A difficult subject was given its due at a Salt Spring Forum event on Friday, Nov. 1 when Angela Marie MacDougall of Battered Women’s Support Services (BWSS) in Vancouver was the guest at Mahon Hall.
In introducing MacDougall, forum board chair Michael Byers said he had learned so much from her when she was an online event guest during the pandemic that he wanted to bring her to the island for an in-person discussion.
Gender-based, intimate-partner violence is both endemic and an epidemic, said MacDougall, who is executive director of BWSS.
“It is, I believe, one of the most pressing social issues of our time,” she said.
In 2018, Statistics Canada found that 44 per cent of women aged 15 and up had experienced intimate partner violence, whether physical, sexual or emotional.
Alicia Herbert, executive director of Islanders Working Against Violence (IWAV), moderated and contributed to the discussion. She shared that in 2023, IWAV fielded 600 crisis line calls from women experiencing some form of violence, and provided shelter for more than 50 women seeking safety. Ten per cent of those women identified as Indigenous.
“Those are big numbers,” said Herbert, “and I think it’s important to say those numbers out loud, because people often think that we’re an idyllic community that maybe is insulated from these issues.”
MacDougall said the root of gender-based violence is the belief that women are the property of men — their fathers, brothers or husbands — a practice that was brought to North America by European colonizers.
“We often look to other parts of the world and see how gender inequity and sexism and misogyny and violence against women is happening there, and forget that it is a reality right here for so many and for so many generations, and it’s something that we continue to unpack and want to address and redress.”
MacDougall reported that the Covid lockdown period led to increased incidents of domestic violence due to the resulting isolation and stress. As well, it accelerated the number of men and boys accessing high-profile individuals online who presented themselves as helping males concerned about livelihood, intimate partner, health and fitness issues.
“But you don’t have to scratch very far beyond that to see that a lot of it has to do with mistrust of women, and a real dehumanizing and objectifying kind of messaging about women,” said MacDougall. “That has always been there, but it’s kind of on steroids right now in particular circles. And so we’re seeing more and more boys that are saying really horrible things about girls. I mean, I think it’s been like that, but we had a moment in time where it was changing, but it’s gotten much worse.”
In answer to an audience member’s question about the impact of pornography, MacDougall first noted that young women and men are accessing online porn in equal numbers, and said she has seen a huge increase in reports of strangulation used in sexual acts, which can be traced to its use in pornography.
“For many youth, their first kind of exploration on sexuality is to see that violence and so there are lots of impacts around that, in the sense of how people can have healthy sexuality. Nobody’s talking about it. It’s something that’s absolutely not discussed now, and so we don’t have a pathway to help change that right now.”
MacDougall told the forum audience that part of the BWSS mission is “a recognition that battering doesn’t happen between two people in isolation, but happens in a social context, where some groups of people are able to oppress others; and that is such an important framing, because it puts the people in it also in a context. It’s not just about two people; it’s also about a whole bunch of other things. And that is, I think, a very vital way of looking at the problem and therefore looking at solutions.”
“The elimination of violence” was also installed in the BWSS mission when it was formed in 1979 by its founders, including Salt Spring’s Maggie Ziegler, who MacDougall acknowledged at the event.
“They were clear that it was important to have that as a mission, so as to be not just about social service, but also about social change.”
She said that in addition to services provided to survivors, her group’s work “is also about getting at the roots of violence and digging up those roots, in the sense of looking at them and saying, ‘What can we do to make this a healthier place?’”
The next Salt Spring Forum guest is former Alberta premier Rachel Notley, who will speak and take questions from the audience at Fulford Hall on Saturday, Nov. 16 beginning at 7:30 p.m. Tickets through Eventbrite or at the door.