplaces, like all public spaces, do not have to be unsafe spaces. They can, and should, be places where survivors can be supported, and where violence can be prevented. Recently, the Centre for Research & Education on Violence against Women & Children (CREVAWC) at Western University and the Canadian Labour Congress released the results of their Pan-Canadian Survey on Domestic Violence and the Workplace. The survey found that more than a third of participants reported they had experienced domestic violence at some point in their life. (This was higher for women, gender diverse and Aboriginal people, those with disabilities and those reporting a sexual orientation other than heterosexual.) Of those who had experienced violence, more than half of participants reported that the violence continued at work in some way, and that harassing phone calls and text messages were the most frequent forms of domestic violence in the workplace. As Barb McQuarrie explained in a recent interview, domestic violence in the workplace “has been an invisible problem only that we haven’t acknowledged it openly.” This, we hope, is changing.
What does it mean to make the workplace a safe place? As a starting point, it means to change our expectations. For employers, it means to implement training around domestic violence and the workplace and create a workplace culture where sexual violence cannot fester and grow. For employees, it means to have “see it, name it, check it” conversations where your co-workers know that concern, empathy, and support outweigh judgment, gossip, and indifference. For every single one of us, it means recognizing that, for many people, our work lives are increasingly online, and that online sexual violence and gendered and racialized hate speech is a serious problem that disproportionately affects women, people of colour, and other marginalized voices. People should be safe at work, whether that work is in a physical or a virtual workplace.
On December 6, 1989 Mark Lepine killed 14 women for being women who were learning and working in a place that he felt he was entitled to be in, a place where they were not supposed to exist. Women in Canada are entitled to exist safely in public spaces, at home, and at work. On December 6, we remember lives lost to gender-based violence, and we take a hard look at what we can do better. We think about how far we have come, and we realize how far we still have to go.
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Make It Our Business is a campaign of the Centre for Research & Education on Violence against Women & Children (CREVAWC) at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. This campaign provides information and education to help employers and other workplace stakeholders to meet their obligations under the Ontario Occupational Health and Safety Act.
To honour 16 Days of Activism, Make It Our Business is releasing new public service announcements (PSAs) to help workers and employers dealing with domestic violence. These short videos feature dramatizations of employers and co-workers talking about their successes and challenges supporting an employee/colleague experiencing domestic violence, as well as the perspectives of a woman experiencing abuse and a man perpetrating abuse. The videos are available here.
You can learn more about Make It Our Business
