Harrison Cruikshank (2L)
Violence against women and access to justice are serious issues. Each implicates the efficacy of Canada’s legal framework and highlights troubling parts of our society. Given the gravity of these issues, why are we at the Faculty of Law comfortable addressing them by playing dress-up?
More than half of women over the age of 16 have been physically or sexually assaulted. On average, a woman is killed by her sexual partner every week.[1] Without social support, many women are unable to escape the realities of an abusive relationship. Relatedly, these same women may not seek recourse through our legal system given a lack of money or time. The inaccessibility of our justice system affects scores of other Canadians, particularly those in financial need.[2]
Walk-a-Day and Flip Your Wig are campaigns put on to help raise funds in support of ending violence against women and increasing access to justice, respectively. The students and faculty who organize and participate in these events are amazing, dedicated people with gigantic hearts. That said, I believe that to accept these silly campaigns as wholly positive initiatives is naïve. These campaigns do a disservice to those individuals they purport to help by trivializing issues which are anything but.
I am a huge proponent of humour as a means of addressing serious issues, and will joke about everything and anything (in the appropriate circumstances, with the appropriate company). It may seem strange then that I am questioning these campaigns given my own light-hearted approach to most issues (the title for this op-ed is a Monty Python quote for jeepers’ sake). My problem is that these campaigns do not use mirth & merriment appropriately and end up subverting their own goals.
These campaigns alleviate the symptoms of serious issues through cold hard cash without addressing any underlying causes and in some ways perpetuating them. In this way, they are alike to raising funds for underprivileged youth by putting on a Minstrel Show.
Consider first Walk-a-Day, an incarnation of several events where men put on high-heeled shoes to raise money for the White Ribbon Campaign. Now, according to its website:
White Ribbon positively engages men, young men and boys through relevant educational programming that challenges language and behaviours, as well as harmful ideas of manhood that lead to violence against women.[3]
I don’t understand walk-a-day-type events, because they do not support this goal other than financially. Walk-a-Day does not “positively engage men”. It certainly engages men; a lot of awesome fellas I know participated and raised some decent cash. But in what sense is this engagement positive? By symbolizing experiences with sexual violence through wearing high-heels, are we not trivializing the former while completely ignoring problems with the latter (a sexist institution that only women should wear high-heels, and must do so for more “conservative” functions)? I think Walk-a-Day is sacrificing the “positive” for the “engagement” in a way that we shouldn’t necessarily be okay with.
Similarly, encouraging fellas to put on high-heels for a day hardly “challenges language and behaviours, as well as harmful ideas of manhood that lead to violence against women.” If anything, campaigns like Walk-a-Day perpetuate these ideas by continuing the usual, “a man? In women’s clothing!? HOW DROLE!”
The fact is a disproportionately large number of women who experience violence are trans-women. For this reason alone it is inappropriate to address violence against women while simultaneously perpetuating the notion that it is laughable for people born as men to dress in women’s clothing.
This continued marginalization of the trans-community is the most obvious problem with Walk-a-Day campaigns. I think partnering with Out in Law or the Feminist Law Society could help with the other similar problems. Why don’t we just have “white ribbon” day, where men all put on a white ribbon? I suppose this brings us back to sacrificing “positive” for “engagement”.
There are similar problems with Flip Your Wig for Justice, a standalone initiative started by and benefiting a number of excellent legal aid clinics. The member organizations of this campaign have enlisted the help of some brilliant students and faculty. Yet, rather than doing something more meaningful, they encourage people to wear silly wigs. According to their website:
Flip Your Wig for Justice is an awareness campaign and a pledge-based fundraising event in support of access to justice in Ontario. The campaign plays on the combination of the traditional judicial wig, and the turn of phrase “Flip Your Wig” – implying to be angry, or outraged. Funds raised will go to raising awareness for access to justice and to supporting the six Ontario-based non-profit organizations.[4]
By their own description of the phrase, Flip Your Wig clearly wants us to be “angry, or outraged” with the state of justice in Canada and recognize it as a serious issue. So why run a trivial and light-hearted campaign?
Maybe it’s just me, but I also get nervous when I notice a lack of attention to detail by a charitable organization. The expression “flip your wig” is not about being “angry, or outraged”, but is in fact a phrase from the 1950s about going insane. Any rage is merely incidental/causal to insanity, and is not necessary. So if we’re going to flip our wigs for justice, we should actually just be losing our minds entirely in response to the state of our legal system.
Criticizing the campaign’s name is a fairly weak complaint, but it is representative of my larger problem with Flip Your Wig. It’s a poorly thought out name (bonus points for being insensitive to mental illness—coming soon: Lunatics for Legal Aid) for a poorly thought out campaign.
Flip Your Wig’s website mentions “making a significant contribution to the conversation and solutions around access to justice”, yet I have seen nothing like this from them to date. Just wigs and posters sporting phrases like “be part of the fun”. As Ultra-Vires itself pointed out, there are discussions taking place in Canada about how to improve access to justice. Why not use resources to participate in those rather than coordinating wig photo-shoots?
In these campaigns’ favours, they have raised far more money for their respective causes than you or I have by complaining about their less than ideal methods. So let’s be clear, I am not arguing for an end to these campaigns. I hope their coordinators, present and future, are alive to these criticisms, and do not simply brush them off as curmudgeonly and continue their status quo.
There is a time to be silly and a time to be serious. Law Follies is the place to point out sad truths through humour. If you’re going to genuinely address an issue, your campaign should do so in spirit as well as substance. Otherwise, you won’t cure any problems, just pay for the bandages.
[1] For more, see http://www.canadianwomen.org/facts-about-violence
[2] For more, see http://www.cba.org/CBA/Access/main/