It is incredibly bizarre for a native Torontonian to read the city's news from afar.
Growing up in central Scarborough, I'd been immured to Toronto's omnipresent violence, learning early on to look behind me when I walked at night, swinging my umbrella like a weapon and forking over countless $20 bills for taxis to quench that nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach that now was not a time to travel alone. I wasn't allowed to walk to the corner store by myself until I was ten, and in high school, my curfew was a midnight pickup at the Kennedy Station kiss-and-ride to save me the fifteen minute bus ride and ten minute walk home through deserted parking lots and ill-lit streets.
It wasn't paranoia - just common sense. When the media presents your hometown as a riotous place of people doing dreadful things to each other, you just don't tempt fate. In your desperation to keep yourself safe, you engage in a blame-the-victim mentality to offer yourself the illusion of control: "She shouldn't have been walking there alone at night. I don't walk alone at night, therefore I am perfectly safe." "I don't let my children out of my sight. Therefore my children are perfectly safe."
And feeling like you can guard against the bad things is comforting. Blaming the victim is comforting, because it means that violence isn't random or systemic, and that you have some sort of control over your undiscovered future. It usually means that you don't have to do anything - you don't have to shift paradigms, or consider your own privilege, or speak out or draw attention to yourself. In fact, blaming the victim often means not doing things out of your own perverted self-interest - not walking alone, not using an mp3 player, not living in St. Jamestown. When visibility becomes criminal, you're willing to modify your behaviour to a grave extent just to avoid being conspicuous, as if the sale of your personal liberty is able to buy you "perfect safety".
But deep down, you know that you are not perfectly safe. Nobody is, in no town in any place in the world. Anything terrible could happen to you at any time, and you might as well accept it. You need a healthy dose of nihilism to keep you grounded, lest you succumb completely to fear.
Toronto's violence was, and remains, simply a part of life in a city of that many people, and while inevitable, a common response to it is for everyone to look out for themselves and their own above all else, blaming the victim whenever necessary to avoid facing larger problems.
So I can't really blame the parents of the fifteen black male students charged this week with repeatedly raping one of their white female fellows for their descrying of the arrests as an act of systemic racism. I know that from their perspective, they're just looking out for their own, trying to keep their children perfectly safe from the dangers of our ambivalent city life:
One mother, speaking loudly outside the court in explosive, staccato
rhythms, as other family members gathered and nodded their heads in
agreement, said the police and justice system are racist, and that
they're responsible for criminalizing black youth.
"This is wickedness, wickedness," she said. Her son was only
permitted to phone her yesterday at 2 a.m., she said, after being held
by police for more than 14 hours. Her daughter, who was at her side,
asked how her brother would be able to go back to his community group,
where he had been working on a project to build trust between police
officers and youth in the Jane-Finch area. She said this arrest would
mark him for life, leave him distrustful of authority, force him out of
his school and endanger his future.
"What they've been doing to us is injustice," another parent said.
"We need to get together as a black community, because these are our
kids, and it is unjust."
But I also know that there's an even bigger picture to hold in view, one that should include consideration of the seriousness of the charges:
Police say the young woman, a Grade 11 student, was approached in a
school hallway last month by a male student and forced into a
stairwell, where she was sexually assaulted. She was allegedly then
taken to a bathroom on another floor and assaulted again.
A month earlier, police said, the girl walked into a bathroom at a
fast food restaurant and was followed by a 15-year-old boy. The boy is
alleged to have locked the door behind them and demanded that the young
woman perform a sex act, but a restaurant employee intervened, allowing
the girl to escape.
The girl was also allegedly harassed for months as boys, many of
them popular students, approached her in school and demanded sexual
favours.
All the accused in this case are high-school students aged 14-18,
and some of the allegations of harassment date back to September, 2004.
Four boys, one of whom was granted bail last week, have been charged
with sexual assault and forcible confinement, and 10 others with
criminal harassment. Two girls are charged with uttering threats.
In light of the horrific nature of the accusations - a protracted series of coordinated sexual assaults on a single victim - complaining about the metro police's failed attempts at community-building seems terribly callous. No-one seems to be at all concerned that that some of the accused engaged in repeated sexual acts with the victim, and they appear to be preparing a coordinated "she asked for it, but not from me" defense:
One student shook his head and mouthed the words, "All lies," as he
sat listening to the Crown's arguments at the bail hearing, which are
subject to a publication ban. When he was released, the same student,
asked whether the allegations are indeed all lies, replied: "It is.
Most of them."
He denied even knowing the alleged victim, as did three other boys who spoke briefly to the media after being released.
"I don't know her at all. I just got accused of doing something I never did," one said.
"I'm innocent, and so is every single one of us," another said. "I never talked to her in my life."
Later, a fellow student opines that there were several other girls at the school who allegedly performed such acts willingly.
"I was there one time. She was not forced," he said.
The only thing that seems clear is that something is terribly, terribly wrong at James Cardinal McGuigan High School, where students are more offended at the presence of police walking their hallways than they are about the possibility of rapists in their classrooms:
Sixteen-year-old Moe Raza, who is friends with most of the 14 people
arrested during Monday's police raid, said many of his classmates were
angry at the way the arrests were handled.
"Everybody knows it's not fair what's going on. They just came into our school and slapped cuffs on all these people," he said.
"People drove by thinking it was a shooting or something."
As I sit apart from Toronto, reading the newspapers, part of the bigger picture I see is the collision of -isms that manages to thwart any attempt to make the city a safer and better place for everyone. The modern liberal impetus to recognize the inequalities of the world we've made in terms of the hot trio of race, gender and class is being torn apart, as infighting over who has it worse is becoming more important than how to fix the problems of the system.
The Globe and Mail, splitting the difference, fronts its article in terms of race, downplaying any hint of gender until late in the story. The headline reads: "Abuse stirs racial tension", and the initial paragraphs read like an account of the efforts of Atticus Finch defending the spurious accusations against Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird. In that famed book too, the black man's defense was "she asked for it", and it is the supposed victim's lechery that leads to his tragic death. Subsumed into the narrative of racism at work "in a sleepy and tired town," the simple message is that women lie about rape and cannot be trusted, and that the white poor are incestuous criminals.
This book, a standard text in the teaching of tenth grade English, the age of the accused and the victim, tells us that issues of race, class and gender cannot be simultaneously examined, but must always be diametrically opposed.
And so too, does The Globe and Mail, where it is only at the end of the article that the issue of gender is brought up by a single student:
But a female Grade 11 student jumped in to the conversation and disagreed.
"How can you say she's a liar? Yeah, I feel bad for those guys
getting arrested at school. [But] no one knows what she's feeling right
now, so you can't say anything," she said.
"If you do it 100 times, it's okay 100 times. When the 101st time
she says no, you have to stop. It's rape. It's not consensual the 101st
time."
It's this kind of opposition that suggests that you can only fight one battle at a time - that if you are committed to gender equality you do so at the expense of fighting racism, as if there is only so much justice in the world to go around, and progress must occur unilaterally if it's to be considered progress at all. As if your commitment to equity is common property to be distributed at the whim of an objective judge of who needs help most, as if "women have no right to complain about sexism, because racism still exists," or "women are discriminated universally, and therefore women's rights surpass all others in the consideration of injustice."
This myth, widely perpetuated in the media, is simply another justification for inaction, telling us that it is okay to do nothing because we cannot do everything. In endorsing this myth, we waste energy on trying to determine which group needs our contributions, our words, and our voices the most instead of just jumping right in. This false zero-sum game of playing oppressed groups off each other is getting old, and I'm amazed that we still fall for it every time.
There is no dichotomy in this sad case. The players aren't racism verses sexism verses classism, but complex individuals each stereotyped by the values society places on those markers of distinction.
So I'll be watching this Toronto case from my Maritime perch afar, rejecting the specious arguments that racism is enough to make a woman cry rape, or that the North Toronto community always plays the race card, or that modern high school girls are whores who like to serve their male counterparts.
I know that the picture is actually much, much bigger. Provided, of course, that ones willing to step back far enough to actually see it.
