Author of The Gaslight Effect Dr. Robin Stern says gaslighting happens in stages. These stages can overlap and repeat. The first stage, says Stern, is “disbelief.” Gregory is the typical abuser. He is likeable and his paternalistic attitude towards his new bride is not yet taken as the patriarchal bullshit that it really is, and is instead seen as charming. When he slaps her face and acts short, it is easy for Paula to shake off this behaviour as abnormal and out of character. She does not right away identify his abusive nature. While Gregory is a good abuser, Paula is his ideal victim. Paula was separated from her mother as a child and raised by her aunt, who was murdered. She is vulnerable and keen to find a nurturing figure that will stay in her life. Gregory takes advantage of her childhood and its consequent insecurities. Stage two is “defense.” Throughout the movie Gregory tells Paula how forgetful she is often enough that she believes it. He even convinces her that she is sick. Additionally he does things like hiding certain items and then telling her that she lost them. She later finds them and is understandably confused. “Suddenly,” she says, “I’m beginning not to trust my memory at all.”

When Paula begins to suspect Gregory, he tells her she is going crazy. This happens in a lot in cases of abuse. Instead of owning up to their wrongdoings, abusers flip the accountability onto their victim. “If you don’t want that guy to look at you, why did you smile back?”, “You’re just angry with me because you are overly sensitive.” Additionally, since abusers tend to be so likeable, others, such as friends and family, may also question the victim: “Are you sure he really acted like that? Maybe you are overreacting, it doesn’t sound like him.” Paula inevitably becomes depressed, which is stage three. Thankfully it’s a movie so a handsome inspector tells her, “You’re not going out of your mind. You’re slowly and systematically being driven out of your mind.”

We find out Gregory has been going up to the attic looking for Paula’s jewels, and whenever he did the gas lights would dim. Of course whenever Paula commented on this dimming Gregory tells her she is going crazy and the lights aren’t doing anything at all. In real life we don’t get white knights and family jewels. In real life we may not realize we are being abused, and this is very scary. However, what we can do is believe victims when we hear their stories and this faith may break the cycle they’ve been enduring.

Feature image by Hana Shafi

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her second year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

Illustration by Jori van der Linde

For a long time, no one understood why I hated my mother. After all, pop culture, Hallmark, and general wisdom tend to all agree that a daughter shares her deepest secrets with her mother. With her, I was supposed to feel safe, comforted, supported, and so deeply loved.

I can’t ever remember feeling that way about my mother.

I know it wasn’t always like that. From age four to 12, our family shuttled between cities, moving from Gaborone in Botswana, to New York City, then to Dallas all before settling in Toronto. It was me, my mother and father, and my two sisters. During that time, we often lived in crammed apartments, but mostly we were happy to be in each other’s company—at least it was nothing like the round-the-clock terror I would come to experience. I remember simple, joyful moments like watching chameleons change colour, playing skip rope, or singing at the top of my lungs to Celine Dion songs with my older sister, Asha, and younger sister, Tarana.

My family decided to settle in Canada in 1997 because our family’s visitor’s visa expired and we felt Canada had more relaxed restrictions. Once in Toronto, Ammu, my mother, developed a closeness to me, but spurned Asha. For reasons neither I or my sisters understood, Ammu invested in attacking and creating stories about Asha, who was 16, and her “relations with several men.” She used me to get information about Asha’s day-to-day activities. As a kid, I didn’t realize what was happening—at first. I gamely informed on my sister, telling my mother Asha visited with male friends after school, not realizing that what seemed normal to me was ammunition for my mother.

Asha figured it out before I did. She also realized something else, too. “Don’t you notice,” she asked me, “that every time you tell Ammu something, you’re suddenly not allowed to go out and play with all the other kids?” I did notice. I had also started to notice that she twisted my words and embellished what I told her. One time she told my father, who I call Papa, that Asha couldn’t visit her best friend, who lived on the eighth floor of our building, because “a lot of bachelors lived there”—a fabricated story presented as fact. Asha had been regularly visiting this friend, without issue, for years. My mother cut it off on a whim. Oftentimes, it felt like she was manipulating us because she enjoyed it—she was like Regina George from Mean Girls. We had no idea what would trigger her or when.

Once Ammu lost control of me as an informant, our home went on immediate lockdown. It was a confusing, depressing time. I couldn’t understand why my mother was out to get me and my sisters. Under orders, I’d come home straight after school to clean the house and do my homework. Unlike other kids I grew up with, I wasn’t allowed to linger after class, play outside, go to friends’ birthday parties, or attend sleepovers. I had no freedom.

I often overheard Ammu on the phone telling her relatives in Bangladesh that “I got stuck with these daughters that don’t do anything to help me.” I would cry to my friends at school, confessing my mom’s lies, manipulation, and suffocating control. Even then, I knew my peers found it all unbelievable—it was so far removed from their own lives—but I didn’t know what else to do. I felt heavily misunderstood, and by my early teens, I became angry.

At school, I earned a reputation as a rude girl. I wasn’t a bully, and I wasn’t popular, but I was aggressive. It was a ripple effect and the stone drop was my home life. My parents argued often and violently, my mom’s own anger spilling over. One time, as they fought, my uncle, who happened to be at the house that day, noticed me crying. Trying to resolve their fight, he brought me into the room, still crying, and said to them, “Look at what you’re doing to your daughter.” They were baffled and asked me: “Why are you crying?” As they dismissed me, I dismissed everyone around me.

I grew to hate myself. Both of my parents constantly told me that I was incapable of being smart. My hair was too curly. My butt was too big. My nose was too big. I was chubby. I saw myself as both ugly and invisible. Aside from the abuse, my parents ignored me. I hated them. As a Muslim family, my mother forced me to do my daily prayers—even as I grappled with my religious beliefs. I would sit on my mat and pray to this supposed God to get me the hell out of there. If he was real, I hated him too.

And yet, I wanted to love my parents. I yearned to figure out a way to control Ammu, so that I could turn her into a good mother, just as she yearned to control me.

Even though I wanted to leave my house, it seemed impossible. For Muslim Bengalis, it simply isn’t culturally acceptable. My parents, like some (but certainly not all) members of the Bangladeshi community, don’t believe in young, single, and unmarried girls living on their own—a belief that was drilled into me. By the time I’d turned 20, a young woman living independently was something I’d only seen on TV or in the movies. None of my friends had moved out and most couldn’t understand my urgent desire to leave. Mental abuse wasn’t on their radar, and my curiosity about leaving home was seen as a potentially dramatic decision. I didn’t take the leap because I believed that I couldn’t. The cultural mentality was too strong and my mom’s abuse was too scarring—a powerful mix.

It was also incredibly isolating. It felt like everybody believed I should tolerate the mental abuse and neglect. Many people suggested or outright advised that I forgive my mother regardless of the pain she continued to cause. I was told she was the only mother I had and that I was lucky to have one. I felt like I couldn’t go to anyone for help. I was a very angry bird trapped in a cage I thought I didn’t have the key to.

Then, in my early 20s, I finally got the break I needed. In 2010, Ammu and my younger sister, Tarana, moved to Bangladesh. She had been hanging around with the wrong crowd after school, smoking, and had tried to run away from home twice. Trapping her there was my parents’ solution. And selfishly, I was reaping the rewards of their departure. My mom was gone.

Without her there, I became unexpectedly close with my dad, a man I didn’t really know or understand. We shared our fears and traumas of my mother. Before then, she’d forced me to wear the hijab, despite my misgivings. While I didn’t feel connected to her Muslim faith, I recognized that wearing the hijab was a choice that symbolized a devotion to Islam. I felt like a liar donning something that represents something so meaningful. Now I finally could take it off., since I never wanted to wear it to begin with. I also dropped out of university to go to college instead. I grew into myself at a rapid pace, feeling at ease in my home situation for the first time since we arrived to Toronto.

It all disappeared the next year. My father received an offer to work in Nigeria and Asha decided to experience living and working in Bangladesh. The only person that wanted to stay was me. Tarana and Ammu were to return; I wasn’t allowed to stay home alone. My fall back into depression was sudden. Now that I knew I could have a better life, I didn’t want to go back to an abusive one—one that didn’t even feel like my life at all. I was withdrawn and quiet.

When Asha and my father came back the next year, my rebellion began full swing. I became committed to leaving my house—even if I didn’t see how I could. There was no one to guide me in the Bengali community. I didn’t know where to look for help and I felt trapped in my own anger. And I felt so alone. But I was determined to leave.

In November 2011, I hit my limit. I was in my room and Ammu was in the hallway, badgering me from a distance, recounting an old, favourite story of hers about a personal wrong. Exhausted, I finally stood up for myself and told her that she could keep talking but that I would not listen, not this time. My cell phone rang, then, and I reached to answer it. She realized I meant it. In a flash, she sprung at me, raging. Before I could even register what was happening, she was choking me. Asha heard, then came running in and grabbed her away from me and out of my room, locking the door behind her.

***

Later, when I told people I ran away from home, they wouldn’t really understand. “How could a 23-year-old run away from home? Don’t you mean you moved out?” I explain; sometimes they understand and sometimes they don’t. I realize that many of those who ask these questions don’t understand the cultural pressure I faced, or my parents’ mentality—both of which decree a woman living alone is unacceptable. They’re confused because, by the time I moved out, I had a well-paying job. I could move into an apartment and wasn’t forced into homelessness. To add to it all, my older sister came with me. From the outside looking in, my story didn’t seem traumatizing enough.

While my mother could be violent, she was predominately an emotional and mental abuser. This seems to be difficult for people to understand or even believe—something I find not only offensive, but appalling. In the years I’ve spent living alone and sharing my story, I’ve discovered that mental or verbal abuse by parents towards their blood-related children isn’t treated as seriously as spousal or partner abuse. As a society, we’re more concerned with possible parental physical and sexual abuse. It has to seem outrageous for us to acknowledge it hurts. Take, for instance, the ads that appeared in Toronto’s subway system earlier this year for Covenant House, a long-standing youth shelter in the city. One, in the style of a cross-stitch hanging, reads, “Home, shut up or I’ll knock your teeth out, home.” It’s powerful and important. But, I wonder, how do you convey the nuances of emotional abuse on a subway ad? Why does someone have to have scars or be raped or even dead for abused children and teens to receive care?

The general public sees severing ties with an abusive spouse or partner as an acceptable act. Yet, when I spoke to most people about my decision to sever ties with my abusive parents, the immediate response from friends, and even some mental health practitioners, was to forgive and rebuild with them. What most people failed to realize is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to rebuilding with abusers of any kind. They also failed to understand the psychological implications of re-establishing a relationship with abusive parents after having cut ties with them: how it can stall a healing process, while further instigating depression, rage, and a slew of other mental health issues.

I’m hoping this will change as more people speak out. I was heartened to see, for instance, that former Edmonton Oiler Patrick O’Sullivan addressed his father’s emotional cruelty and abuse in his new book Breaking Away: A Harrowing True Story of Resilience, Courage and Triumph. Even though his career as an professional hockey player brought him great success, he was always looking over his shoulder in fear after games. “There’s a lot of people that don’t even know it goes on, it’s a very private thing, ‘it’s not my business anyways.’ A lot of people don’t want to know because it puts them in a tough spot. They think they saw something, they’re not sure, they don’t want to know anymore. That’s got to change.” At 31 years old, he has trouble sitting still and sensory triggers can immediately implant a memory of his abusive father.

Over the years, I have met adult victims of parental abuse, and a lot of them share similar experiences to mine. Regardless of heritage, the feelings of loneliness and being misunderstood because of abusive parents, and particularly an abusive mother, are common. We victims have a deep understanding of one another, and I’ve shared more than one high-five with other survivors because we’ve made it to the other side, alive and mentally healthy.

I once asked Asha how many times she thought of calling the Children’s Aid Society in our youth. She admitted, “Many. The only reason I didn’t leave was because I knew I’d get separated from you guys, especially if we went through the foster care system.” She’d sacrificed her own mental wellbeing because she wanted to make sure that Tarana and I weren’t alone with my parents or split up in foster care or shelter systems. If she had called, though, we wouldn’t have been alone. In 2014–2015, the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto worked with more than 21,000 children who called because of physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence, caregiver capacity, and caregiver-child conflicts. The latter, which is what I experienced in my upbringing, is one of the things children are least likely to call in about, according to the CAS’s 2014–2015 annual report.

As a teen, the only time I ever seriously thought of leaving home was when staff from Covenant House did a presentation at my high school. The information stayed lodged at the back of my brain, but I soon learned how doubly traumatic it can be to live in a house of strangers who come from their own trauma. It scared me enough that I eliminated that option from my mind. If I were to be free, it would to be in safety, not another abusive environment. I wish it had been easier for me to find out more, solid information.

Public education around the solutions and processes of running away from home needs to be more prevalent, louder. Children of abuse grow up in a contradictory and confusing emotional world. Some children also normalize parental abuse until they are exposed to a different relationship dynamic—like when, one day on the subway, I saw a woman and her daughter share stories and giggle with one another for the first time. My mind was blown. I couldn’t even think of being that physically close with my mother. When kids don’t understand that what they are facing is not safe, someone has to be the voice that speaks out for them.

***

Asha decided to leave with me after the choking incident. Together, we moved to an apartment in the west end of Toronto. On an April morning, while my mom was away at work and my dad was living in Guyana for another international gig, my sister and I woke up at 7 a.m. sharp. Nervous, we called our movers to confirm they’d arrive on time. We’d also prepared emails that announced we were officially leaving home. They were crafted months in advance, and sent that evening to my dad and my younger sister.

For my mom, we had prepared a printed letter, sealed in an envelope. It took months to edit and keep concise, on the advice of our counsellor at Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic. We’d come to the clinic earlier for help: it had a counsellor dedicated to supporting women that run away from home. We were to hand the letter to Ammu and leave immediately after we gave her the news face-to-face. The letter said that she had pushed us to do this. It indicated that we would be safe and that we would not be in contact with our family for at least three months or until we were ready. It was a memento of closure for us, and a piece of evidence in case of an emergency. The paper trail was important, according to our counsellor, should the police need to be involved in the event that my parents escalated to violence.

We took out the empty boxes we had hid in our closets, taped them and stuffed them quickly. We didn’t have to be that urgent, but we were filled with anxiety. It felt like my mother could come home at any moment. We put our clothes in garbage bags, and the movers took our furniture as we watched our rooms empty in the quickest hour of my life. After leaving our things untouched in our new apartment, we headed back to my parents’ place to get my dad’s car. We picked up our mom from work and told her we were all going to our family friend’s apartment. She was giddy from the surprise.

As I parked in my family friend’s garage, my heart was beating loudly in my chest. I called a cab as soon as we arrived. In the 15 minutes it took for the cab to get there, I told Ammu that we were leaving. It didn’t even feel like I was in my body, but I somehow managed to tell her that when she returned home, we wouldn’t be there, and that our rooms would be empty. We began to gather our things and leave for the door as she grabbed us, begging us to explain more. We said nothing. I was so scared I thought the room was spinning. The family friend told her simply, “Let them go.” The door shut, and we heard her wailing.

As I jabbed the elevator button, I grew so nervous hoping she wouldn’t come out of the door trying to do something. We headed to the elevator and I felt numb. It was a defence mechanism I’d used ever since I was a child, exposed to my parents’ public fights. I remember thinking, “This is it, we’re all alone.” I felt like no one would support us, and I also felt sad that I was cutting ties. I didn’t want them as my parents, but I did want parents. I felt orphaned.

The cab ride back to our new place was silent. I hugged Asha tightly and we listened to a CBC Radio Show talking about abuse. I asked the driver to please change the channel. We met a few friends at a restaurant. We ate a warm meal, even though we didn’t feel hungry. Our phones rang all night, voicemail after voicemail. One was from the family friend asking us to move my dad’s car from their parking spot. Another was from my mother, demanding to know why we did this to her. A third was from my dad in Guyana demanding we go home right now or else he would kill us.

I laid on the bare mattress of the new apartment, scared and crying. I had never felt so alone in my life, and anyone I could call would not understand. I wish I knew at the time how empty their threats were.

I wish my friends understood how hard of a decision it was to cut the umbilical cord, instead of viewing my actions as selfish. I wish more people in my life at that time understood how painful it was to not be understood—or even to just be heard.

***

As I write this, it has been three months since my last visit to my parent’s house. While the process of separating from my parents has been full of up and downs, I am now experiencing adulthood and zero dependency on my parents, and it feels exciting and scary all at once. While I feel mentally, financially, and physically healthier and safe, I am sad that I feel I have to do it alone and without the support of my parents. While I feel stable, it’s still daunting to carve out a self-created stability, in all respects, all by myself.

In Christine Ann Lawson’s Understanding the Borderline Mother, there is a chapter called “Living Backwards.” It focuses on how adult children of parental abuse can move forward by first understanding their mothers and then recreating the self. In many ways, I feel as though I’m 17 years old and experiencing my life, not 27. Sometimes I get mad thinking, “Why did it take this long?” I can confidently (and sadly) say that there are more victims that I can possibly personally speak to who are still affected by their parents’ abuse. It is much rarer to connect with adult children who have moved past their lives as victims into a more stable existence, and that alone is scary.

Overall I feel so much healthier. But it took four years of therapy and seeking out my own education on meditation, self-growth, and self-love. I took initiative because I didn’t want to move through the world in my traumas as so many adults do. I feel proud of the courage I take everyday to do what is safe and healthy for me. For the first time in my life, I am my first and only priority. Unfortunately, there are a lot more people who don’t have this experience because of fear, confusion or the way the world around them misunderstands parental abuse. We must strive for clarity and understanding in a broader context to give a voice to children and youth living in mentally and verbally turbulent homes.

I can only hope that other survivors, like me, actively search for the key that will unlock the cage they are in so they can finally fly to their freedom.

Illustration by Hannah Wilson

WHILE MOST PEOPLE’S FACEBOOK messages brim with congratulatory notes on the day of their graduation, Samra Zafar’s inbox was overflowing with two words: “Thank you.”

On Monday June 10, 2013, Zafar, then 30 years old, had kept her phone off for the duration of her University of Toronto graduation, where she was awarded top student in economics. That same morning, an article came out about her personal decade-long battle with and triumph over marital abuse on the Express Tribune blogs page, a major daily English-language newspaper in Pakistan. Unbeknown to Zafar, by the time she walked off the stage, a Bachelor’s degree in hand, women across Pakistan and beyond had read her reluctant in-depth interview and messaged the woman who had somehow broken the shackles of marital abuse.

One message stood out. A young woman in Waterloo asked to talk to her on Skype. She wanted to take her daughter and leave her abusive husband, but she was scared. “This was me five years ago,” says Zafar.

Back then, Zafar was on the brink of deciding whether or not to get a divorce from her husband, who was 12 years her senior. They had married in Abu Dhabi when she was 16 years old. Zafar’s workingclass parents had accepted his Canadian-based family’s marriage proposal so that their eldest daughter had the opportunity to pursue her dreams of higher education at a good university—something assured and supported by his family.

Instead, Zafar’s ticket to a successful education trapped her in decade-long nightmare with a husband who severely controlled and limited her life. She was not permitted to leave the house, had no cell phone, and only minimal contact with her parents—visiting them only when her father personally sent her and her daughter plane tickets. “I feel like I was in a prison for 10 years,” she says.

She had initially excelled at distance-learning education and when she turned 18 was accepted into the University of Toronto. By this time, she was also a mother. Her husband refused to pay her fees, and his financial status made her ineligible for government loans. She didn’t go.

Five years later, she was pregnant with her second daughter when her father died. After his funeral, she reluctantly returned to Canada. Her husband had begged and assured her that it would be different this time. The thought of leaving a relationship that was all she knew was “like jumping off a cliff and hoping there is a surface to land on,” says Zafar. Still, her father’s parting words to “take the fear out” became her driving force. “He always dreamed of seeing me at the top of a world-ranking university,” says Zafar.

In 2008, she applied to university again, and this time used money from her at-home babysitting job to help pay for tuition. “Going to school opened my eyes,” says Zafar, speaking of her time there. “I was being respected at school and that made me re-think my situation and question the way I was being treated at home.” Campus posters at the health and counselling centre prompted her to seek help. She would sometimes skip class just to hear counselling services tell her “it’s not your fault.” Yet, leaving her marriage was neither an easy path, nor a linear one. Her husband’s abuse increased proportional to her steps towards self-sufficiency—so much so that she stalled and dropped out of school, her self-confidence broken. “I used to ask him, ‘Why do you do this?’” says Zafar, “each time he said ‘because you deserve it’ and I used to believe him.”

But she kept focusing on taking the fear out and that, coupled with her older daughters’ insistence that “we will only be happy if you’re happy,” cemented her decision to leave. In 2011, Zafar separated from her husband and gave the police a detailed record of the abuse she faced. From there, without his income, she successfully reapplied to the University of Toronto and this time was granted financial assistance. Her husband was arrested on four counts of assault while Zafar excelled as a mature student, earning over a dozen awards for academic excellence, and getting admission into the Ph.D. program in Economics at U of T with a full scholarship. This was all accomplished while doing four part-time jobs. “The awards that I won reinforced my belief in myself,” she says, “and made me respect myself as a person and as a woman.”

Fast-forward to 2013, during Zafar’s meeting with the woman who contacted her from Waterloo. “I could complete her sentences,” says Zafar. For the first time in her life, Zafar felt hope and a complete sense of empowerment. “I felt like everything I had been through had a purpose, a meaning—to help other women realize their self-worth, break the cycle of abuse and pursue their dreams and potential,” she says. She helped the young woman to examine her options, to walk away from her marriage and to re-establish herself. She told her, “I’ll hold your hand anywhere you want to go.”

This instant connection formed the foundation of Brave Beginnings, Zafar’s non-for-profit mentorship program, to be launched this year. “What helps the most is talking to another woman who understands and can really help,” says Zafar, “I didn’t have that.” Brave Beginnings aims to bridge the gap between resources and the woman, to complement already established counselling services, and to take women out of what Zafar calls “their mental prison.” Once women reach out, they’re matched with a mentor in their area who will provide guidance, human support, and friendship. “We’re regular women who are passionate about empowering other women,” says Zafar. The question she wants us to ask is: How can we help her help herself?

“There’s not a one-size fits all approach,” says Zafar about the need for something like Brave Beginnings. “My dream is that every woman has the freedom to be who she wants be without any fear, without any judgement, and without any ridicule.”

While writing my reading piece “She Asked For It” I was thinking about all the bystanders who watch their friends/sisters/peers get physically and verbally abused by their partner, or the adults who don’t stand up for abused children. I was thinking, too, about the public backlash women receive when coming forward about abuse, especially publicly like in the cases of Jian Gomeshi and Bill Cosby. There is this strange obsession to defend the most popular and charming, and this terrifies me. Almost as much as public speaking.

Here is the written piece read that evening:

She Asked For It

It seems so obvious to the outsider, get hurt, you go.

And that’s what makes them outsiders: the dichotomy of you and them.

So when that person makes those fists – just like dad used to make – and they tell you it isn’t just you and them, it is the two of you against the world, that’s all you got.

White trash can’t get hurt.

As Other, they can not feel.

The beatings and mockery vye for what hurts most, but don’t dare take first place from isolation.

Teachers ignore signs of quiet and retraction amongst bouncy, vibrant peers.

The church keeps secrets hushed behind decorated doors.

The police don’t write up, they write off.

Nurses say, “We don’t use the word rape here.”

A distance is created.

Friends don’t want to believe it.

She asked for it.

They watch and do nothing.

Drinking buddies before hoes dominates so-called progressive punk rock mantras.

Left alone, seeing your valueless and disposability, even you can’t stand being by yourself.

Prosecutions doled by class bracket dictations.

So, you have this guy – who makes fists just like dad used to make – who makes it both of you against the world that doesn’t want you.

You latch.

It’s all you got.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her first year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

The culprit: common hand sanitizers, which have been saturating not only our hands, but also store shelves and public places in the wake of H1N1 paranoia.

Apparently, this widely available alternative to traditional hand washing has another useful function. According to this article published yesterday in The Gazette by the Winnipeg Free Press, an increasing number of addicts are ingesting the extremely high alcoholic content of the product in order to become intoxicated.

Experts say people add salt to the hand sanitizer, which separates pure alcohol from the product with potentially dangerous results.

At one of Winnipeg’s main shelters, workers have confiscated sanitizer bottles and stopped leaving salt out on tables; people have to ask to use it.

Under the province’s Liquor Control Act, an individual found guilty of selling a non-potable intoxicating substance as a beverage can receive a fine of $2,000 to $20,000 or up to six months in jail.

Furthermore, there has been growing concern among the public about the dangers and effectiveness of the popularized product for its intended purpose. This news report, featuring Dr. William Jarvis from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) attempts to alert the everyday addicts; germophobes who dose their hands in the product as often as a chain-smoker takes a drag. Some scientists and healthcare professionals caution that an overuse of hand sanitizer could lead to an immunity to the product, which weakens the body’s ability to combat bacterial infections making people more susceptible to illnesses.

While many of the purported dangers are still speculation, at least one thing’s for sure. The increasing number of sanitizer skeptics, coupled with these two types of potentially harmful additions to the the product leaves the future of “convenient” cleanliness in doubt.

No one has conducted an official poll on the matter, but I’m fairly confident that the first reaction of most sound-minded Canadians to this news is one of disgust, perhaps even outrage, at the existence of such blatant state-sanctioned gender injustice—especially in such relative proximity to our own progressively thinking northern hub. And, while this may be a stretch, I’ll bet the next response is a smug “only in America,” twinge of moral superiority. This is Canada, after all, hotbed of progressive politics and European socialism lite; there’s a reason why U.S. travelers abroad pretend to belong to our half of North America.

Unfortunately, the truth is less than cut-and-dry. Sure, we don’t charge rape victims for their disclosure, but when it comes to the nationwide epidemic of sexual violence against Native girls and women, we are willing to turn a cold shoulder. Which is worse?

According to studies conducted by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada in both 1996 and 2001, Native women with Status are five times more likely to die as a result of violence than any other Canadian woman. In addition, 75% of Native girls under the age of 18 have been sexually abused. Yet, the ongoing scourge of violence against Canadian women of Native descent remains a virtually silent struggle.

Despite the disproportionate incidence of violence against Native women in Canada, “[cases are] grossly underrepresented in our mainstream media,” says Robyn Bourgeois, a PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education who teaches a course on Gender and Violence at the University of Toronto.

Bourgeois cites the highly publicized disappearance and murder of Victoria “Tori” Stafford as a current example of the preferential treatment of non-Native violence by mainstream media outlets. Bourgeois explains that on the same day that Tori disappeared, Regina police renewed their efforts to locate Tara Lyn Poorman, a Native girl who had already been missing for four months. “In this case, neither the original disappearance, nor the renewed search efforts, garnered [much] media attention,” says Bourgeois.

Bourgeois points out that while dominant cases such as that of Vancouver’s missing women do bring such brutalities into the mainstream, coverage is skewed. In that particular case, the emphasis was placed on the women’s involvement with addictions and prostitution rather than their Aboriginality, failing to make connections to the larger national scope of violence against Native women. In less lurid cases such as that of Tara Lyn Poorman, a straight-A student and regular volunteer at a Regina drop-in centre, coverage is either grossly limited or entirely non-existent.

This poses the question: what exactly does violence against Native Canadian women have to do with Texas rape kits?

The act of charging the victims of rape—who are primarily women—to pay for their own rape kits implies that these individuals are somehow responsible for—and therefore deserving of—the violence perpetrated against them. Similarly, in opting to dismiss the epidemic of violence against Native women, we are quietly enabling the process. We say, through our silence, that these women deserve to be abducted and abused because they are implicitly less-than.

With regard to the Lone Star State’s rape kit record,  someone seriously ought to mess with Texas. But, we shouldn’t be let off the hook so easily either.