A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. We are a long way from done.  The line on the graph looks like a dip in the road – downhill for a few years after 2009, then slowly climbing back up over a decade starting in 2014. It tracks the number of police reports in Canada related to intimate partner violence. For a while, things were improving. But that’s over now, with violence rates (54 per 1,000 for Canadian women) now back to the levels of 15 years ago. Similar trends are evident in the US, where aggravated domestic assaults have risen to heights not seen in more than 20 years. What were we doing right for those good years? What did we start doing wrong? When the issue is something as deeply in the shadows as intimate partner violence, a clear answer is hard to come by. With 80 per cent of people experiencing IPV not even reporting the crime to police, any trend line is only ever scraping the surface. But the rising stress of daily life on P...

   Still reeling from the news that they're putting Uzis into the hands of nine-year-olds for fun in the U.S. (well, at least until they accidentally kill their shooting instructor ), I now see that whites in the United States believe that anti-white racism is a bigger problem than anti-black racism. Oh, my.      But there's loads more in this piece from the New York Times than that little depressing tidbit. Like how the income gap between whites and blacks in the U.S. is now greater than it was in South Africa during apartheid. Or how a white boy born today in the U.S. will live an average five years longer than a black boy born at the same time.     Read it and weep, or at the very least confirm once and for all that race issues are very much alive and tragically well among our neighbours to the south, if recent events in Ferguson, Missouri leave any room for doubt. Americans are great people individually, but collectively they've got some se...