Is it yet clear to anyone why it took three full agonizing days to read into the court record the facts that will put Russell Williams away for the rest of his life?
The Crown assures us that the courtroom and media circus was necessary to ensure that Williams doesn't get paroled after serving his mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years. Could this be a joke? It wouldn't have taken more than two hours of reading in a single morning to accomplish that end. We live in "law and order" times and in cases like Williams's, that isn't likely to change this century.
One thing is clear: the effect of handling the case this way has been to feed into every stereotype about serial rapist murderers and to place Russell Williams as far away as possible from any description of humanness. That way we can file him tidily away in the mental vault we keep for depraved monsters.
Is that to ensure that few of us will be prompted to wonder just how and where he fits on our socially sanctioned continuum of male violence against women? Is that so we don't learn something that would implicate our military institutions, our systems of law enforcement, our courts of law, our legislators, and all of us in a wilful and systematic blindness to the inequities and inequalities that oppress womenfolk every hour of every day of every year in which we live?
The fit between police and lawerly narrative and mainstream media reportage is so "almost perfect" it's hard to resist conspiracy theory. The media was prompted to refer over and over and over again to the vast distance between Williams's impeccable behaviour in everyday life and the "perverted," then criminally" depraved," then sadistically assaultive and finally murderous acts he perpetrated on girls and women.
He is intelligent and was ambitious. He attained a high rank in a military institution that Canadians are taught to revere and not to question. He did things that many people are lucky enough not to be able to imagine. The only explanation is that he is a depraved sex pervert who acted beyond the pale in his "private" life and that -- hey! -- in fact, he can't be explained. Case closed.
Lest anyone be tempted to question this, plaster pictures of the macho man in women's undies to be carefully released by the court all across the country, engage in uninformed conjecture about the nature of fetishism, argue about where and how much and how many pictures should be published, ponder the character of his wife and sensationalize what needs no repetition or exaggeration to be sensational all on its own. Say the names Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. Remember their crimes in detail. Make everyone as sick to death of it all as possible so they will want to forget. Ensure that as few people as possible come to any understanding of the meaning of Williams's acts.
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The focus on the colonel's supposed fetish for women's underwear and how that fetish escalated from breaking and entering into the homes and bedrooms of girls and women to the imprisonment, torture and repeated sexual assaults of two women and finally, the terrible deaths of two more is critical. We should be interested in this theory of Williams's behaviour but not because it makes him so unexplainably "other" that we can comfortably forget him. Rather, it is because it is a theory profoundly in error and yet so readily accepted.
The mainstream media has accepted this description absolutely uncritically. Given decades of feminist educating on the nature of rape, sexual assault and femicide, it's just heartbreaking to witness this glib acceptance.
Wearing women's underwear doesn't lead to raping and murdering women. Predatory behaviour leads to rape and murder. The desire for power and control over women leads to predatory behaviour.
To break into the house, the bedroom, the dresser drawer of a girl or woman, try on her underwear and spend hours taking pictures of yourself wearing it while masturbating isn't a fetish, it's a violation of the personal space and the sexualized belongings of the girl or woman. It made Williams feel powerful and in control -- feelings he was clearly very fond of. To masturbate all over a woman's bedroom is a violation. To tie her up and take pictures of her while masturbating and taking pictures of yourself is a violation. To do the same and then kill her is a violation. This is escalating predatory behaviour in the service of power and control, not fetishism.
If the police don't know that, they can't do their job of securing women's safety because they can't properly categorize dangerous behaviour and make the predictions necessary to stop people like the colonel. Women can make those predictions. Several women in Tweed recognized the danger of their situations after visits from Williams. The police paid no attention to them. That was and is a tragedy.
Our failure to understand how easily predatory men get along in our misogynist, porn-saturated rape culture and particularly in the most macho aspects of that culture -- like the military! -- is another tragedy. When the next Russell Williams comes along, we won't recognize him until after more dead women are found and mourned and filed away.
Elizabeth Pickett is an internet-based feminist freedom fighter, a mother, a grandmother, a blogger, and a poet, seething in Whitby, Ont. A version of this article appeared on her blog.
Thanks for making those important points.
I have been avoiding this story for a number of reasons, one being that the media and much of the public feed off of the morbid voyeurism of cases like this, and don't really think about the tragedy, nor of making the important connections you point out.
From what I have heard, I think much of the public will simply blame it on what they consider "perverts". Then, as you say, they'll use the smokescreen of calling it a mystery to avoid looking at misogyny, power, and suppression in our everyday culture that had played a much larger role in shaping that man's behaviour.
Then they'll pore over the news reports so they can be horrified and fascinated by every little detail of other peoples' suffering.
It bugs me too, because the BDSM community along with anything that is not straight, vanilla and monogamous will probably take much of the blame. In reality, people these communities are among those who have worked hardest to demystify desire and sex, and to inform people of the importance of safety, consent and respect.
Unwanted touching and not understanding the meaning of the word "no" is a whole different thing in that community than it is in some vanilla joint.
Like you, I fear that most people will learn nothing from this man's horrible acts. Worse, I think it will do a lot of damage, and give hateful people even more reason to justify their homophobia and scapegoating of anything that deviates from their conception of "normal" relationships and desire.
I've been wondering whether the police could have caught him sooner if they had investigated the break-ins and home invasions forensically as they did the murders. Murder gets their attention, but rape clearly does not. I heard on the news that there are some 1400 unsolved rape cases in Montreal. The police complain about workload, but maybe if the solved some of those cases and locked the perpetrators up, their workload would decrease. As it is men know they are extremely unlikely to get caught, so there is no deterrent whatsoever.
I think the public realizes that Wiliams had more than a fetish. I don't think fetishists need to waste their time defending themselves. It just looks petty in comparison with the horrendous pain Williams has caused for so many people. There is one issue to look at, though. One has to ask whether BDSM pornography fuelled Williams' fire. Child porn is illegal for that reason, even though many who use it never offend. The same is true of BDSM porn. Most don't act it out criminally, but some do, and maybe that is enough reason to make it illegal. It's not a need, and people can still use their own imaginations. Wouldn't it be a worthwhile sacrifice to keep women safer?
@ VIGrrl
I'm not actually too worried about people who already have to deal with plenty of judgment, misunderstanding and threats from society, and who are used to being very careful.
I am actually more concerned for society at large, specifically the people, some bigots and some not, who will look at this man and project the blame everywhere else, and refuse to look at or deal with its roots in our so-called normal culture. More entrenchment of that attitude is something we sure don't need. In fact we could stand to learn a few lessons from those communities that I know a lot of people are blaming.
In that, I think I am just supporting the author's argument. Excuse me if it sounds like whining and minimizing of these crimes. I assure you that's not my intent.
Thank you for this article. I live and work in the transgender (trans) community where there is much concern over how this news will be received and to what end it will be used. Cross-dressers and other trans people are more likely to be the targets for gendered violence than perpetrators. As stated, this crime was not about sex, not about fetishes, not about gender diversity, nor trans people... just familar old misogyny. The one thing that is not being explored in the media.
I think the cultural argument -- saying that our culture is mysoginist and naturally produces this psychotic mindset, has major limitations. A lot of evidence that never gets into the media suggests there is a cult operating behind these cases. It involves elements in the military, the police as well as organized crime. These elements work together. Not ALL military, not ALL police, not ALL men belong to this cult, but it operates at many levels. It gets rid of people who, wittingly or unwittingly, expose aspects of it.
Reading about Bernardo-Homolka, it appears were being coached, encouraged, rewarded, manipulated, drugged, etc. by members this cult. They appear to have been selected when they were young, and then received training. Places they travelled, eg Disneyworld, are cult training centres.
This is not to say they are not guilty of horrific crimes, but there is more going on than meets the eye. The military and police, as well as secret organizations they join to rise through the ranks, are involved in organized child trafficking and abuse. This underworld trains controllable, ambitious, depraved individuals who sometimes screw up and have to be publicly sacrificed and paraded in the media. This serves two purposes: terrorizing the public, and creating a scapegoat. But the cult goes on.
See the work of Fritz Springmeier and others on cult mind control, and notice how many unanswered questions are suddenly answered.
I prefer the terminology of Martin Buber:
Russell Sovka, as he left Upper Canada College, was a misfit. Among the children of the elite, who bonded at UCC for life, he did not bond. He lacked all social skills. He had no one close to him, neither fellow students nor family. He lacked a sense of social boundaries, and appeared obsessive-compulsive and bossy.
This continued in his first few weeks at the Scarborough campus of U of T.
He took a look at himself, and did not like what he saw. His self-knowledge, to use Martin Buber's terms, demanded inner rejection.
Within weeks, he changed his name, and constructed a new persona for himself.
He became Russell Williams, after the biological father who took, if possible, even less interest in him than his step-father. Was he making a statement to Jerry Sovka? Perhaps, or perhaps he just needed a new name for his new persona.
He became an overnight extrovert, but still lacked a sense of social boundaries. He started to expand his repertoire of pranks and became known for what one friend called his "off-the-wall sense of humour." He adopted a distinctive forced, unnatural, high-pitched laugh.
After earning his degree, Russ spent another year in Scarborough trying to decide what to do with his life. He lived alone in a basement apartment, working part-time at the university and waiting on tables at Red Lobster.
But then he watched Top Gun. He became obsessive about flying, and transformed himself once more, into the perfect officer.
Martin Buber writes "Man . . . requires confirmation. Again and again the Yes must be spoken to him . . . to liberate him from the dread of abandonment, which is a foretaste of death."
Years later, rather than face his inner emptiness and fear of abandonment, Russ Sovka did nearly 50 late-night break-ins from Belleville to Ottawa.
Next he broke into the homes of two women last September near his cottage in Tweed. The women were blindfolded, stripped and photographed in the nude.
Martin Buber has described such a person in his writings on the nature of Evil: the crises of the self which make the person's psychic dynamic secretive and obdurate, and lead him into the actual decision to evil.
When a person's self-knowledge demands inner rejection, Buber says, he displaces his knowledge of himself by an absolute self-affirmation. The image of what he was intended to be is totally extinguished, and in its place he wills or chooses himself just as he is, just as he has resolved to intend himself. This self-affirmation in no sense means real personal wholeness but just its opposite -- a crystallized inner division. "They are recognizable, those who dominate their own self-knowledge, by the spastic pressure of the lips, the spastic tension of the muscles of the hand and the spastic tread of the foot. . . If he still concedes any significance to the concept 'good', it is this: precisely that which I am."
How does the military recognize such people when it sees them?