Getting Away With Murder
OUTPOST VANCOUVER
November 2005 28
The attack was so savage that it was difficult to count the number of wounds on the victim’s body. One hundred forty-six, they finally determined. Maybe sheer exhaustion finally stopped the frenzy.
That may sound like something from a far off war or a TV police drama. But it’s one of hundreds of incidents happening to queers in tree lined neighborhoods right across the country.
Pink Blood, by Ottawa author Douglas Victor Janoff, is the first comprehensive study of homophobic violence in Canada. His groundbreaking research on a largely hidden crisis is a treasure trove of facts and figures. But while statistics make this book important, a deep emotional impact makes it relevant. That impact is nothing short of gut wrenching as Janoff—in matter-of-fact, academic tones— exposes the cold-blooded brutality directed at ordinary Canadians going about their otherwise unremarkable lives.
Janoff admits that the first time he got a copy of his newly printed book, even he was stuck by its jarring list of 121 homicides.
“I opened it up…and I saw page after page after page of victims who’d been mutilated, burned, chopped up, castrated and killed in many horrible ways”, he said. “It really took the sheen off our official media line that Canada is an incredibly tolerant society—it just doesn’t add up.”
The body, with 146 stab wounds, was identified as Vancouver schoolteacher David Curnick. His frenzied murder was by no means unique. Henry Drosdevech of Abbotsford, BC was stabbed sixty-eight times and had his sex organs cut off by a killer who later said he was defending himself from a homosexual advance. Anthony
Dowdling of Toronto was bludgeoned twenty times; Marc Bellerive of Montréal, Lucien Bertin of Halifax and Dave Gaspard of Vancouver, were each knifed between forty and sixty times. And the list goes on and on.
Also chilling are the 350 nonfatal attacks. There’s a horrifying home invasion in the dead of night in an Osoyoos, BC cabin. Another man, severely beaten, was still in a cast when his brazen attacker returned within weeks to assault him again. Yet another was punched unconscious outside a busy downtown Vancouver theatre, only to have police drag him away, only to bring him home in handcuffs in front of his whole neighborhood. Outside a B.C. courtroom a mother defended her son, accused of savagely assaulting a local queer, explaining it was prompted by “fear of AIDS” and criticizing those who called it a gay bashing.
“People are under the illusion that we have laws that protect us from hate motivated violence in our community, and that these laws send a message to the community that this won’t be tolerated. I think a lot of that is PR,” Janoff says. Janoff was a freelance journalist who became focused on homophobic violence after witnessing a friend’s long and painful recovery from a fag bashing in Vancouver’s Stanley Park.
“My life changed at that moment,” says Janoff, whose friend suffered through multiple surgeries, steel plates, construction of a plastic jaw, hundreds of stitches and serious infections. “I didn’t see the world the same anymore.”
He wrote a newspaper article, then wanted to dig deeper. The research was so tough—due to underreporting, conflicting definitions and poor record keeping—that Janoff headed for Simon Fraser University and made it his masters’ thesis.
“You ask any gay person if gay bashing exists, and yes, they can tell you that (it does); but as soon as you looked for official statistics, or reports or articles that really named the numbers, it was just impossible to find any information,” he said.
Janoff says the most frustrating part of the project was dealing with police, interviewing representatives of twenty-five law enforcement agencies, where he encountered “lots of non-participation or pseudo-participation” in his project.
“It seems like they all had their own definition of what a hate crime was, and their own way of keeping track—or not keeping track. What I found was the vast majority of policing services really didn’t have a clue.”
Judges can increase the severity of sentencing where hate crime is involved, but the head of the Toronto Hate Crimes Unit told Janoff he had seen it happen in only one single case. And in Vancouver, the B.C. Courts didn’t see the high profile murder of Aaron Webster as a hate crime, even though he was a gay man beaten to death in a known gay cruising area.
Janoff feels the jury’s out on whether more laws or tougher sentences are the answer.
“Just because you outlaw homophobic violence or hate motivated violence doesn’t mean it’s going to stop,” he says.
What he’d really like to see is an acknowledgement from the courts that homophobic violence is “unacceptable and reprehensible” to society, as is common in cases of crimes against ethnic or religious minorities. Change is possible, he says, citing the example of women who’ve “made great gains in the criminal justice system in the past thirty years, but they had to demand them.”
Justice reform, changes in policing and news reporting and better education at the secondary level are all needed, according to Janoff. Within the community more information sharing, better networking and an annual conference would all help.
For now, he’s pleased that homophobic violence is getting some attention.
“Just the fact that people are sitting in a room talking about this, that’s worth the whole ten-year effort of the book. For me there’s hope there,” he says.
But above all Janoff wants us to remember the people on that terrible list.
“(We can’t) forget all the suffering that’s happened and continues to happen as long as the crimes continue to go unpunished,” Janoff says. “I just hope we’ll find a way to…make a change so we can prevent more violence.”
By Gerard MacMullin
Gerard MacMullin is a writer and broadcaster who lives in Vancouver’s West End.
John Ross
PSAC Ontario Representative for
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgendered Members
P.O. Box 325
Hagersville, ON
N0A 1H0
H (905) 768-3756
W (519) 751-2584