The question of feminicides and armed violence in several neighborhoods of Montreal has surfaced as the province remembers the fatal attack on Polytechnique students, 32 years after the fateful day of December 6, 1989.
“It’s an event that ended the lives of 14 women, it’s not just a number. There were 18 feminicides this year, that’s not just a number, ”said Mélanie Ederer, president of the Fédération des femmes du Québec (FFQ) in an online speech for the annual 12-day campaign. action against violence against women.
The women killed are “individuals who have dreams, tastes, things they like and dislike, who have families, qualities, flaws, and who were murdered because they were women. , in a society which still today considers that we can do gender-based violence, ”she argued, as part of the National Day of Remembrance and Action against Violence Against Women .
In the same virtual roundtable, Julie Tran, anti-racist feminist activist and lecturer at the University of Montreal, noted that gender-based violence affects neighborhoods like Montreal-Nord, Saint-Michel, Rivière-des-Prairies, and others. peripheral neighborhoods.
“Gender-based violence results in a lack of services for cases of domestic violence and sexual violence, and therefore victims have to leave their neighborhood to seek support services. Once in these services, they are exposed to racist, homophobic and transphobic prejudices. ”
A “hypersexualization” of the bodies of black, indigenous and racialized women is common, she noted. “Our bodies are seen as permissive, and we are seen as either aggressive or passive people,” she said.
Innu writer and poet Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, originally from the Pessamit reserve on the North Shore, for her part testified to the fact that the reality of murdered Indigenous women has always been part of her conscience.
“Being an aboriginal woman myself, every day I run ten times more risk of disappearing or of being murdered here in Quebec. ”
First Nations women must “deploy a force day after day to overcome the consequences of colonial history on our lives and on our bodies,” she said.