Every year on December 6, Canadians across the country honour the , a day dedicated to remembering the gender-motivated murder of 14 young women at Polytechnique Montréal in 1989. Unfortunately, gender-based violence still persists in our communities today, and it's a systemic issue that the national project is attempting to address. With a Canadian team of interdisciplinary experts, including nine from the 海角社区, Courage to Act is developing tools, resources and strategies to help institutions better address and prevent gender-based violence.
As the 海角社区's Director of Student Conduct & Accountability, Deb Eerkes, has been part of Courage to Act's Reporting, Investigations and Adjudication Working Group since 2019. Her work with Courage to Act is directly informed by, and a continuation of, her work on gender-based violence at the 海角社区.
What is Gender-Based Violence?
Gender-based violence refers to harmful acts directed at an individual based on their gender, and is often rooted in gender inequality, the abuse of power and harmful norms. Eerkes says that gender-based violence is sometimes used synonymously with sexual violence, but in reality the term is much broader than that and encompasses a broad range of harm based on gender, gender identity or gender expression. This includes anti-trans hate and intimate partner violence.
“Education and prevention often tries to address gender-based violence as an individual act or individual pattern of behaviour,” Eerkes says. “However, we can see over many decades that this behaviour hasn't stopped, because it permeates our culture." For example, popular culture often treats women as sexual objects, or makes sexual violence or gender identity the punchline, and reinforces harmful power structures. “While we try as institutions to deal with it as an individual problem and remove the individual, we see that it doesn't solve the problem–so it must be a systemic problem.”
Through an Intersectional Lens
Gender-based violence doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and neither can the tools used to combat it. “If we look at it as a part of all of the kinds of violence that are exerted, gender-based violence becomes a part of that picture," Eerkes says. "It is used as a weapon of power, just like racism, or colonialism.” Gender-based violence is also intersectional; while the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis is an example of how Indigenous women and girls are far more likely to be subjected to gen