My Facebook feed this morning is still reminding me of the horrific shooting at École Poytechnique. It happened in my final year of university, just a couple of hours down the road from where I was at school in Ottawa, studying journalism. Thirty six years ago, 14 women the same age as me, were slain by a lone guman who believed women shouldn’t study at university. I won’t repeat his name.
It affected me deeply and I remember so many conversations among my female classmates. I then went on to work in highly technical industries that employed hundreds of engineers (I was always the least technical person in the room!), and for many, it was an annual event we marked with a solemn note that I wrote for our employee communications if nothing else. In the final years of my career, I worked for a Montreal-based company and we sent executives to solemn ceremonies.
As the years passed (and my Facebook memories back this up) what really started to bother me was the fact that I could still tell the name of the person who perpetrated the horror, but not those of any of the victims. And that struck me as wrong.
I started following the writings of Zeynep Tufekci. She’s a sociologist and professor at Princeton University who, at the time, was writing about the same things I was thinking – that there has to be a better way for journalists to report on events like this. She later went on to write a book called Twitter and Tear Gas which is a good read if you’re interested in how social media is playing a part in protests and riots. (A Turkish citizen heself, she included a thwarted Turkish coup in her research, but that, and how her work served as a jumping off point for Metin’s research in Another Glass of Tea, is a story for another day).
Long story short. By continuing to report the name of perpetraors of violent acts, we give them the glory, the “fame”, the spotlight that they were seeking. And that may encourage other unbalanced individuals to see violence as an acceptable way to get them same.
I’d encourage reporters to leave that name out in future coverage. This year, I noted that his name is still there. At least it’s under the victims, so I suppose that’s some small progress. But today, I remember the names of: Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte and Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, all women right on the edge of starting their lives – who had those lives snuffed out before they could even doff their mortarboards at their university graduations. May they rest in peace.
