Saturday triggered the bejeezus out of me.
And I'm not using the term "triggered" in the modern new-agey snowflakey buttercuppy kind of sense – as someone who has spent the last several decades learning to live with her complex post-traumatic stress injuries, I am fully aware of the difference between being psychologically triggered and merely a little annoyed, thank you very much.
It started when I saw the (sadly, unsurprising) news that last week's massacre in Nova Scotia had started as domestic violence. Which the media twisted into being a rampage that had been sparked by "a domestic dispute".
HEY, MEDIA:
A domestic dispute is arguing over which way the toilet paper roll gets hung,
or how best to allocate the family budget.
It does NOT include one of the parties having to run away from said domicile
to hide in the woods until 7am.
The latter is ASSAULT, or DOMESTIC VIOLENCE (although the addition of "domestic" has always bothered me, as it often seems to be used to make the violence seem not as bad as if some stranger hauled off and punched you in the street).
Then, I was masochistic enough to read some of the comments (I know, I know...), which included such gems as accusing the woman who had to hide in the woods until 7am of being a part of the murderer's plot, or at least somehow responsible for it; another who was happy that the December 6 massacre was no longer Canada's worst (so we wouldn't have to hear from all those yammering feminists again); not to mention all these armchair pundits coming out of the woodwork to declare this to have been a random, unpredictable "snap" by someone with obvious mental health issues.
Sigh...
Okay, I'm going to go into further detail in a sec, but if you want to just skip to the punch line(s), here we go:
- If you re-read paragraph #2, you will recall that I have spent the last several decades with some pretty damned serious mental health issues. And yet, I have not murdered a single human being. I haven't even hit one. And while I now have lots of tools and knowledge to help keep my C-PTS symptoms at a low murmur, even at my wildest, bat-shit crazy moments, neither murder or violence were ever, EVER even a remote possibility for me. There's a reason for that. (Oh, keep reading, you didn't think I'd give the ENTIRE punch line away this early, did ya?)
- For the last couple months, women's shelters and other organizations have been warning us all that the current self-isolation guidelines, mixed with stress and uncertainty over the pandemic, were going to create a tremendous rise in domestic abuse and femicide. And we'd already seen those rates ramping up – at least, those of us who were paying attention. This wasn't a random act, it was predictable and predicted. Not because men would, in their boredom, suddenly decide to become abusive during isolation, but because those who were already abusive would, in a time of stress and uncertainty, escalate their behaviour, and the only target available would be the woman forced to stay in isolation with them, with no workplace or friend's place to safely and excusably escape to, even for an hour.
- Using the term "mental illness" as an excuse for misogyny and toxic masculinity is just plain wrong, and perpetuates the damned problem. It's about bloody time we call it what it is, so we can start to prevent these very predictable occurrences from occurring.
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