August 23, 2010
Gender Violence and the G-20 Convergence: Our Streets Were Not Safe
By Tess Sheldon and Claire Mummé*
The Group of 20 Leaders met in Toronto from June 25 to 27, 2010. The events that followed shook Our Streets.
Few were eager to host the G20 Leaders in Toronto’s downtown core. Nevertheless, for a year prior, community activists and civil society groups planned events and themed Days of Action, to highlight the impact and interconnectedness of the G20’s elite decision-making on Canadians and people across the world. Federal, Provincial and City government leaders resisted those challenges. In the weeks leading up to the G20, downtown Toronto became a fortress. The downtown core became a maze of fences protected by police forces from across Canada.
Lead up to the G20 Convergence
In May of this year, the Canadian government announced its decision to abandon funding of abortion and family planning options as part of its maternal health foreign aid plan. In response, Oxfam Canada hosted the Gender Justice Summit 2010 in Toronto. The Summit explored the themes of gender violence, maternal health, poverty, security, climate change, and food security. The Summit sought to connect social justice and women’s rights in Canada to the global movement for gender justice, highlighting the fight we must continue to wage to ensure freedom over own bodies, with the policies the Canadian government is now promoting abroad in regards to maternal health funding.
Over the last years, public authority has been repeatedly used to silence women’s voices. In 2006, most of the Status of Women’s offices were closed. Funding to the National Association of Women and the Law was slashed in 2006/2007. The Court Challenges Program for equality cases was defunded in 2006.
Also demonstrative of a culture of “ideological intimidation”, women’s organizations who denounced Harper’s abandonment of abortion funding had their public funding stripped. Advocacy organizations affected included Match International Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, the Centre for Equality Rights in Accommodation, the Alberta Network of Immigrant Women and the New Brunswick Pay Equity Coalition.
These decisions of defunding must be understood as the precursor to the official policy announced by G20 leaders this summer, championed by Canada’s Prime Minister: austerity. At a time when communities across the world have suffered profoundly from the global economic crisis, hitting the most vulnerable the most dramatically, the G20 Leaders have announced that social programs are not affordable, that governments must reduce their size and public debt must be slashed.
Gendered ideas about acceptable parenting and protesting roles were also evident in the lead up to the G20 Convergence. Children’s Aid Societies (CAS) and the City of Toronto set up emergency daycares in local libraries to ward the children of parents arrested during the G20, with a threat of starting the apprehension order process. Even though the CAS committed to closing files after children were picked up, the fact that a CAS file was opened at all might mean further CAS involvement in a parent’s life, a particular concern for parents who are poor, First Nations parents, parents with precarious immigration status, Queer parents or parents with mental health issues.
We joked amongst ourselves that state-funded daycare was apparently only “affordable” in Canada when it was being used to intimidate parents into staying away from political events.
During the G20 Convergence
We took to Our Streets to challenge the authority of a small group of elite (mostly) men from a small group of countries to apportion the world’s resources, from behind closed doors. Their decisions affected so many people, in so many different ways, on so many different issues across the world, which was so clearly demonstrated by the myriad types of groups who came together over the week and weekend of the G20 Convergence.
Gender and sexual identities were a focal point of organizing. On Tuesday, June 22nd as part of the Days of Action, organizers staged creative forms of resistance, including a “Roving Kiss-in”. Organizers and attendees challenged the corporatization of Toronto’s Pride festivities, barriers facing queer migrants seeking status in Canada, the rejection of a new sex education curriculum and the removal of queer rights from the Canadian citizenship guide.
Issues of gender justice were at the forefront of the movement, literally. Women and trans folk led the labour rally (“People First: We Deserve Better”) on Saturday June 26th. They marched carrying an oversized coat hanger. With this decision the march’s organizers – the Canadian Labour Congress, Greenpeace, Canadian Federation of Students, Oxfam Canada and the Council of Canadians – came together to challenge Harper’s attacks on reproductive rights, and to once again signal our communal allegiance to women’s economic, social and political equality, and to the control over our own bodies, at home and abroad.
Gender Violence during the G20 Convergence
Despite the overwhelming police presence, thousands took to the streets during the G20 Convergence. Over a thousand people were arrested. The police used suspect legal authority to search peoples’ possessions, to scare people away from certain areas of the city. They harassed and frightened the legitimate expression of political dissent represented by the simple act of coming together in public spaces. And, in particular, women were subjected to serious verbal and physical violence by police officers and their agents.
Women were sexually intimidated, harassed and assaulted. Women who were arrested were taken to the Prisoner Processing Centre, an abandoned warehouse far from the downtown core. There, women were stripped searched by male police officers – including cavity searches. They were made to use the washroom with the doors open, in full view of the guards. After being subjected to degrading, misogynist and homophobic treatment, most women were released without charges.
On July 22, the Toronto Community Mobilization (TCMN) held a press conference about the violence experienced by women during the G20 Convergence. The TCMN called on the Toronto Police Service Board to condemn the gender violence by police. Women told some of their stories from the weekend (available here and here):
I was roughed up by the cops, had my hair pulled, and was thrown forcefully to the ground. I was called a bitch, and my breasts were grabbed by by-standing cops as they dragged me across the pavement. …They (the Police) asked me and other women I was with if we wanted to have sex with them. We were told to take our clothes off if we wanted to be taken seriously…they made a joke about having a sexual threesome with me and a female officer. …
When they stood me up against the wall to search me, an officer leaned in beside my face and told me that I was going to prison, where I would be raped repeatedly… In a separate room, I was strip-searched and called various unprintable names by these officers. When they brought me back, saying that they had found nothing, the detective yelled at me that I was wasting his time. He shoved me face first into a corner of the room and pushed me repeatedly into the wall.
Video statements by Lacy Macauley and Amy Miller have also been released.
Jane Doe, who spent 9 years attempting and succeeding in 1998 to sue the Toronto Police for negligence and gender discrimination in their investigation of her rape, spoke at the TCMN press conference. Her words and her presence remind us of how much work there is to do on issues of gender violence.
Also at the TCMN press conference, Grissel Orellana of the Toronto Rape Crisis Center warned that if there are not consequences, the gender violence that happened at the hands of the Police during the G20 will be repeated. Indeed, the gender violence experienced by women and trans folk at the Prisoner Processing Centre is demonstration of the importance of the gender issues on which we were organizing, including reproductive rights and violence against women.
The Criminalization of Dissent since the G20 Convergence
The gender violence experienced by women and trans folk at the Prisoner Processing Centre should be understood in the context of a culture of over-policing and myopic concern for ‘order’ rather than a focus on the democratic nature and substance of speech and dissent. This culture is represented by an escalation of police harassment and intimidation for public demonstrations and acts of political protest.
Just a few short weeks after the G20 Convergence, the Ontario Coalition against Poverty organized on the issue of the elimination of the Special Diet Allowance. There were 11 arrests (of about 300 attending) made when peaceful protesters attempted to deliver a letter within Liberal Headquarters in downtown Toronto.
The experience of police hostility and harassment is not new for many communities in Canada, but it is an experience that has now also become a lived reality for many more people living in Canada, and appears to be the new normal, in Toronto at least.
Initiatives to Redress Gender Violence
The Toronto Police Services Board, a civilian agency overseeing the Toronto force, will review the governance and policy issues regarding policing during the G20 Convergence. The Board has not paid specific attention to gender violence.
The newly-created Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD) launched a systemic review of police conduct during the G20 Convergence, including allegations of unlawful searches, arrests, improper detention and concerns relating to the temporary holding facility. The OIPRD has not explicitly addressed gender violence.
The Ontario Ombudsman will investigate Ontario’s introduction of a new regulation that gave police expanded powers in the security area ahead of the Convergence.
A newly-formed class action suit has been filed, representing about 800 people who were arrested but not charged during the Convergence. The representative plaintiff is a woman who was part of a group of protesters on the Sunday afternoon of the Covergence, who were “kettled”, surrounded and detained for hours in the rain. There is more information about the class action here.
As part of the “People’s Investigation”, the TCMN is encouraging people to share their photos, video, and eyewitness accounts of police violence and brutality. The People’s Investigation will work with Ontario Women’s Justice Network to investigate instances of gender violence and demand accountability from the police command structure. For more information about the People’s Investigation see here.
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*Claire Mummé and Tess Sheldon are volunteers with the Movement Defence Committee’s Summit Legal Support Project. The Summit Legal Support Project is a project of the Movement Defence Committee (MDC). The MDC is an autonomous working group of the Law Union of Ontario which is made up of legal workers, law students, activists and lawyers which provides legal support to progressive organizations and activists in Toronto. There is more information about the MDC here.
