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A noon on November 22, 2006, Womyn 4 Social Justice will hold a silent vigil remembering the 235 women and 35 children who have been murdered by their spouses, partners or boyfriends in the province of Ontario since 1995.
This will take place on Queen Street, Sault Ste. Marie in front of the Courthouse. Please wear black in solidarity. Please meet in front of the courthouse near the War Memorial Cenotaph to pick up a white t-shirt as part of this vigil. We are asking all participants to form a human chain of men, women and children on Queen Street and to hold a white T-shirt that will symbolically represent a woman or child who has been murdered in the past decade. To honour these victims of domestic violence, we will be holding their shirt for 15 minutes in a silent vigil to bring awareness and to seek to end woman abuse and domestic violence in Ontario and in our community. We are asking all community members and agencies that want to be part of the movement to end domestic violence in our communities to come out and support this public outcry to end the murders of innocent women and children in our homes and communities. The event is sponsored By Womyn 4 Social Justice (a group of community agencies, businesses and individual community members). For more information call: Lee, Phoenix Rising, at 759-5864 MORE ABOUT WOMYN 4 SOCIAL JUSTICEWomyn 4 Social Justice meets as needs to plan womyn's events such as Take Back the Night and Women Abuse Prevention Month. The committee decided this year that it had to be more vocal in order to bring more awareness to the prevalence of woman abuse in our community. One of the community awareness projects that we decided to pursue was to make a t-shirt to represent over 207 womyn and children who were murdered in the province of Ontario since 1995 and to display these t-shirts in the form of a human chain on Queen Street. We wanted to create a powerful visual statement and also to remember the individual womyn and children who were murdered. Womyn 4 Social Justice gathered for over four days to make these shirts. We read the hundreds of personalized stories about each womyn and child that was murdered using the information from OAITH (Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Homes) and we designed a T-shirt to end their silence. We agreed that each shirt would have a womyn's relationship (such as mother, or aunt), her age, and how she was murdered on it. As we started to create these shirts, we were overcome with sorrow, anger and angst. As we painted the words on these shirts, the horror and pain of these murders filled the room. We began to weep and cry for these lost lives. We were so aware that each shirt represented someone's life and that their lives had been wiped out by violence, power and hatred in what was supposed to be a loving relationship. We were also overcome by the fact that if we felt this traumatized by painting a shirt, what was life like for that womyn and child and what about her surviving children, family and friends and community. In fact, we were so distraught with this project, that we had to stop and it was another week before we could even attempt to finish the remaining shirts. Some womyn in our group even wanted to stop the project. We had to do a lot of talking and processing, but in the end we decided that as womyn, we have been silent about these murdered for far too long. So we picked up or brushes and paint and continued to tell their stories. Violence against womyn and girls continues to be a major human rights concern in all parts of the world including Sault Ste Marie. We also know that while Violence rhymes with silence, we could no longer be silent about the life and death consequences that face many womyn each day. We can no longer treat such violence as an aberration or simply the act of a few mad men out there. Violence is about abuse of power and we need to acknowledge this. Womyn who are abused need to be supported by society and governments with fair, access to justice, housing, childcare and money to feed and clothe their children. This is a endemic problem in Canadian Society and it involves all of us - those who live with it, those who work with it, and those who hear about it. We all have to come together and work collectively toward eliminating all forms of violence. We are silent no more as all womyn have the right to live in safe communities, free of violence, and the threat of violence.
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