The horrific murders of 22 innocent people last weekend was rooted in violence that is prevalent in the experiences of many women who come through Adsum House, says a news release from the Halifax emergency shelter for women and children.
“Our understanding is that if she was not the first victim, she was certainly early on,” Sheri Lecker, executive director of Adsum, said Sunday of the girlfriend of the gunman who perpetrated the carnage.
“The suggestion from what the RCMP have released so far is that it began with a disagreement with a longtime partner,” Lecker said.
“Unfortunately, yes,” she said of the shelter’s familiarity with women who are in abusive relationships.
The release from Adsum said the shelter shares in the collective grief, confusion and anger that people from across the province and the country are feeling.
“We again express our most sincere sympathies to the victims’ families, friends and communities,” Lecker said in the release. “Our thoughts are also with the survivors of this tragedy.”
Despite the use of words like random, senseless and unpredictable in media accounts about the deaths of 22 people, the release said the tragic sequence of events followed a familiar pattern.
“The RCMP confirmed what many suspected,” Lecker said in the release. “The murder of 22 innocent people was rooted in the violence that is, sadly, prevalent in the experiences of most of the women we have worked with over more than three decades.
“The hatred of women has been linked to our nation’s most horrific mass murders,” including the 1989 massacre of 14 women at Montreal’s l'Ecole Polytechnique, the murder of 10 women and two men in 2018 in the Toronto van attack and in the latest tragedy in Nova Scotia.
“We hear officials repeat phrases like ‘it is impossible to know what was going through the killer’s mind,’ and ‘the motive remains unclear,’ but we do know the patterns and the facts that emerge following these incidents,” Lecker said in the release.
“Domestic or intimate partner violence typically precedes mass tragedy, and further investigation of these perpetrators often reveals long histories of misogynistic behaviours and attitudes.”
The Adsum release said some will feel it is too soon to be connecting last weekend’s massacre to misogyny but it is an ongoing emergency that has to be addressed.
“Every 2.5 days, a Canadian woman or girl is murdered, most often by a man. Each week, on average, one woman is killed by her male partner. The hatred of women that leads to violence and eventual homicide is known as ‘femicide’ and must become part of our vocabulary, and we must ramp up our actions to bring an end to it.
“As isolated as large-scale tragedies such as this week’s may seem, there are societal and systemic conditions that lend themselves to this unspeakable violence.”
Lecker and her staff assure that they will continue their mission of supporting survivors and victims in the days, months and years to come, and renew their commitment of “working to combat the existing systems and biases that contribute to hatred of and violence against women and girls.”
