In the late afternoon of December 6, 1989 a lone gunman walked into École Polytechnique in Montreal and murdered 14 women before killing himself. This was one of the earliest school massacres of such magnitude and the most misogynistic. The women in the college were killed because they were women and for no other reason.
December 6 was declared a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women by the Federal Government in 1991. Those of us working to end gender-based violence, like the Women and Children’s Shelter of Barrie, have commemorated this tragic event in our nation’s history each year since 1989. It’s a sad commentary on our society that twenty-one years after Montreal we still need to be reminded that violence against women exists and that women and children continue to experience abuse in their lives.