GSWS Caucus Mentorship Session with Angela Marie MacDougall

By Nikita Mitra

On June 26, 2024, a rainy Wednesday morning, GSWS graduate students joined a meeting on Zoom. This was no ordinary (read: yawn-worthy) Zoom meeting they’d joined however, it was a mentorship session with the distinguished executive director of Battered Women’s Support Services (BWSS), Angela Marie MacDougall. Angela has been involved in social justice efforts for violence victims and survivors for over three decades and was thus, the most popular choice among the graduate students when choosing a speaker for the second session of the GSWS Caucus Mentorship Series.

Angela touched upon the establishment of BWSS at the start of the talk, sharing how the women who founded the organization in 1979 wanted to make domestic violence visible at the time as it was still a very hush-hush topic. Therefore, they chose a plain name that directly points to the organization’s work while also throwing light on the persistent prevalence of intimate partner violence. This introduction was poignantly closed with Angela saying that violence doesn’t just happen between two people in isolation but is housed within a broader social context.

After this brief introduction, Angela was keen to hear a short introduction from each of the students present at the session. Students touched upon where they come from, what their research interests are and how they relate to the issue of gender-based violence. Once the rounds of introduction were complete, Angela issued a trigger warning for the content she was about to touch upon, saying it could sometimes be surprising to be able to connect the information shared with realizations about personal relationships.

On resuming the talk, Angela shared her wisdom by saying, there are false hierarchies of value that oppress others. For example, structures like colonization, patriarchy and capitalization are rendered invisible but affect human interactions daily. Therefore, violence is endemic and woven into one’s identity in Canada.

Touching upon how the issue of domestic violence has been made visible and dealt with in society, Angela spoke about how during the lockdown there was media attention initially but in society’s eyes, it is still considered a brand-new issue. She mentioned that over the years in Canada, different generations have dealt with the issue in different ways, but it still hasn’t received the attention and redressal it needs. Angela was met with many nods of understanding when she spoke about Margaret Mitchell, the parliamentarian who brought up the issue of domestic violence in the Canadian Parliament and the men seated there laughed at her.

This segued into a discussion of how Canada is still a patriarchal society, where patriarchy has been normalized and is extremely pervasive. A quote in Angela’s presentation stood out: "All men are created equal, some, however, are not equal therefore they are not fully men." Angela also touched upon the role of race and racism in creating violence in society, and how the making of nation-states through the colonization of white populations has created races in the first place. She illustrated this with an image of Cecile Rhodes, a notorious colonizer, standing over a map of Africa. She also showed an image of farm workers working in smoke-filled conditions in Abbotsford and shared how it’s still a very racialized profession.

Angela often opened the floor up for discussion. The students chimed in with their thoughts about the gendered implications of slavery, intergenerational trauma affecting adult relationships and the limitations of school education in teaching folks about the wrath of colonization. After an hour and a half, Angela did a quick check-in with the audience about how they were feeling and their feedback on the talk, before bringing an end to the wonderful summer mentorship session.