Episode 4: (Prairie) Gender Trouble

Hello and welcome back to Unmaking Saskatchewan, I’m Sara Birrell and I’m glad you’re here. I’m joining you as always from my bedroom closet on treaty 4 territory. We’re going to be talking about women in the province more broadly, but I’m going to offer a content warning for today’s episode, because we’re also going to be talking very specifically about sexual and domestic violence in the province. Some of the material we’ll cover in this episode is upsetting, but for those who are able, please do listen. I’m speaking especially to men who may be listening, and often decide to tune out when this subject comes up because they incorrectly perceive it as a women’s issue, when it is very much a man’s issue. This is your problem. Women and gender diverse people in this province are well aware of much of what I will be talking about. 92 per cent of primary survivors of sexual assault in the province identify as female, and the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are men, regardless of the gender of the victim. Of the 37 people killed by an intimate partner between January 2015 and June 2020, 29 were women. Saskatchewan has the worst rate of intimate partner violence in Canada, more than double the national average, and it consistently has among the highest rates of sexual violence in the country. As I began writing this episode, there were two stories in the news about murdered women, one a settler, Sheree Fertuk whose husband is on trial for her 2015 murder, though her body has never been recovered, and one about the discovery of the burned body of 24-year-old Taya Rae Anne Sinclair in Prince Albert. Taya’s family described her as “a young Indigenous woman — a granddaughter, a mother, a child, and a dearly loved family member and friend.” There was also the story of 13-month-old Tanner Brass, also of Prince Albert, who was murdered by his father after his mother, who was fleeing spousal abuse, called the police only to have them arrest her for alleged intoxication and leave the baby behind to be killed. The family of Charlene Aubichon, a mother and teacher from the Flying Dust First Nation, who was killed by her husband in September 2021, will not see a trial, as Charlene’s husband killed himself after shooting her to death in front of her sister in a Meadow Lake campground. A quick google search of domestic homicides in Saskatchewan brings up a litany of cases of horrific violence against women and children, settler and Indigenous, and indignities done to their bodies after death. Every last one of these deaths was preventable. There are also other statistics that are less viscerally horrifying, but nevertheless reveal quite clearly what kind of place this is for women and gender diverse people. Saskatchewan is one of only three provinces that has never had a woman premier. The first woman to be elected mayor of the province’s capital was Sandra Masters in 2020 (Doreen Hamilton who held the position of mayor for 6 weeks in 1988 was not elected to the role). The province’s largest city, Saskatoon, has never seen a woman mayor. Saskatchewan is about to have the lowest minimum wage in the country, something that impacts women, and in particular racialized women, more acutely than it impacts men. Our public transit, both in cities and intraprovincially is a disaster, something that, again, impacts women far more severely than men.

I am not particularly interested in talking about the risk factors, be they age, race, gender, class, for victims and survivors in Saskatchewan, I’m more interested in the structures of power that allow and even encourage this kind of violence. This is for two reasons, the first is that, when we focus on the supposed risk factors, we are, even inadvertently, placing responsibility on victims and survivors, rather than on perpetrators, as well as glossing over the factors that exist in our society, like racism, ableism and misogyny, that turn a person’s identity into a risk, and the second is that when we focus on the risk factors for victimization, we have very little opportunity to find solutions. You cannot stop being a woman, you cannot stop being racialized or disabled in order to mitigate the risks that your identity poses to you. We’re limited to things like rape whistles and not walking alone at night and teaching people to identify signs of coercive power in their own and others’ relationships, essentially limiting the freedoms of some people in order to not address the behaviour of others, and offloading responsibility for systemic problems onto the individuals least responsible for them.

For today’s episode I’ll be relying primarily on my own reporting, and the work of other journalists who have been covering sexual and intimate partner violence in the province, four of Sarah Carter’s works, Imperial Plots, Ours By Every Law of Right and Justice: Women and the Vote in Prairie Provinces, The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nationbuilding in Western Canada, and Arab Cooking on a Prairie Homestead, James Pitsula’s Keeping Canada British: The KKK in Saskatchewan and For All We Have and Are as well as the final report from the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and Sexual Assault Service’s Saskatchewan’s report, called Sexual Violence in Saskatchewan, Voices, Stories, Insights, and Actions from the Front Lines. If you haven’t read this document, which was published in 2020 as part of a 22 step sexual violence plan — Saskatchewan was the last province in the country to develop one — I really encourage you to read at least the executive summary. It’s only 14 pages long and the writers of the report have provided a really thorough, explicitly antiracist and anticolonial assessment of sexual violence in Saskatchewan, one that examines the historical and contemporary power structures that enable this type of violence, and that offers a clear path forward. This is a document that I have returned to again and again since I first read it in April 2020, and it has had a very profound influence on my thinking.

One of the things that I really want to get across in doing this show is how interwoven this province’s challenges are, so we’re going to see certain things come up again and again. And I think that the subject of sexual and domestic violence is really demonstrative of the way that many of these historical factors, some that we’ve talked about and some that we will, converge to create a type of masculinity that is very coercive, very possessive, very oriented to materialism and accumulation and control, and where the structures of authority, like the police, and the health system, and the education system, and the government, all function to facilitate men’s coercive power over women and children. All of these factors intersect and compound to create a full blown crisis that is brutal and devastating and costs women and children their lives, and that is 100% preventable. And as I’ve said before, we also have a form of white femininity here that is extremely devoted to the patriarchal, white supremacist project of state building in Saskatchewan. It’s a femininity that is both subordinated and oppressive, and that often glories in its subordination and its oppressiveness. If we think of settler femininities as languages, I wouldn’t say Saskatchewan femininity is a different language than other settler femininities, but I would argue that it’s a distinct dialect, that many of the negative aspects of white settler femininity that can be found elsewhere are supercharged here. And as we’ll learn in this episode, women’s marginalization, and in particular women’s marginalization by institutions like the police and the legal system, has actually served to foster the growth of hate groups like the KKK in this province in the past. Those kinds of groups have positioned themselves as defenders of women, and as moral authorities that will stand up for women against abusive or deadbeat husbands and fathers, and exploitative bosses. And that said, there are also a lot of really incredible, groundbreaking, and totally radical things that settler women in the province have done, and I will talk about those things as well, because those episodes tell me that there is something absolutely salvageable in Saskatchewan femininity, that there’s a courage and a resilience and a refusal to submit there that is really necessary to identify and to tap into.

So a quick recap of the historical factors that we’ve already covered that I think are a starting point for understanding how we got to the place we’re at right now. The first is something I discussed in episode 1, from Sarah Carter’s Imperial Plots, Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Prairies, where settler women were, right from the outset, disenfranchised in a way that was unique to the Canadian prairies. Unlike the United States, where women were encouraged to homestead during the settlement of the Midwest, Canadian women, except for widows, were denied the right to own property. This intentionally made them reliant on a husband or a male relative, and that disenfranchisement and engineered dependence is still very present in the culture. And although by the early 1900s, women like Georgina Binnie-Clark were challenging homesteading laws and farming their own land and campaigning for homesteads for women, the restriction on women homesteaders remained law until the homesteading program was ended in 1930 (and Binnie-Clark, like the suffragists, was largely campaigning for homesteading rights for British women to squeeze out so-called undesirable immigrants). I spoke in the first episode about my belief that the reason so many white liberal women in Saskatchewan are deeply invested in small business ownership because owning property is freedom, and while reading For All We Have and Are, I came across a passage that mentioned that in the movement towards suffrage, which, at a municipal level, was granted to unmarried women and widows before it was granted to married women, it was married women who owned property who were able to vote in civic elections before married women who didn’t own property. So even historically, we see that for married women, the key to autonomy, the key to having a voice in the way this province is run, is property.

The second is something I discussed in episode 2, which is the way that, during the settlement of Saskatchewan, settler males exploited the manufactured hunger in Indigenous communities in order to coerce Indigenous women into sex work. This historical exploitation of poverty to facilitate sexual abuse, coupled with the racist Indian Act, which works to prevent Indigenous women from owning property or having a home in their name, increases the likelihood that Indigenous women will be victimized by both strangers and intimate partners. This use of hunger and poverty and a lack of social mobility to interfere with Indigenous women’s bodily autonomy would happen again, with governments in the 19th and early 20th centuries withholding food and vaccines from families that wouldn’t allow their children to be taken to residential internment camps, and up until last year, the province used birth alerts to remove Indigenous newborns from their mothers before they even had a chance to bond, and it continues to happen today, with children being removed from their homes because of poverty that is orchestrated by the government. The government and police in Saskatchewan have always, always seen Indigenous women as objects to be manipulated at will. During the days of the pass system, women who were found off reserve without a pass would have their hair cut off, or threatened to be cut off. I’m not going to speak for Indigenous people about what it means to have their hair cut outside of ceremony, although I know that in many Indigenous cultures, hair has a cultural significance and is often only cut as an act of mourning. I think that settlers can often be dismissive of the violence that comes with forcibly cutting someone’s hair, regardless of the presence or absence of cultural beliefs around hair. You are coming into someone’s physical space with a sharp object, you are manipulating their body in a way that will be evident. It’s an incredibly intrusive and violent act, and it’s one that officials in Saskatchewan have used as a means of control for generations.

For both settler and Indigenous women, the disenfranchisement that has been written into law and perpetuated through generations limits their ability to leave violent or abusive situations. If you do not own your own property, if you are dependent on someone else economically, if you are living in isolation, it is very difficult for you to flee. And for Indigenous women in particular, the entire province is saturated in danger. It can be dangerous for you to be at home with your abusive spouse, but it is also dangerous for you to be alone in any environment, urban or rural.

Race and gender intersect in really profound ways here, and something I’d like to acknowledge right now about today’s episode is that there is a huge gap in information about the experience of non-white and non-Indigenous women, and in particular the racialized immigrant woman’s experience of life in Saskatchewan. This isn’t an intentional oversight. Most of the information I’ve used in this podcast so far, Pitsula’s work, Warren and Carlisle’s work, Bill Waiser’s book, Carter’s book, are works that I read long before I started this podcast, and when they look at women, they’re really focused on either settler women, Indigenous women, or both. Divided does cover the experience of more recent, usually racialized, immigrants, but there’s not a huge focus on the racialized, non-Indigenous woman’s experience, so because I’m using a lot of information that I’ve known for a while, I’m not coming to the podcast with a strong foundation of scholarly understanding when it comes to the experience of non-Indigenos racialized women, and I don’t yet feel comfortable in my level of knowledge. That’s something I’m working on building, and I will do an interview style episode on the experience of immigration to Saskatchewan as a racialized person, but for now I want to acknowledge this omission, and acknowledge that unfortunately, and frankly unacceptably, I don’t have a lot of information that I can give you about what it’s been like historically and presently to be a racialized woman in Saskatchewan. I’m sorry for that, and I’m sorry to the women in this province who don’t see themselves reflected in this episode, you are as much a part of Saskatchewan as anyone else, both presently and historically. Arab homesteaders in Saskatchewan were the first to grow pulse crops, which have since become a primary agricultural crop in the province, and they endured the struggles of the Depression alongside white farming families, while also experiencing racism from these same families. Black people, obviously including Black women, have been present in the province for more than a century. So I will integrate the knowledge that I do have into this episode, but I’m aware that it’s not enough. This is partly on me, and it’s partly a reflection of the fact that non-Indigenous racialized women, especially prior to the 21st century when they started to become hyper-visible, have been rendered largely invisible in Saskatchewan history and jurisprudence, but they have been present in Saskatchewan for as long as Saskatchewan has been, and their existence here is no less important for the fact that the province has deemed them unimportant.

A lot of the early victories for white settler women in the province came about because of these intersections of race and gender. It was thanks to the organizing efforts of urban and rural women in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Women Grain Growers Union that Saskatchewan became the second province in Canada, after Manitoba and before Alberta, to grant suffrage to white women in 1916. And I think that’s very important, because this is a place where women were deliberately made to be subordinate, and you had them stand up and refuse that subordination in a really important way, and to reject their disenfranchisement. But I’m not going to pretend like the politics of early suffragists were perfect, or even good, but they were politically engaged and they were organized, and I think that Saskatchewan history, despite, or maybe because of, the way the province can be so brutal to women, is filled with episodes where women organized and mobilized to improve their material conditions. But it also needs to be mentioned that, just as the movement for women’s suffrage in America was aided by white men’s desire to break up the voting power of free Black people, Saskatchewan women’s suffrage was aided by Anglo-Saxon racism against Ukrainians and Germans. Maude Stapleford, who was the wife of the president of the regina college, explicitly said that suffrage was “no longer a sex matter, but a race matter.” And unfortunately but unsurprisingly, many of the advances that white women have made in this province have come, and continue to come, at the expense of racialized women.

So a place in history where it maybe doesn’t seem intuitive to think played a really instrumental role in the construction of womanhood in Saskatchewan are the KKK years. I believe this was one of the places where that particularly virulent form of white female settler racism that we’ve discussed in the past was really nurtured and given space to flourish, and when women came to see organized racism as protection from violence. The KKK showed up in Saskatchewan in the 1920s, and by the end of the 20s they had around 25,000 members, at a time when the population of the province was about 820,000. By 1929, they had amassed enough political strength that they were instrumental in ousting James Gardiner’s Liberal Party and replacing them with James Thomas Milton Gardiner’s Conservatives, which was the first time the Conservatives were elected in the province. And after Gardiner’s single term, the province wouldn’t see another Conservative government until Grant Devine’s PCs in 1982. To paraphrase Bill Brennan, a scholar of Saskatchewan history, the KKK came to Saskatchewan from Indiana like a rain storm and it tore across the province and created some damage. And then it disappeared.” Bill Brennan is a professor emeritus of history and I’m literally just some guy, so take me with a grain of salt when I say I don’t believe that they just disappeared, I think that they changed form. And of course, like many racial panics, the KKK was able to find purchase here because of white fears over growing numbers of non-Anglo immigrants. This was a time when whiteness was more limited in its scope than it is now, most eastern Europeans and even Scandinavians wouldn’t truly become white until after the second world war. These types of immigrants worked more dangerous jobs and were paid significantly less than men of British descent, in cities they tended to live in shanty towns in rental houses without sewer, water, electricity, or telephone. A good example of how tenuous most European’s grasp on whiteness was in the first half of the 20th century, is a story about a Saskatoon magistrate in 1912 who had to decide whether two women, one Russian and one German, were “white” in order to determine if their employer, a Chinese man, had violated the Female Employment Act which stated that Oriental — heavy scAIR quotes — men could not employ white women, in order to prevent race-mixing. While the magistrate ultimately decided that the women were white, it’s really demonstrative of both the artificiality of whiteness as a racial construct, and of the early 20th century mindset regarding women, which was as weak and vulnerable subjects incapable of self-defense or decision making.

So what does this have to do with the KKK? Even 100 years ago, white supremacists were very aware that they needed women on side to be successful, and they aligned themselves very closely with temperance movements, which have always been the purview of women, and have very often been rooted in racism. Saskatchewan was the first province in Canada to enact prohibition in 1915, and it lasted until 1924, but an initial vote on Prohibition in Regina in 1910 failed, and its failure was largely blamed on the men of Germantown, the slum where non-Anglo workers lived, and throughout the period when Prohibition was in effect, it was largely Chinese men who were blamed for violating the Liquor act and for operating brothels and bawdy houses. So you see two things here, one: women and children were seen as the primary victims of alcohol, since, according to James Pitsula “drunken men often wreaked havok on family life.” Prohibition was synonymous with “home protection,” and therefore women’s safety was dependent on it. And two, one of the primary barriers to Prohibition and the protection it offered was immigrant men. Not uncoincidentally, the end of Prohibition helped the KKK gain a stronghold in Saskatchewan as the Klan presented itself as a moral authority, against the evils of alcohol, opium, and gambling.

Indiana members of the KKK were the ones who established the organization in Saskatchewan, and a really crucial part of their strategy when trying to entrench themselves in a community was to invoke white women’s vulnerability, and in particular their vulnerability to non-white men and to men who used drugs and alcohol. At one point they were handing out cards that read “remember, every criminal, evey gambler, every thug, every libertine, every girl ruiner, every home wrecker, every wife beater, every dope peddler, every shyster lawyer, every white slaver, every brothel madame is fighting the KKK.” Defending women who were economically dependent on men was a tactic the KKK used to establish itself as a crusading moral force, at one point, Indiana KKK members beat a husband for not supporting his wife properly, and, according to the story, the next day he went out and got a job. At the same time, the KKK was vowing to kill the infants of heretics, Protestants, and freemasons, and “rip open the stomachs and wombs of their women.” They were staunchly against independence for women and women’s rights, and yet they framed themselves as defenders of women. I mention this because it’s such a good example of the way that racism and patriarchy go hand in hand, and the way that women’s dependence on men and the perspective of them as vessels for the reproduction of settler society makes them and their bodies sites of ideological struggle. Protecting some women and destroying others are simultaneously moral goods. And so for women who are invested in the patriarchy, as many women are, upholding and defending racism and racist organizations is a matter of self-preservation.

At rallies, Klansmen addressed white women directly, as Pitsula reports, KKK organizer JH Hawkins told women If the Klan had the power, it would adorn every woman with unfading flowers: “We would go into the gardens and gather there the flowers of rarest perfume and beauty; we would take the choicest jewels from the Crowns of Kings and Queens, and from those flowers and jewels, we would fashion a Crown brighter and more dazzling than England’s Crown and, with the hand of love, press it down upon the brows of our wives, our daughters, our sweethearts — Canada’s womanhood.” “We want your help tonight,” Hawkins pleaded. “There’s an organization of the women here; we want you in that. We need your help and assistance and, in return, we are going to throw around your homes a solid wall of love, loyalty, and devotion.”

So the government, which has repealed the law of Prohibition will not protect you, and your drunken husbands will not protect you, and it is the KKK that will build a better and more beautiful world for you. I think that we can see this sort of ideology, perhaps not explicitly, but certainly implicitly, in more recent iterations of white nationalism that have their roots in the prairie provinces. The Yellow Vest movement and the humiliatingly named “United We Roll” convoy were xenophobic, racist, anti-immigration movements that were very much about defending and upholding the extractivist economy. And what we know about the extractive economy from episode one is that it’s one that is very violent towards women, that marginalizes and excludes women, that makes white women economically dependent on men and systematically marginalizes or exploits Indigenous people and more recent immigrants. And yet we see white women very present in these movements, they were very present in less coherent movements like the Ottawa occupation as well, and these are groups that see the government as incapable of or unwilling to protect women and children and families, as unwilling to defend the kinds of male-centred jobs that provide the kind of income that allow women to stay home and raise their children, and that rely instead on racist organizations for protection. I don’t think that’s a coincidence and I don’t think it’s wholly disconnected from the KKK of 1920s Saskatchewan.

And in some ways, although not necessarily the ways that they think, the white women who have embedded themselves in these movements are not incorrect about the ability or the willingness of the government or the police to protect them from harm.

As a reporter, I’ve written articles about very difficult subjects, including stories about people murdered by the police and domestic murder suicides, and they’re always hard, but one of the stories that I found really profoundly troubling, and that still haunts me, was one about the fall out from the Sask Party’s destruction of the STC. And I’ll do an entire episode about the STC, but in the context of sexual and domestic violence, and really women’s autonomy over their own bodies, the loss of that intraprovincial transit has had really devastating consequences. It’s an example of the government making a decision that directly impacts the lives of women, and harms women more than it harms men. Women report being pressured into performing sexual favours in return for rides or access to a vehicle, including one woman who tried to hitchike to see her children and ended up being sexually assaulted and left in a ditch. Women, especially those living in rural and remote communities, have more difficulty getting away from abusive spouses, and for those who do get away, they’re at greater risk of violence during that escape. Shelter staff reported that women would call and say they were fleeing, and never show up, and staff were left to wonder if they had changed their minds, or if they had come to harm along the way. I talked in the first episode about how if you don’t own property in Saskatchewan, you’re disenfranchised, and how owning vehicles is a way of owning property without owning land. If you don’t have a personal vehicle in this province, you are isolated, your ability to participate in public life, to participate in the economy, to ensure the safety of your person, are severely curtailed.

I suspect that the province’s failure to ensure that all rural and remote communities have access to reliable internet also hinders womens’ ability to leave dangerous and violent situations. These are gaps in the social infrastructure that facilitate violence against women, reinforce womens dependence on men, and demonstrate the government’s belief, whether or not explicitly stated, that the family is the nucleus of society and that violence within the family is a private matter that the government has no responsibility to mitigate. And this happened historically and it happens in the present. During the Prohibition years, police generally tended to ignore the operation of bars and brothels, during the Klan years, police were known to ignore women’s complaints of sexual harassment and assault, and the KKK was often there to serve vigilante justice.

There is a tendency to view sexual violence, and intimate partner violence in particular, as something that happens between individuals. Date rape and stranger rape are seen as a matter between victim and perpetrator, intimate partner violence, domestic homicides, are seen as isolated events that are rooted in, and contained within, the family. And if the superstructure becomes involved at all, it is only after the fact. This is the easy way to view these things. It allows us to see justice as a transaction, i.e. if the perpetrator is found guilty and given a prison sentence, that is justice, and if they are not, that is not justice, and it allows us to locate the blame within the particular family, or even with the victim.

But sexual and domestic violence are community problems. Many of the everyday violences, both historically and presently, that women in this province face are violence that have been written into law. We speak more often now of the intergenerational trauma that has occurred in Indigenous families thanks to the extermination and assimilation policies of the provincial and federal governments. In Saskatchewan in the 60s, the government developed a formal program for what was essentially the sale of Indigenous children to white families, called the Adopt Indian and Metis program. These children were stolen from their families, told their parents hated them and didn’t want them, and were adopted by families who were quite often abusive and even forced the children to work as slave labourers on farms and in their homes. And although Saskatchewan never passed formal legislation regarding the forced sterilization of Indigenous women as BC and Alberta did, the province is nevertheless currently facing a class action law suit by women who were sterilized against their will as recently as 2018. How can we understand violence as interpersonal when faced with a government like that?

And settler women in Saskatchewan have also faced tremendous legislative cruelty from the province, from the start when they were forbidden to own land. Even women in Saskatchewan who were deserted by their husbands, as happened not infrequently, were refused the right to homestead, essentially being ordered to starve. During the farm crisis of the 1980s, women bore the brunt. They were working the land and they were raising families. If you think the daycare situation in Saskatchewan is dire now, consider the fact that in the 80s, fewer than 5% of licensed daycare spaces were in rural Saskatchewan. This is something that happens when you devalue, on a broad, societal level, the work of women. We should also think of places like special care homes as places that are critical for understanding the status of women in the province. Not only are workers in these homes disproportionately female, as of 2018, 61.9% of residents were female as well. And so when we look at the crisis in long term care, a crisis that has cost people both their lives and their dignity, both before and during the pandemic, we should understand this at least in part as a woman’s crisis. Women are more likely to live alone and in poverty in later life in this province, they’re more likely to require the services of a special care home in the final years, they’re more likely to be employed in mentally and physically grueling but underpaid roles within such homes. They’re more likely to experience physical and sexual abuse, both as workers and as residents. The very structure of our society, which is presumes a nuclear family with a male breadwinner working in the trades, is violent towards women.

What we need to understand is that there can only be justice and equity when the social circumstances that allow for this kind of violence, and this kind of systematic impoverishment and oppression are eliminated. sexual and domestic violence are structural, low wages, intolerable working and living conditions are structural, and while they may often manifest as interactions between individuals, they are outgrowths of societal problems, and cultural belief systems, and types of economies. So in Saskatchewan, what are those societal problems, what are those beliefs, what is that economy?

The first thing that’s really important to consider here is the police and the carceral system. Police arrived in Saskatchewan to defend dominion property and to remove Indigenous people from the land. And in a province where women are essentially considered either property or Indigenous, that means that cops have no real interest in protecting women from sexual and domestic violence. And why should they? It’s not their job. According to the SASS report from 2020, fewer than one quarter of primary survivors of domestic violence reported their assault to the police, and of those who did, more than half reported dissatisfaction with their experience. According to the report, survivors reported difficulties from the moment they stepped into detachments and police stations. I know for myself that when I went, as a teenager accompanied by my friends mom to the RCMP detachment to report an assault by an adult man that happened in Alberta, where my arms were bruised black with finger marks, I was talked right out of reporting. So I have no trouble believing this. One officer interviewed for the report actually told researchers, and this is a direct quote, “I had a complainant come in and disclose sexual abuse and it was at a party, after a party, blah, blah, blah.” This officer ultimately told the prosecutor that the police would not investigate the report at all, telling researchers it could have “really screwed up” the alleged perpetrators life. In Saskatchewan 41 per cent of sexual assault allegations are dismissed as “unfounded.” And naturally, the cases that are concluded to be unfounded are less likely to be accompanied by police investigation, including interviews with witnesses and suspects. And as I wrote in 2020, According to the report, “in contexts where professional roles are masculinized” — like Saskatchewan — “sexual violence may operate as a mechanism for asserting male authority and for keeping women ‘in their place.’” Under this view, sexual violence is seen not as a crime but as a tool; it doesn’t need to be met with justice because it is justice. The problem is particularly acute in rural areas, where one victim told researchers, “the victim-blaming in rural hospitals is out of control.’ And other survivors reported being talked out of getting a forensic kit done because it was too time consuming. Regina was the only place in Saskatchewan where survivors who endured a forensic evaluation were given clean clothes to go home in. Others were discharged in flimsy paper gowns. So you can see how, if you are a particular type of woman, you may be very willing to align yourself with white nationalist movements that are critical of police and government handling of these issues. Instead of seeking solidarity with other women and gender-variant people who are likely having even more violent experiences with systems than you are, you’re going to align yourself with the kinds of people who have framed a clear enemy: usually migrants and other racialized people, and who are willing to go to extreme lengths to keep such people out of the community. And if the harm is happening within your home, well that’s just par for the course.

You’re also going to look at the options that exist for you as an individual who can, at the end of your life, no longer work, and you’re going to try to make the kinds of decisions, whether they be marital choices or business choices, that are going to protect you from places like decaying care homes. It’s an individualistic mindset that prevents solidarity and prevents progress, but which may, if you are very lucky and very white, protect you from the worst of what this province has to offer.

I also mentioned that these problems are outgrowths of Saskatchewan’s economy, and there are multiple ways that Saskatchewan’s resource-based, free market economy impacts the incidence of sexual and domestic violence in the province. We’ve already talked about the ways that resource economies explicitly exclude women, so we won’t retread that ground, but there are other ways our economy contributes to the subjugation of women.

In the 1920s, working women were largely ignored and overlooked in the labour force. Their wages never came close to what was required to support a single person, because women were expected to be under the care of a husband or another male relative. Domestic servants, who were largely Eastern European, and therefore not quite white, were not covered by the minimum wage act. We see these parallels today, where women make up 21 per cent of full time earners in the bottom 20% of the wage distribution, while men make up 17%. The minimum wage is not nearly high enough to support a single person, a fact that impacts single women and racialized women the most. 100 years, and little has changed. Women who worked as servants on farms made around half of what hired men made, and a century later, Saskatchewan women experience one of the highest wage gaps in Canada, 21.6% compared to 18.2% in the rest of Canada. Women have been organizing for better wages for more than a century, and this province has not met them with respect. In 1918 waitresses and phone operators went on trike for better wages and working conditions, and their employers responded by bringing in strikebreakers. In 1923, female school teachers raised the issue of wage inequality with men, but they wouldn’t actually see equal pay for equal work until 1945. The history of the province is littered with the implementation of equal pay for equal work policies that have often been ignored. There was an Equal Pay Act enacted in 1952, and the Blakeney government would amend the Labour Standards act in the 1970s to require equal pay for similar work, amendments that the Devine government would refuse to enforce. We’ll talk in more detail about working women in a later episode on labour history, but suffice it to say for now, that the province has not been good for working women.

In her book “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism,” Kristen Ghodsee, an anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania, writes about how the unregulated free market and capitalism itself disproportionately harms people who have primary caregiving responsibilities, either for elders or children or both. The free market can’t function without the free labour that is provided by these caregivers, whose caregiving burdens tend to increase the more marginalized they are. The free market’s dependence on the free labour of women necessarily leads to women being more dependent on men, and can cause them to be trapped in abusive or unhealthy relationships. And as we have seen in Saskatchewan, more than many other places in Canada, women bear the brunt of caregiving responsibilities. They bear the brunt of low wages and limited housing and transit options. This province exists and has always existed because of the unpaid labour of women, and it has done everything in its power to prevent women from getting out from under the burden of that labour.

Ghodsee suggests that state interventions in the economy, like universal childcare, mandatory job-protected maternity leave, better healthcare and homecare and elder care, can all work to help women become more economically independent, more free. These suggestions aren’t whims that Ghodsee came up with, they’re proven to increase women’s economic independence, which increases their ability to escape from domestic violence situations, to escape or avoid entirely survival sex work, and to have more control over their reproductive choices. And so we should consider, when the province refuses to implement these things, when they refuse to raise the minimum wage or provide any of the infrastructure necessary to facilitate women’s independence from men, that that is intentional. That the system requires women to be subjugated in order for it to function, to be profitable, and that those in positions of influence and authority are aware of that, and in fact prefer that. Because what could change if women — all women — had autonomy over their bodies, and over their reproductive freedom, and over their ability to participate fully in the economy? That would undermine everything Saskatchewan is built on. If Indigenous women are allowed to have as many children as they choose, without being forcibly sterilized by the state, and if they were free to raise their children from infancy to adulthood without the state interfering, they would have the opportunity to revive their culture, they would have a real chance at futurity that the government has been trying to deny them for more than a century and a half.

And if women and other people who can get pregnant, like myself, had full access to abortion on demand, instead of the patchwork of access that we have now, they could plan their families. They would less frequently find themselves bound to an abusive man. They would have more opportunity to participate in the economy. But when it comes to sexual health, Saskatchewan leads the country in negative outcomes. We have among the highest rates of teen pregnancy — at 23.7 per thousand. We have “abstinence is best” sexual health instruction for youth, that routinely focuses on the worst outcomes, without offering much in the way of guidance on how to avoid those outcomes. And for people who do get pregnant, Saskatchewan has a very weak system of abortion access, and it’s a system that is consistently under attack, whether we realize it or not. Saskatoon is the northernmost point in the province where you can access surgical abortion, which is only an option for people up to 12 weeks pregnant. That means for the roughly 37,000 residents of Saskatchewan’s north, which is 250 km from Saskatoon at its southernmost point and more than 1000 km, or a 14 hour drive, at its northernmost border. And without the STC, if you’re an individual who doesn’t have access to a vehicle, or the support of someone who does, you are almost certainly going to have to carry out your unwanted pregnancy. As I wrote in 2019, The difficulty many Saskatchewan residents have in reaching the only places where abortions are performed, combined with the time frame — 12 weeks in Saskatoon and 20 weeks in Regina unless circumstances are extraordinary — means that one of the goals of the anti-choice movement — to prevent abortions later in a pregnancy — is effectively already in place. And if you consider the fact that transportation and accommodations are not covered for people to travel to these centres, the anti-choice goal of defunding abortion care is well on its way to being a reality. Abortion may be legal, but it is not necessarily possible.

And of course non-women are affected by these laws and restrictions, but they are nevertheless misogynistic laws and restrictions that are deeply rooted in the patriarchal need to control women’s bodies. And yet, in Saskatchewan, women are often at the forefront of pushing for greater restrictions on reproductive freedom. In 2016, Saskatchewan Conservative MP Cathy Wagantall introduced Bill C-225, an act that would see the injury or death of a fetus during a criminal offense a Criminal Code violation. Such a law, which seems at the surface to be reasonable, is a law that would, in effect, grant fetal personhood, a blow to reproductive freedom. I don’t think it’s surprising at all that we would so often see women at the forefront of these movements to pass legislation on women’s bodies. Time and time again in Saskatchewan and elsewhere, we see white women as ferocious defenders of patriarchy and of the subjugation of women. They couch it in terms that seem pro-woman, and pro-human rights, but you never see these same women raising a ruckus about how Saskatchewan has the fourth highest rates of infant mortality and maternal illness exceeds the national average.

Some people believe that there are solutions to violence against women within the existing legal system, but it’s pretty clear to me that the system itself is violent towards women. Nevertheless, we can talk about things like criminalizing coercive control, which is essentially when a partner or former partner terrorizes a victim, but does not actually physically harm them. We’ll talk about that more in the episode on policing, but what it boils down to is the fact that the police were created and dispatched to Saskatchewan to defend private property and dominion property, and although you would be hard pressed to find a cop who would admit this, or even be consciously aware of it, the fact is that in this province, as we’ve discussed before, white women are considered extensions of a man’s property and Indigenous women are meant to not exist at all. Unsurprisingly, survivors interviewed by SASS reported having the most difficult and traumatic experiences with police, who revictimized them and deterred other survivors from reporting their assaults. Less than a third of survivors in Saskatchewan reported their assault to law enforcement. And although the vast majority, 71%, disclosed their assault to someone, less than 10 per cent of those disclosed to law enforcement. And this is obviously a problem across the board. In every province, in other countries, we see examples of the police ignoring violence against women, facilitating violence against women, or even committing violence against women, including women they have arrested and their own intimate partners.

I don’t believe that criminalizing coercive control is an effective strategy to deal with this problem, and there are a few reasons for that. The first is that we have already seen and discussed the way the legal system fails survivors of sexual and domestic violence. It’s absurd to me to criminalize more behaviours when we know that the legal system is very often neither willing nor able to respond effectively and meaningfully to this type of violence. There is, in fact, a concern that abusers will be able to use coercive control laws against their partners and former partners, whose response to abuse often manifests in ways that are themselves abusive or at least appear to be abusive. By this I mean pushing, shoving, or kicking someone who has been screaming at you, or getting in your space, or otherwise psychologically abusing you. I mean calling someone repeatedly to the point that it appears to be harassment because instead of coming home with formula they went to the bar. I’m talking about preventing an estranged spouse from seeing your kids even if you share custody, because you’re fearful for their lives. Meanwhile abusers feed stories to their family and friends that make their victim look like the abuser. So you can see very quickly how these kinds of laws can be weaponized against victims of domestic violence. And of course, they’re more likely to be weaponized against racialized people, immigrants, mentally ill people, undocumented people, everyone in our society who is already made vulnerable by their identity.

There’s also the fact that carceral solutions will not do what we need them to do, which is provide long-term, compassionate, effective treatment that addresses the source of the abuse. Putting an abuser in jail for a time, or mandating them to a social worker led anger management class once a week in the basement of a church is not healing. I’m going to digress a little, so please forgive me, but I think it’s very easy, when we look at domestic abusers and people who commit sexual violence, especially when their offending involves children or results in murder, to write those people off. To dismiss them as monsters, to want them removed from the community. I think it’s understandable to feel that way, especially because we live in a society that really does not do what needs to be done to protect us from violent people, to protect us from people who do harm. And so we say, these people need to be removed from the community, to protect the rest of us from them. I know that there are many stories in recent memory that have been so disturbing and senseless that they really challenge my anti-carceral principles. But I think there are a couple of responses to that. The first is that, if we consider a person to be a threat to the public, who must be removed from the public to keep them safe, why don’t we consider other prisoners to be members of the public who also deserve to be kept safe? Why are we comfortable with putting certain people in harms way to keep others safe?

The other thing is to understand sexual and intimate partner violence as social phenomenon. People are products of the environments they live in, and if we want to live in a society where women and children aren’t vulnerable to violence and murder, we’re going to have to change the society. We’re going to have to fight for the kind of social infrastructure that ensures that women and children and gender variant people can get out of a dangerous situation quickly and easily. We’re going to have to build a society where certain kinds of women aren’t rendered invisible. We’re going to have to fight for better public transit and thriving wages and non-market housing. We’re going to have to fight to keep families out of poverty, which is a huge risk factor for violence. We’re going to have to stop basing our economy on extraction, we’re going to have to stop building mancamps at the expense of women’s lives. We’re going to have to abolish the police and prisons, which harm women and children by removing mothers and fathers from the community, by incarcerating women, by creating a violent and oppressive structure that has veto power over justice.

And women have organized effectively in the past, and I think that this can be done again, but one thing that has really hindered past organizing is the fact that it has been largely divided down racial, class, and urban and rural divides, and the support of men has largely, but not always, been absent. In order to change the existing status quo, women are going to have to cross those barriers, and organize as a whole. I spoke about the Adopt Indian and Metis Children program, or AIM, and that program didn’t go unchallenged. In 1971, as past guest Mike Gouldhawke wrote in the Land Back issue of Briarpatch, Metis women formed a committee against the program and managed to secure a meeting with the Saskatchewan government and gain some small concessions. And while what I noted about the racial undertones of women’s sufrage in Saskatchewan is true, it was still a remarkable feat of organizing over years and years. Suffrage was not handed to women, and in one particularly telling anecdote, Lucien Boudreau, the MLA for St. Albert declared that women belonged in the home and should not meddle in the public affairs of the province. The suffragists present laughed in his face.

I think we can continue to laugh in the face of a province that sees women as non-citizens, as individuals whose contributions are not foundational to the survival of Saskatchewan, and I think we can continue to organize in ways that are anti-hierarchical, anti-oppressive, anti-racist, and anti-colonial. We’ll talk about how to do those things in a future episode, but for now I’m going to leave it right here, fully aware that this hasn’t even scratched the surface. But there’s much more to come, so thank you for joining me.