Mr. Speaker, violence against women is a sordid reality and not a fantasy confined to the pages of a tabloid newspaper or a pornographic magazine.
The history of violence against women is like Pandora's box that when opened reveals the ugliest side of the human condition. We would expect by now that complacency would be shattered amidst the tales of horror and abuse that so many women have lived to tell. What of those who have died?
It was inexcusable for the justice minister who professes to champion women to artfully dodge my question of last Friday. We do not need the minister's platitudes nor his citing of statistics to tell us we have a problem of domestic violence in this country.
What specific plan does this government have to get at the root causes of violence against women? Until gender roles are eliminated, until the family no longer serves as that convenient arena for male violence, until wife beating is no longer a logical extension of male domination and until our justice system demonstrates its capacity for justice, we do not have a blueprint for change.
Intellectual and political anguish have become meaningless. Violence against women exists. We have endured enough.