You can tell a lot about a
society by the way in which it treats its women and children. The
difficulty today is that it's really impossible today to assess
accurately how a society does
treat women and children. The media obsess over the crime blotter to an
unseemly degree, giving us a distorted and dismaying view of a world
seemlingly wracked in violence and death. But meanwhile contemporary
society's willingness to hide its dirty little secrets under the guise
of 'the right to privacy' conceals a flood of domestic violence behind
closed doors. We know almost intuitively that if we could really see
how many women and children are routinely physically, sexually and
psychologically abused, as many as one in five in every neighbourhood,
rich and poor, we would be aghast and outraged.
Hollywood chimes in with programming that is relentlessly violent,
brutal, savage. We are desensitized by this barrage to the point we
start to believe that every society, every human culture in history,
was and is soaked in blood, anger, depravity,deceit, and incessant
cruelty. For the last couple of years I have watched almost none of
this diaspora of despair, finding it has no value. I have never
particularly received pleasure from visceral stimulation -- horror
films, roller coasters, WWF and the rest of the torrent of
knee-jerk-revulsion- then- pat-redemption on which the 'entertainment
industry' is now almost wholly based. There seems no limit to the
degree to which so many will subject themselves to images of crass and
manipulative second-hand brutality for the rush of phony relief its end
brings. It seems to me addictive -- each depicted atrocity must outdo
the last to give the same rush down, and the same bounce back up when
normalcy returns at the end of the entertainment. It's been going on
since Charles Dickens and Somerset Maugham, two writers I have always
loathed.
Do these media distortions -- the overstatement of brutality in the
news and in our 'entertainments', and the understatement of brutality
in the 90% of the world we never get to see -- Darfur, our own prisons
and those in Iraq and Guantanamo, factory farms, the closed doors of
each neighbourhood's wife-beaters and child-abusers, the systematic
psychological rape of the poor and the weak by the rich and powerful in
every workplace and community -- offset, and give us 'on balance' a
fair picture of how we treat each other, the degree of humanity and
inhumanity in our world?
Yesterday I turned off an award-winning and critically-acclaimed film
called Cold Mountain in disgust -- it absolutely wallows, with
thinly-disguised glee, in the unmitigated horror of Civil War
Appalachia, as if this somehow makes the horrors of today, everywhere
else, more reasonable, manageable, an improvement, all right, something
by contrast to feel good about. Instead I turned on the radio, in time
to catch the 'local' (Toronto) news. I normally don't pay much
attention to the news because it's all context-free and unactionable
(more to say about this next week). But I was struck by the first three
news items, which were all Toronto-area domestic violence stories: A
man had been arrested in connection with the murder of his
ex-girlfriend. He had been under a restraining order not to contact
her, and his arrest was for violating that order on the day of her
death, not 'at this time' for the murder itself. The second story was
about a woman who had been arrested for the murder of her second baby,
aged 7 weeks. Her first baby had died at 5 weeks under 'suspicious
circumstances' but there was 'insufficient evidence' for arrest in that
incident. The third story was a new suspected murder-suicide -- a man
had killed his wife and two children and then killed himself.
What are we to make of all this? Hollywood would have us believe that
the world is, was, and always will be soaked, drowning in violence, but
that today and here, where the movie theatres and Blockbuster outlets
are, we are in relative oceans of tranquility, and we can be smug. The
news media would have us believe that while most violence is domestic
or gang-related, such violence is routinely sniffed out and prosecuted,
and that, with continued police vigilance, we can be relatively safe
and secure. More learned helplessness.
I live in a small community of 33 homes, with a total of 32 couples,
six other adults, 46 children and 36 pets living in them. Of that 116
people, it is statistically likely that five women, one senior, eight
children and seven pets are abused, physically, sexually and/or
psychologically, or severely neglected. It is also likely that no one
will ever be charged for these crimes, and that their victims will
never even confide their suffering to others, let alone receive
counseling, amateur or professional, and that they will spend most or
all of their lives suffering silently and desperately from these
abuses. And adjacent to our community are a block of farms and a
slaughterhouse where other unseen, unreported, uncorrected atrocities
are undoubtedly occurring. Of course I don't know this for a fact.
In the absence of information, even in our very open and close-knit
community, it is easy to shrug off the statistics and say that 'our
share' of abuse and suffering must be happening elsewhere. It's someone
else's problem.
So, aside from an annual donation to women's shelters, youth counseling
services, and private animal shelters (the public pounds are mostly
complicit in Canada's shame),
I do nothing. I completely discount the Hollywood whitewash ("violence
is happening, but, thanks to our virtue, not right here and now"). I
heavily discount the news, which reports only the no-longer-actionable
arrests and prosecutions, and none of the evidence of the epidemic of
unreported, unresolved violence and abuse that is, or at least might
be, actionable.
I turn off the entertainment media and the 'news' media which provide
only distortions and useless information, and pay attention instead to
the hard-to-find and under-reported, 'un-newsworthy' analyses of the
extent of systemic abuse, violence, and cruelty in our society, which
we could do something about
if the entertainment and news media hadn't so sapped our will, diverted
and distracted us by the unactionable.
Abuse of women and children is unacceptable, period.
That abuse perpetuates itself and its perpetrators thrive in an
environment where their crimes can be so easily concealed, denied,
swept under the map. Every year 4,500,000 children die
of diseases that are readily and inexpensively preventable or curable
with today's technologies. That's the same as the number of people who died in the recent
tsunamis, every twelve days. Tens of millions more suffer silently,
surviving this year to become the victims of next year or the year
after. But we do nothing for these 4,500,000 each year because they are not newsworthy.
Just as the women and children in every community -- even yours -- who
struggle every moment of their lives, not only as victims of abuse and
cruelty, but as victims of poverty and disease and lack of education
and other crimes perpetuated by the state, by all of us, are not
newsworthy.
If you can tell a lot about a society by the way it treats its women and children, what does this say about us?
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
