CULTURE-CANADA: Women Unite Against Terror Close to Home

By Marty Logan Reprint | | Print |

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Nov 5 2001 (IPS) - Women representing this city’s sizeable ethnic communities are banding together to fight a common enemy. Their joint efforts stand in contrast to the communal suspicion sown by the Sep. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States and attest to the power of a terror closer to home: family violence.

Earlier this month, a coalition of groups launched a directory of services as a tool for doctors, nurses, police officers and others who work daily with individuals from the more than 80 ethnic groups living in greater Montreal, Canada’s second-largest city.

Women in the coalition represent Russian, Yiddish, Greek, Arab, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and Creole-speaking communities.

Their directory is the second step of a three-part project to assist residents who speak neither French, Montreal’s main language, nor English to deal with family violence. The first move was to publish brochures in seven languages for victims of violence.

“It’s not that there’s less or more (violence) within these communities, but that the issue is relatively unknown,” says Melpa Kamateros, a member of the ethno-cultural communities working group of the Table de Concertation on Conjugal Violence of the Montreal Urban Community, a body formed in 1986 to bring together organisations working on family violence.

Printing brochures in the communities’ languages was one way of taking the issue to the residents, says Kamateros. Another tactic was to write in each group’s “cultural language”. For example, the brochure for the Jewish community included quotations from the Torah and one destined for groups that practise Christianity had Biblical references.

“You cannot use the same approach with ethno-cultural communities as you do with someone from a group that has been in Canada or Quebec for generations,” says Marie-Helene Blanc, projects coordinator at the Table de Concertation. “You have to take into account the cultural particulars.”

Those particulars continue to multiply as Montreal welcomes about 25,000 new immigrants yearly. In 1996, 26 percent of city centre residents identified themselves as immigrants, according to the official Statistics Canada.

Blanc says there are few figures on family violence among ethnic groups. According to the provincial Quebec government, incidents reported by the general population increased 19 percent from 1997 to 2000. Countrywide, family violence cost the economy some 2.6 billion dollars in 1994 – in police, medical, judicial and social services; work hours lost; and temporary housing. In 1996, seven percent of residents reported having been victims of family violence at some time in the previous five years, adds Statistics Canada.

“Members of ethno-cultural communities won’t necessarily go looking for help,” says Blanc. “Language can be a handicap, but it’s not the only one; culture is another,” she adds. “For example, there could be a community where, if the woman makes a report, the husband would be accused and have a criminal record, and that’s not acceptable (to them).”

Adds Kamateros: “We’re not saying that violence is relative, but that the way we deal with it is always different for each community.”

Like their kin across Canada, Montreal’s Arabs and Muslims have been victims of a backlash since Sep. 11.

Leaders of the city’s 100,000-strong Arab community, one of Canada’s largest, say many people have suffered slurs and other minor abuse but only a couple of serious incidents have been reported.

Just hours after the attacks, a small bomb was thrown at an unused mosque and on Sep. 14 a man in an elevator reportedly tried to choke a Muslim doctor with her headscarf.

Nevertheless, the community felt secure enough to continue planning its second Festival of the Arab World, albeit with increased security. The event attracted 20,000 people last year.

Even before the attacks in the United States, Montreal had developed a reputation as Canada’s terrorism centre. According to the Globe and Mail newspaper, 104 of 186 Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers investigating suspected terrorists in Canada are based in the city.

In 1999, a former Montreal resident, Ahmed Ressam, was caught trying to cross into the United States with explosives he planned to use to bomb Los Angeles airport.

Earlier this month, Abdellah Ouzghar, a Moroccan-born Canadian citizen and another former Montrealer, was arrested in the neighbouring province of Ontario. Last spring, he was convicted in absentia by a Paris court of supplying bogus passports to Islamist terrorists and sentenced to five years in prison.

But the attacks and the backlash have not affected the work of the ethno-cultural working committee, says Diane Sasson, coordinator of the Table de Concertation.

“We’re Jews, Arabs, Italians, Greeks,” Sasson says. “We’re really a mixed group and I haven’t heard of any repercussions.”

In fact, she adds, the women now regularly consult one another for help in working with families from different communities.

“As a side-product, we’ve developed a collaboration and a network,” says Sasson, also director of l’Auberge Shalom, a Jewish shelter for women and children. “We rely on each others as colleagues and we’ve expanded our resources.

“There’s been a respect of each other’s community. There’s definitely a better understanding of each community,” she says.