(This piece was written and published a number of years ago. When the late Peter Gzowski was hosting Morningside on CBC Radio, he asked listeners to send him something about Christmas for his Christmas Eve program. I sent this and he read it to end his program that day. Years later, I read it myself on Christmas Eve, on the CBC Radio Mainstreet program that covered the Maritimes. I was hoping to give you a link to hear me reading it but I couldn’t find it so I’m afraid you’ll have to read it yourself. I hope you enjoy it and I wish you all the best of the Christmas season.)

In the mid-‘60s, I was a student in Montreal. One year, my schedule made it impossible for me to leave for home before December 24 so there I was, deciding whether I should spend much of Christmas in a little room in residence or whether I should spend it on the train. I decided in favour of the train.

I was very familiar with Montreal’s Central Station and always looked forward to the atmosphere there in the few days leading up to Christmas. There would always be a big raucous crowd at the far end of the station. Mostly everyone would be carrying shopping bags filled with wrapped gifts; there would usually be a couple of people with guitars and there’d be lots of excited children. When that big white-on-black sign was rolled into place listing the destinations — Trois Rivières, Québec City, Montmagny, Rivière du Loup, Rimouski, Mont Joli, Campbellton, Bathurst, Newcastle, Moncton, Amherst, Truro, Halifax and Sydney — there was a cheer and a good-natured crush as we all prepared to go down the stairs and board the Ocean Limited. These were eastern Quebecers and Maritimers going home for Christmas.

It wasn’t like that on that Christmas Eve. The station was dim and quiet, the way airports are late at night. There was a straggling handful of us waiting to board; we were subdued and cheerless.

It was late evening when we got on the train but even still, most of us gravitated toward the club car and soon began to talk. We exchanged stories of who we were, where we were going, why we were travelling on Christmas Eve. Some people were in my situation — they had worked up until that afternoon. One young couple had planned to stay in Montreal for Christmas and had decided at the last minute that they couldn’t bear not being home.

We talked about who would be meeting us at our various station stops and about little family traditions we were missing by not being home tonight. By the time we went off to our berths and roomettes, we were feeling quite warm and cheerful, the way you do when you’ve made new friends.

When we congregated in the morning — a sunny Christmas morning — in CN’s dining car, we were already rolling through the impossibly white snowy Québec countryside along the St. Lawrence River.

It was then that we began to lose some of our crowd and we established an instant tradition: at each station, as someone was leaving the train, all the rest of us would gather around the door to wave to the family on the platform and to sing a rousing chorus or two of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.” We just kept waving and singing until the train pulled out.

By the time we were crossing the Gaspé peninsula, heading towards northern New Brunswick, we were having a real Christmas dinner, drinking toasts to each other and to our crew and acknowledging that so far, believe it or not, we were having a pretty good Christmas.

By mid-afternoon, our numbers had dwindled and as we approached the broad sweep of the Miramichi River valley, I began gathering my stuff together to be the next one to go. At the Newcastle station, I was waved and sung off the train by fewer people than there’d been earlier but with no less enthusiasm. My mother and father and I stood on the platform watching the train out of sight as it continued on toward Moncton.

The five-mile drive to Chatham was a merry one as I reported all the details of the trip. Everyone — including me — was surprised at the exuberance of my mood, everything considered.

There was one more surprise. Although both towns had the quiet empty streets and the unmistakeable atmosphere of Christmas Day, in our own house, the calendar had been set back. They didn’t want me to miss the special feeling of Christmas eve so the presents remained wrapped under the tree, the mince pies were on the counter ready to be baked, and the turkey was still in the bottom of the fridge, ready to be roasted with all its trimmings on Boxing Day.

When I’d left Montreal the night before, I had resigned myself to having no Christmas at all. I ended up having two Christmases — which turned out to be much more satisfactory.

(Continued from here.)

(When I was having my website made, I sent the designer a number of photos of flowers in our garden. I thought this one had a particular symbolism when it comes to me. Maybe I was thinking of this very post.)

In my last entry, I wrote this:

When I first started to write these entries, I hadn’t intended to include so much detail about the robbery. I intended to mention it, in passing, to provide myself with some credibility when I began to write about how the justice system works and when eventually, someone would assert, “That’s easy for you to say; nothing like this has ever happened to you.” I needed to show that, even as a “victim of crime,” I was capable of looking at the justice system with an objective eye.

This is the part — part five — I was thinking about from the beginning.

I was thinking about prisons. I’ve been thinking about them even more than usual, every time anyone in the Harper government talks smugly about being “tough on crime”. Their planned policy is to build more prisons, put more and more people inside, keep slashing resources until conditions become even more deplorable than they are now and then announce their privatization strategy. They will then turn over the whole operation to some sleazy business outfit and prisoners will become the latest unfortunates to be sacrificed on the altar of profit.

I can’t resist, right here, pointing out the kind of corruption that can result in a system where prisons are privately owned.

As scandals from Wall Street to Washington roil the public trust, the justice system in Luzerne County, in the heart of Pennsylvania’s struggling coal country, has also fallen prey to corruption. The county has been rocked by a kickback scandal involving two elected judges who essentially jailed kids for cash. Many of the children had appeared before judges without a lawyer.

Prisons are already places of anger and despair, of rage and violence. More and more prisons will not make us safer; on the contrary, they will release even greater numbers of people who have no vested interest in the society which has isolated and brutalized them.

It is so unimaginative and so barbaric to keep confining people to these violent spaces that I believe it is high time we started to look for humane, workable and effective ways to deal with miscreants so they can truly be incorporated back into a meaningful role in our communities.

Yes, there are people who should be in prison — those people who are a danger to others must be isolated but even they should be treated with human dignity.

But others . . . For example, the day Garth Drabinsky was sentenced to prison, I asked myself, in all seriousness, “Who is going to benefit from this prison sentence? Drabinsky isn’t, nor are the people he defrauded. Nor is greater society. Then who?”

The answer is no one, of course. Just as no one will benefit from the prison sentences doled out to all the other criminals who stole money from their companies, their clients, their customers — including the highest profile Canadian among them, Conrad Black.

Which is not to say there shouldn’t be retribution. It seems that Conrad Black is showing himself, in prison, to be a gifted teacher. He’s enjoying it and learning humility and humanity while teaching people who have never had his vast advantages. Why shouldn’t he have been sentenced to that? To have been sent to a community where he’s needed, to live among the people there, to work for minimum wage at a job that will produce positives, not negatives, in all directions?

Conrad Black and Garth Drabinsky are the privileged and white-collar versions of the petty criminal we deal with on a daily basis.

The young man who robbed me grew up in a large chaotic family in the North End of Halifax. My husband’s aunt is a retired teacher who taught him and remembers the whole family. The parents in that family did — as all parents do — the best they could given the resources, both personal and monetary, they had to work with. But the children had little structure and no disciplined direction to shape their behaviour. The attractions of street culture, with its dangerous underside, seem much more attractive under those circumstances.

We failed that boy long before he robbed my house — and all the other houses. We’ve known for so long the significance of early childhood development and its importance in influencing “everything from behaviour to mental and physical health” — according to Dr. Fraser Mustard, who did ground-breaking research on the subject years ago.

Starting with our young children is only a beginning — but an essential beginning. But we seem to have no imagination about how to deal with those who are already grown up and are offenders against the law. We pay lip service to rehabilitation but don’t really demand that the system follow through. In fact, often after a mob scene at a courthouse where an accused is being brought to trial (and which makes me turn cringing away from the TV), we are content to throw people into prison and never give them another thought. We treat people in prisons as less than animals, all the while making jokes about on one hand, the sexual violence inside and, on the other hand, the enviable life the prisoners are living in the entirely fictional lap of luxury .

It is an awful thing to lock up non-violent offenders, to feed their anger and nurture their alienation and minimize their humanity. They will, without doubt, find a community in prison and they will get out — and yes, they’re going to get out — much more dangerous than when they went in. This is so true that it’s pretty much a cliché and yet too many people put this certain knowledge aside and allow the Harper government to use misinformation and false assurances of security to push ahead with their tough-on-crime agenda.

A study has been done which looks carefully at the roadmap the government is following as it pursues its wrongheaded path. The report on this study is eye-opening and worth reading and I recommend it.

I would like to think there is another more compassionate and more effective way of dealing with lawbreakers.

(There is one more entry in the series, In pursuit of justice, and I will post the conclusion to those thoughts and observations a little later in the week. For today, December 6, 2009, I wanted to acknowledge the 20th anniversary of the murder of 14 women at École Polytechnique in Montreal.)

In 1989, I was writing a feminist column for The Daily News in Halifax. As I read those columns 20 years later, I am disheartened to find that too much has not changed, that many of the columns are as relevant today as they were when I wrote them.

Case in point: This column was first published on Sunday, December 10, 1989. The only changes I’ve made today are in square brackets or are added links.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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On Thursday morning, distinguished lawyer and former MP George Cooper made a little joke on CBC Radio’s Information Morning. He was discussing the recent NDP leadership convention with host Don Connolly and panel mates Dale Godsoe and Ray Larkin when he decided to use a colourful comparison to express his opinion about some aspect of the race.

It’s a good news/bad news sort of situation, he said, like that old joke about your mother-in-law driving over a cliff — trouble is, she was in your brand new Cadillac at the time. I believe I detected some laughter from the others and I’d be interested to know whether the CBC switchboard lit up with outraged callers, the way it does when someone says a rude word on the air. Somehow I doubt it.

In my household, we sat in stunned disbelief, hearing a joke which would be in poor taste at the best of times but was absolutely scandalous being told and snickered at the morning after the murder of 14 women at the University of Montreal.

It wasn’t the only joke being told that day. Francine Pelletier, a Montreal feminist who was interviewed extensively on the TV coverage of the murders, said that men in the corridors at Radio-Canada were treating the massacre in a most light-hearted way, one of them remarking, “I’ve often wanted to do that myself.”

At around the same time, a young friend of mine was walking into Tim Horton’s to buy some doughnuts. There were two men in front of her carrying a newspaper with a screaming headline about the murdered women and one of the men said something along the lines of, “way to go, buddy.”

Her friends asked her how she handled this awful moment; most of them felt, bravely, that they wished they’d been there. In retrospect, we can all come up with the enviable line, the cutting quip, the perfect putdown.

She said nothing, of course. There are few women — including me — who could respond to those men. Such verbal violence is part of what renders women powerless, unable to act, not so much from fear as from emptiness, from the debilitation that results from crying out for so long and not being heard.

I’ve been told so often — all feminists have — to lighten up, to learn to take a joke. They don’t really mean anything by it, you know. This week, finally, I’ve been told by men — among others, by Peter Gzowski [the late host of CBC Radio's Morningside] and his panel on the radio, by Tom Regan [a former columnist with The Daily News] on the phone, by my husband at home — that it is time for them to do something about their violent brothers.

They know now that they must begin listening to women and they must refuse — loudly — to listen to the dehumanizing “jokes” that so many of them allow to slip by. They must disdain the views of those who keep saying that the carnage in Montreal was an isolated act carried out by a madman.

They must examine and be willing to change their political, economic and judicial systems, all of which conspire to keep women in positions of dependence. They must observe their sons — their vocabularies, the games they play, the way they’re learning to deal with anger, the things they say about little girls. They must stop undermining the mothers and, once and for all, lay to rest that age-old excuse that “boys will be boys.”

They must not simply be available to provide protection; they must work actively to create a safer world, where their sisters and daughters and mothers can live with the same sense of security that brothers, sons and fathers take for granted. They must recognize and acknowledge that the 14 women in Montreal are only the most recent to die at the hands of a man, that in 1987, almost 70 per cent of women murdered in our country were murdered by the men they lived with.

One of the buttons we brought back from the Winnipeg NDP convention — where I saw the joy and exhilaration on the faces of the women who had worked to elect Audrey McLaughlin as their leader — bears the slogan “Men of quality are not threatened by women seeking equality.” The words seem almost horrible in their irony this week but the message remains true.

And so it’s time to take another step forward, to convince men that violence against women is the fault of men and — to resurrect an old phrase — if they’re not part of the solution, they’re part of the problem.

(Continued from here)

Do you feel bad that on one day, I was the Queen of Potential Witnesses and the next day, I was dropped like a hot potato?

I’m not sure how I felt about this at the time. It’s possible that I was a little miffed and felt that a simple phone call would have been nice, just to say, “Thanks, Sharon. We appreciate that you were standing by, ready to come to court and do your civic duty.”

But now, all these years later, I think the way it was handled was entirely appropriate.

When I first started to write these entries, I hadn’t intended to include so much detail about the robbery. I intended to mention it, in passing, to provide myself with some credibility when I began to write about how the justice system works and when eventually, someone would assert, “That’s easy for you to say; nothing like this has ever happened to you.” I needed to show that, even as a “victim of crime,” I was capable of looking at the justice system with an objective eye.

Victims of crime need a lot of support in the aftermath of their ordeal. I would not begrudge them that.

I do not, however, believe that support should be provided in the context of the crime and in the court system. Within the last few years, the focus of crime has been shifting to the victim to the point that, in some cases, the alleged perpetrator has been relegated to a bit part — to playing the role of the instrument that caused the victim’s suffering.

This is wrong. Criminal proceedings should not be about the victim. A court case must be centred on the accused person and the law that has been broken. If the victim is called as a witness, then he/she should be required to present the facts and not to be a prop for the defence.

I’m jaded by the parade of victims of crime who appear on television, prodded by their interviewers, lovingly and harrowingly describing every detail of the torment they’ve been through. When their voices break and they begin to cry, I can almost see the producers, rubbing their hands gleefully and saying, “This is great TV.”

I connect it directly to the ever-growing popularity of so-called reality TV and to the ever-growing number of people who feel that their lives don’t matter — that they aren’t really living — unless they’re on TV.

Victim Impact Statement legislation was proclaimed under Section 722 of the Criminal Code in October, 1988. It is the high end of the trend toward focussing on the victim and I strenuously oppose it. Why should one person be likely to get a heavier sentence because his victim is eloquent and articulate and a good writer and another get off a little more easily because his victim is not so well-spoken and not quite as appealing?

Focussing on the victim is one part of a larger policy approach that is based on ideology and also includes all the “getting tough on crime” strategies: longer sentences, repeal of the young offenders’ act, cracking down on parole “privileges” — and ultimately, privatized prisons where there are big profits to be made off people’s misery.

Prisons-for-profit are immoral. So are the de-humanizing and other mis-treatment of prisoners and — of course — imprisoning the wrong people.

Some of these issues around prisons and prisoners — and they’re in the news right now — were what I started out to explore when I got sidetracked into writing about the robbery. Let me try to pull all this together in the next segment and then, I promise, we’ll change the subject.

Part 5

(Parts one and two)

The young man who robbed me was 24 years old. When he was arrested, his arms were both covered with needle-tracks. He was addicted to injectable cocaine. The police officer who had asked me in the very beginning if I thought he was on drugs at the time of the robbery believed I was probably mistaken when I said no.

The officer said that if the burglar had not been on drugs at the time, he would — in all likelihood — have been much more desperate and my life would have been in much greater danger.

After a thorough investigation, the police determined that this young man was responsible for up to 300 break-and-enters over the preceding year. It was pretty much a full-time job for him.

His method of operation was, apparently, much the same in each robbery. He would knock on a door — it was pretty easy at our house as the outside door did not lock and it opened into a little porch where the inside locked door was not visible from the sidewalk — and if he didn’t get a response, he would find a way in. (If he did get a response, he would name someone he was looking for and would be most apologetic when told that there was no one there of that name.)

I had been feeling guilty about that key which we always left on top of the electric box in that little front porch. The police officer told me it wasn’t a good thing to do and we should stop doing it but he assured me that the burglar would have got into the house anyway. If the key hadn’t been there, he would have broken in.

Once in, he would — presumably on his own — locate the garbage bags and then methodically rob the house. When he had everything he wanted — this always amazes me — he would call a taxi and leave with the garbage bag over his shoulder.

Leaving our house, he didn’t call a taxi but he walked up the street and caught a cab at the taxi-stand on the corner. When I try to picture this whole scene, I can imagine that he didn’t look out of place: there’s a laundromat in the next block from our place and it was not unusual to see young people walking along Clyde St. with a full garbage bag slung over a shoulder.

In all those 300 break-and-enters, I was the only person he ever encountered.

I sometimes wonder how he felt, upstairs in our house, when he heard the front door open that day. After all, I could have been anyone: a bunch of big guys, a parent with a gaggle of hungry kids, a housekeeping service. Surely he spent a few anxious minutes until he discerned — with relief, no doubt — that it was a lone female.

From the police point of view, this was a very significant arrest — 300 break-and-enters solved in one fell swoop. I was very important to them and they were careful to keep me in the loop. I can’t remember now whether I actually talked to anyone in the Crown Prosecutor’s office but I had sessions with the police going over the evidence and the testimony that I would give as the Crown’s only witness.

I didn’t look forward to it but it seemed inevitable.

The details of what happened in the next few weeks are now lost to me but eventually, I phoned someone — the police or the Crown Prosecutor’s office — and asked what was happening. I was dealt with quite impersonally and summarily and I was told that there would be no trial, that the burglar had pled guilty to seven counts of break-and-enter, one count of armed robbery and one count of forcible confinement. The person I spoke to didn’t know any more than that.

Somewhere, in my completely disorganized files, there’s a small newspaper clipping that appeared a few weeks after that conversation. It was under “Court briefs” and it described — briefly — the robbery and the guilty plea. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.

It was the first time I had ever seen his name.

(There’s still more to come.)

Part 4

(Continued from here)

The details of the actual robbery are as clear in my mind as if I had been invisible and watching it all from an observational perch. This is probably because I told the story often in the first few days after it happened but also because I think some kind of specialized scrutinizing function had been activated in my brain.

I remember thinking, tied up in the bathroom, “If I survive this, I will have to describe very carefully exactly what happened.”

But the events that followed are not nearly as clear and as well-organized in my mind. I remember and can recount mostly everything that happened but it might not be in the right order.

The police and Dan arrived very quickly after they’d been called. The media (following their trusty police scanners) arrived also — a couple of reporters, at least one TV camera — but I declined to see them.

The officer who was in charge sat with me at the table and asked me to tell him what had happened. He was polite and respectful. He stopped me from time to time and interjected a question. He asked me to go back over some details that I’d already covered. He remarked that I was very calm.

He asked me to describe the burglar — and then later, asked me again, rephrasing his question.

Later that same day, another officer asked me many of the same questions and they also asked me to write an account of what had happened.

It was clear to me that they were trying to see if my details would be consistent and to rule out the possibility that I was involved in the crime or that I knew the burglar. I was not offended by this and I quite understood why they were doing it.

When they felt reassured that I was not a partner in the crime, their attitudes noticeably changed and the senior officer — the one who had questioned me first — thanked me for my co-operation.

He asked me if I had the impression that the burglar was on drugs. I told him I didn’t think so.

After the police left, we looked around the house. I probably wasn’t thinking this way then but later, I thought: this is what I would have found if I’d lunched out that day and arrived home at suppertime.

The china cabinet was as I’d last seen it — all the doors and the drawer open, the silver gone. The stereo equipment was gone. The desk drawers and the drawers of a small antique washstand in the front hall were open and ransacked, their contents spilled out on to the floor.

Upstairs, it was more of the same. Both our jewellery boxes were gone. Dan’s had contained cufflinks, tie pins and clips. He also lost a valuable ring set with an emerald. Mine held mostly costume jewellery but my late mother’s engagement and wedding rings were in there as well as a couple of other pieces that I’d inherited and that were of strong sentimental value.

Dan had cancelled all the credit cards while I was with the police. After we checked everything out, we called a locksmith — as far as we knew, the burglar had taken our key with him. And then we started making lists with descriptions and approximate value of everything that was gone.

I had never been a brave or adventurous person but I had always enjoyed my own company. For a long time after the robbery, however, I was not able to stay in the house alone. I will never be able to repay the friends and family members who came to stay with me — day after day — and often watch as I did nothing but pace the floor.

I was afraid. I soon realized that my fear was not focussed on the burglary — or even on the burglar — but had branched out into many other areas of my life. I was afraid of random men on the streets, in the supermarket, in the movie theatre. I was now irrationally afraid of getting cancer; I was afraid of fire or of the propane tanks exploding; I was afraid of driving if even one snowflake had fallen. I couldn’t sleep, of course.

I was referred to a psychologist and I went to see her once a week. I talked a lot there and I’m sure it helped but I’m also sure that the passage of time — a lot of time — is what really helped me regain some trust in the people out there.

Within the next couple of months, the police called me and asked if I’d come down to the station and help them out. They took me into a small room which had counters around three sides. Spread out on the counters was what I can only call the detritus of a great number of break-and-enters.

I found it indescribably sad. There were earrings and necklaces, watches and bracelets, drivers’ licences, library, health, membership and other cards of the kind that populate most wallets. There were even letters and small documents. The officers told me that they thought they knew who had robbed me and they had staked out the place where he was staying on garbage night — and they’d confiscated his garbage bags. Nothing there was mine. Mine would have been long gone in an earlier garbage pick-up.

Not long after this, the police called again and asked if they could meet me at my office. There was another development. There were two officers. I could see they were very excited. They had brought head-and-shoulder photos of a dozen people, based on my description.

They asked me to sit at my desk and said they would lay the photos before me, one at a time. They said I shouldn’t say anything until all the pictures were in place. When they laid the last one down, they stood back and said, “Is he there?”

I pointed to him and they could barely contain themselves. They asked if I were sure, and I was.

They arrested him shortly after that. While they were questioning him, they asked, “What happened on Clyde St.?” They told me he put his head down into his hands and said, “Oh God, I never should have done that to that lady.”

(More to come … soon, I promise.)

Part 3

On January 9, 1989, I walked home for lunch in downtown Halifax. It was unusual for me to go home for lunch. I was a magazine editor and there were always lots of people (writers!) who wanted to have lunch with me. I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if I had eaten out that day.

I unlocked the front door, went in and tossed my coat on the couch. I was immediately struck by the fact that I was not greeted by three cats. They had their own door/tunnel leading from the first floor bathroom window out to the deck but none of them liked the cold — and it was a cold day.

I went into the dining room and saw the doors to the china cabinet were standing open and my mother’s silver flatwear had been placed in my own suitcase, which was open on the floor.

While I stood trying to register what this meant, I heard someone coming down the stairs. I knew immediately that there was a burglar in the house. I stood still — there was nowhere I could go. I had always heard that people who did break-and-enters didn’t want to confront anyone and I imagined that he would rush down the stairs and straight out the front door, happy to be out of there.

But he came around the corner to where I was standing and he had a knife in his hand. He laid the knife against the side of my face and said, “Don’t try anything and you won’t get hurt.”

He went through my purse — there was a reasonable amount of cash in there which was unusual but probably a good thing — and while he was occupied, I was memorizing his appearance without appearing to be doing so. I was very calm. I asked him how he got in. He said, “I found the key you left on top of the electric box.”

He took my wedding ring off my finger. It was quite a spectacular ring — a wide, gold, open-work band with five small diamonds — that had been made especially for me.

He then grabbed a straw basket that I’d brought from Spain and cut the rope handles off. He tied my hands behind my back, wrapped the scarf I’d been wearing around my mouth and led me into the bathroom.

He sat me down on the john and tied my hands to the large pipe that runs vertically behind a toilet. He went out and closed the door.

He came back in about a minute. He’d left his knife on the sink, just inches from my face. I was now able to give an excellent description of both him and his weapon. He grabbed it, said, “I forgot this,” and went out again.

I sat there quietly and listened to him continue to rob the house, all around me. The detail that makes me smile in the telling of all this is that while I was sitting there, FurFace, the middle cat, the friendliest and most loving cat, came in through the kitty door and expressed delight at seeing me. She jumped up on my lap and settled in and began to purr happily. She seemed not to mind — or to notice — that my hands were tied behind my back.

The burglar came back and asked me through the door where he would find the garbage bags. I told him they were in the drawer nearest to the stove; he said, “thanks.”

He returned once more to tell me he was leaving and told me not to scream. I had no intention of screaming.

I sat there quietly for awhile. I was afraid it might be a trick, that maybe he was really standing outside the door, waiting to see what I would do. I guessed it was now about 1:30 p.m. and I wasn’t expecting Dan, my husband, to be home until mid-evening as he had an after-work meeting. I thought FurFace and I might be in for a long afternoon.

Eventually, I began to work away at the ropes behind me. I managed to get out of the one that was tied to the pipe and I dumped FurFace and got up. (It’s an unimportant detail but I looked at myself in the mirror and I was the colour of chalk. I had never seen a face that colour and I wondered what my blood pressure was.)

I went out into the hall and saw the front doors wide open onto the sidewalk. I went around to the back where our tenants’ entrance was and I kicked on the door. They were shocked when I told them what had happened — they had been there the whole time. At one point, one of them had said, hearing unusual noises upstairs, “Those cats are very active today!”

They cut the rope and freed my hands. They called the police and I called Dan and we sat and waited.

(To be continued …)

Part 2

Back when second-wave feminism was a new and exciting movement, we used the word “patriarchy” unabashedly, not at all self-conscious about naming the structures that were deliberately designed and kept in place always to the advantage of one segment of society. “It’s a man’s world” was no joke and it was the premise we had all grown up with.

It came with another word: entitlement. Entitlement was so deeply embedded that to even suggest — never mind demand — changes that would bring those outside the advantaged group some measure of equality was met with fearful hostility.

It was as if some people gaining a few rights meant that others had to lose some — as if there were only so many rights to go around.

There has been a backlash against some of the strong language we used as feminists in the ’70s. Nowadays, patriarchy is mostly used — condescendingly — in speaking of Afghanistan or other cultures that we need to demonise and look down on.

But in our own society, patriarchy hasn’t gone anywhere. Physical and sexual violence against women and children — up to and including murder — continues unabated. Popular culture is rife with images and stories that exploit the sexuality of young people. Planeloads of North American and European men still fly off to Southeast Asia where they have made specific arrangments to have sex with children — children as young as six.

Catholic priests live in the heart of the patriarchy. Why would it be shocking to anyone that they too are swept along in the privileged belief that adult males are entitled to act out their sexual urges no matter the hurt and broken lives they leave in their wake?

Of course it is a horrible betrayal of trust to be raped by your priest — as it is to be raped by your father, your stepfather, uncle, brother, Boy Scout leader, hockey coach. Yes, some are worse than others although comparing betrayals doesn’t seem wise to me. But this rampant abuse is all rooted in the same place and it has shaped the society we live in.

Men no longer “own” women and children but in large swaths of the world — and in too many religions — men still seek to control the minds and bodies of women and children, both those they know and those they don’t know.

During my reading on this subject, I came across a website called Male Survivor. It’s the kind of website I usually avoid because I expect it to be heavy on men’s rights and feminist bashing. But this website has neither. Instead, it pays tribute to the feminist movement and urges those who are working on child abuse issues to take a lesson from rape crisis centres and other feminist organizations.

For years, professionals grappled unsuccessfully with how to understand and prevent the physical battering of a woman by her husband or partner. The standard question asked by the professional focused on the (female) victim: “Why doesn’t she leave?” That question was based on numerous theoretical models and treatment interventions designed to resolve the problems of battering by treating the “victim’s pathology.” However, advocates of battered women, many of whom had been physically assaulted themselves, eventually confronted the professional establishment and posed an important re-framing of the question. Quite simply, by shifting the focus from the victim to the (male) perpetrator, the primary question then became: “Why does he hit?”

It goes on to say, ” the abuse of children cannot be adequately addressed without acknowledging the fundamental political and social dimensions that govern our society. Existing social norms create a climate that fosters physical and sexual abuse of children.”

To suggest that priestly celibacy is the problem implies that child sexual abuse doesn’t exist in all other segments of society — most notably in families.

The problem is patriarchy and its upholding of the social norms of adult male entitlement and the often not-very-subtle subjugation of women and children.

I recommend much of the material in Male Survivor. I also recommend this column, written by my friend, Ralph Surette.

There is an episode of Seinfeld (yes, I am a Seinfeld trivia expert) in which Kramer, signing up for an AIDS walk, refuses to wear the AIDS ribbon.

Ribbons have become such a cliché. Maybe they were a cliché from the beginning, starting with Tony Orlando and Dawn and Tie A Yellow Ribbon …

I’m with Kramer. I won’t wear a ribbon — not yellow (support the troops); not white/purple (against violence against women); not white (against pornography); not red (against AIDS); not rainbow (support gay rights) — not any of the 77 official colours that represent (mostly) every disease you can think of and quite a few causes as well.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Breast Cancer’s colour is pink. I don’t wear that one either.

I have never been comfortable with all the pink — ribbons, teddy bears, jewellery — surrounding breast cancer, second only to lung cancer as a cause of cancer deaths in women. I find it way too cutesy for my taste.

I was also not the first person to feel a little put off when I discovered that Breast Cancer Awareness Month was started by a drug company that sells breast cancer drugs and the pink ribbon was originated by Estée Lauder cosmetics. It has turned into a huge marketing ploy and has successfully shifted the emphasis away from discovering the cause of breast cancer to — purportedly — looking for a cure.

I appreciated this article on the subject and noticed immediately when I opened it that all the Google ads that were generated were for breast-cancer-related pink stuff — to buy. And there was a “Breast Cancer Store” too!

I hasten to add that I am all in favour of people gathering together in support of one another in whatever kind of group and activity that works for them. It’s also important, however, to understand that great profits are being made from the pink campaign by companies which would stand to lose a lot if more resources were poured into looking for the cause rather than the cure for breast cancer — and all the other cancers.

Samantha King’s book, Pink Ribbons, Inc., has been well-reviewed. This Maclean’s interview with her offers a lot of insight into her book and her views on this subject and should give everyone something to think about.