Thirty years ago on December 7, 1989, I participated in a group of women and men in Grey Bruce learning how to work with men who were abusive to women. It was our last training day. That morning we heard on the radio, a man had killed 14 women at Ecolé Politechnique in Montreal. We were speechless, in shock and struggled to make sense of this horrific event. We learned from the reports that the killer separated the women from the men, sent the men out of the classroom and then shot the women. Our training group started to talk and questioned how this horrific event related to our work with men to end violence against women.

We had heated discussions that revealed divisions and differences and confusion within our training group. Some said it obviously must have been the isolated act of a “crazy” man with severe mental health issues. Others insisted we needed to understand this horrific individual act in the larger context of violence against women – that it was an act of gender based violence, based on beliefs of male privilege, misogyny, and male entitlement. I remember how painfully the discussion and conflicting beliefs were for our group. We were faced with core disagreements in what we believed and knew, and the impact of these differences on working with men to address violence against women in our communities. We argued over some central questions: Do we need to merely focus on one individual, one “case” at a time? Is it helpful to explain men’s violent acts on women as results of their mental health issues or substance abuse? How do we understand an individual’s act within the broader society, which is based on patriarchy and gender inequality?

Thirty years later we know the killer of the 14 women was motivated by hate against women studying to be engineers because he believed women take away men’s jobs. He and his mother were abused by his father. His mother had no support or help, and neither did he dealing with the impact of profound abuse. He blamed women for his pain, not his abusive father, or the broader society for failing him.

For the past 30 years I have worked with men and women at the Men’s Program, hearing countless stories of violence and seeing many examples of change. I’ve witnessed ongoing violence against women in the community and in my personal life, and how we make slow progress towards a different future. There are many painful and many hopeful stories.

I will never forget the impact of the Montreal massacre on myself and the Men’s Program in its early stages and to this day. We were challenged to define the scope of our work – to connect the dots between gender inequality and gender roles and seemingly innocent sexist jokes, put downs of women, emotional, physical and sexual violence, and the extreme of men killing women. We now know we cannot ignore the larger societal forces that contribute to violence against women.. We have come a long way since 1989. We have more honest conversations, about women’s equality, we have started listening to them and we have more resources and supports for women, children and men. We recognize that Violence against Women is everybody’s business. It has become a community conversation that changes the way we think and act.

Joachim Ostertag
Owen Sound