I remember September and October 2000 when female students at York University were terrorized and traumatized by a man who robbed and sexually assaulted at least seven young women near the campus. Gender violence is not a feminist issue or a radicalist issue. Violence, whether physical or mental, it intrudes into our fabric of being. Those who speak out are neither. Female violence is not an issue of feminism, but a problem of society as a whole.
Gender violence makes women targets of violence simply for being women, nothing else.
Badih, who worked in a Montreal women's shelter at the time of the massacre, also spoke at the UTM memorial. 8270 of these occurred in Ontario. The demand for help exists. The resources, however, do not. Halton Women's Place, in Burlington, an emergency shelter for physically, emotionally, financially and sexually abused women and their children, has felt stretched in resources.