Wilson Remembers Montreal Massacre

Editor's Note: The following is a statement by Radcliffe College President Linda S. Wilson.

On December 6, 1990, one year will have passed since the horrifying event now remembered as the Montreal Massacre. On that date, without provocation and without warning, a man yelling, "You're all feminists!" murdered a group of women engineering students and wounded several more men and women.

It was a brutal and terrifying act. Its occurrence in a university setting brought widespread attention to the ugly reality of violence against women. What was a senseless tragedy can be an important turning point if we use our remembrance of that event to renew and invigorate our efforts to understand and remove the causes of violence against one another.

The Montreal Massacre, by its remoteness in place and in the degree of the brutality, may seem to some observers to be unrelated to the Harvard/Radcliffe community. It is not unrelated. The seeds of violence are here, as everywhere. They exist in deeply rooted differences of belief, in individual intolerance, uncertainties, and frustration, in institutional inertia, and in intensly competitive situations with high personal stakes. Civilisation is a fragile veneer requiring constant vigilance and effort to sustain. It requires everyone to make commitments for the common good.

An important place to put our efforts in this community is in affirming that no individual or group has a rightful dominance here and in understanding and respecting our differences--in gender, race, ethnicity and socio-economic class characteristics. Perhaps the most frequent encounters across such difference are those between men and women. And in these encounters inappropriate assertion of dominance is manifest in many ways, often unconsciously.

Contributing to these efforts to dominate are old cultural patters that persist despite changes in the law. Among the most pernicious of these are beliefs about the acceptability of force in sexual intimacy. Renee Landers '77, Professor of Law at Boston College, reported in the Radcliffe Quarterly about a recent study of 1700 sixth- through ninth-grade students in Rhode Island. Despite our laws to the contrary and despite the general improvement in understanding about women's rights in society, 65 percent of the boys and 57 percent of the girls responded affirmatively to the question of whether it was all right for a man to force a woman to have sex if the couple had been dating longer than six months.

The students were also asked if it was all right for a man to force a woman to have sex if he had spent a lot of money ($10 to $15) on her. Twenty-five percent of the boys and 16 percent of the girls responded affirmatively. I find such evidence of persistent ignorance of women's rights as individuals startling and very worrisome.

It is the law in Massachusetts that without genuinely mutual consent, sexual intercourse is rape and is a felony. Specifically, the Massachusetts statute states that sexual intercourse obtained through force or threat of force or against either party's will is considered rape.

Judicial processes in the courts and in the university community are critical elements in communicating the standard of behavior now. Preventive education is even more important. Victims of rape not only suffer the pain, cost and disruption of their lives that the procedures of justice impose, however sensitively they are executed.

Here at Harvard and Radcliffe, we must make very clear that date or acquaintance rape is sexual violence and will be punished. Repugnant in any environment, rape is especially so in this community where trust and mutual respect are essential to our present and future purposes. We must therefore make the standards of behavior clear to individuals joining this community. And we must exclude from this community those who do not abide by the law and this community's standards.

Simply recognizing that rape is against the law, however, is not sufficient. We must accomplish a genuine change in belief and attitude between men and women so that this law becomes unnecessary as a deterrent to violence against women, and becomes instead an affirmation of men and women's mutual respect and common standing in society.

From this change will flow other valuable improvements in living, learning and working environments for both men and women. The lessons we learn in setting aside old practices and beliefs based on subordination of individuals of a certain gender will help us in our larger efforts for social, racial, ethnic, intergenerational and international understanding.

In remembering the Montreal Massacre, let us each make a commitment to the eradication of date or acquaintance rape in particular and other forms of interpersonal violence in general.