Victim-blaming and woman-shaming claim another victim

[Posteritatis]

204. I'll take a crack at those

First, the political aspects since you're wondering about those.

Canada is no more politically monolithic than the United States is. We're left of the United States politically, generally speaking, but we are kind of stuck with Harper for a couple more years thanks to the vagaries of the parliamentary system. The federal government tends to spend about three years under Liberal governance for every two it spends under the Conservatives in their various forms, though the system's probably going to be shook up over the next few decades between demographics and the major parties all reimaging themselves in odd ways. It gets odder when you look at federal/provincial jurisdictions, and the fact that those effectively mean that a provincial NDP or Conservative party can be very different from the federal ones, but that's outside the scope of this. Simply put, we're as complicated and flawed as any other nation of thirty-five million people.

Now, Nova Scotia in particular.

This province, along with the other three east of Quebec, are, shall we say, not the most advantaged region of the country, and haven't been for awhile. About twenty-five years ago there were some pretty bad collapses in the region's mainly natural resource-based industries and the resulting craptacularity is something we've only really started recovering from in the last few years. The part of Nova Scotia I spent my childhood in, Cape Breton, has something obscene like 18% unemployment and that's been improving. The provincial capital, Halifax, where all the mess this thread is about happened, is doing vastly better - and has a half-dozen universities, which explains the election results - but it's still a city in a province that spent a very long time absolutely in the gutter and that's got the spread of nasty cultural effects that implies.

The school whose students assaulted Parsons is in Cole Harbour, which is officially part of Halifax since the city amalgamated with a bunch of other communities back in the nineties, but is usually treated by locals as a separate town (along with a few of the other major communities like the one I'm in). If you take Halifax's issues as a whole and ramp them up somewhat you've got Cole Harbour - by the standards of the town as a whole it tends to be poorer and rougher, both physically and in terms of the population. The high school in particular has had an incredibly toxic reputation going back into the nineties when I was a student at another school (the one I mentioned in my post) - it was seen as the kind of place that was rife with violence, drug problems, and so on and so forth by students in the urban schools, so make of that what you will.

The school I attended was a larger one and had its own issues, feeding from some bad neighborhoods as well, but it also tended to be the school that people who had problems at Cole Harbour High would transfer to to try and get away from things. (A few people I knew back then had transferred to my school from there for safety reasons.)

In this particular case, I don't know if what's going on is "Cole Harbour District High School is still a cesspit," or if it's "Cole Harbour District High has a couple of dozen awful, awful people." Either's as likely, the latter probably a little moreso, and it's going to be under much more of a microscope in the coming weeks than the students and staff there have been used to since what amounted to a race riot back in the nineties. That examination's incredibly overdue.

As to the rape culture issue in general? Much as I hate to admit it, yes, Canada has a problem with that. There isn't a place on this planet that doesn't. I'd like to say we're better at it than some, which doesn't excuse the conduct when things like this happen. That said, I've been seeing Steubenville comparisons in this thread and others, and I don't think those apply much at all. There's a lot of vile little shits in Cole Harbour who brought about a kid's death by the usual circling of wagons that rapists' friends (or high school bullies in general) tend to do, and the Justice Minister almost certainly destroyed his career despite his backpedaling on the investigation issue this afternoon, yes.

On the other hand, the reactions towards this in local media since yesterday, and much moreso today, have been absolutely unanimous rage of a type I haven't seen in local news for a long, long time. Every single paper, down to the university ones, that prints in or near the province had this story on their front page - the only thing on their front page for some - with a tone at least as outraged as the discussions on DU have been having.

We very much have a problem, of course, because this happened in the first place. A bunch of students are going to keep defending what happened, keep protecting the assailants, because the types of people who do that in the first place tend to be valueless little shits who aren't going to be shamed by something like this at all. The police might hem and haw about reasonable doubt with the investigation, though they're going to be dragged back into trying to do something about it come hell or high water at this point. As for the population as a whole, there is absolutely not going to be one of those displays where half the locals start making excuses for the assailants, or talk about how the girl had it coming, or fret about the futures of those poor angels should the law come down on them. The province as a whole is way, way too angry about this right now, and a good chunk of them are exactly as embarrassed that it happened as they ought to be.

I know I am.