No Safe Place: Violence against Women and Children

Carolyn M. Hackland was editor of the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association and lives in Ottawa.

No Safe Place is a series of articles by a number of prominent Canadian feminist authors. Edited by Connie Guberman and Margie Wolfe, it offers a great deal of thought-provoking material dealing with child abuse and wife abuse. This book should make readers angry and raise their awareness of the issue of violence against women and children. While it succeeds in some measure in both of these objectives, the tone of the book detracts from its very important subject matter. It makes the reader angry, all right, but for all the wrong reasons. No Safe Place, while raising awareness of our society’s violence, often directed toward women and children, will also raise the hackles of a great many educated, thinking, professional non-feminist women in this country.

Chapter 4, “Child Sexual Assault,” by Alanna Mitchell, is one of the better written ones in the book, backing up its cases with statistics and showing the reader that child sexual assault is not just a feminist issue, but an issue to concern all thinking Canadians. However, this chapter, like most of the others, displays the most prevalent and annoying point of view in this book: that all men are basically wife and child abusers and that all women are basically powerless victims in a patriarchal society.

While the material is good in many of the chapters, the tone will turn the non-feminist reader off immediately, so broad is the brush and so black is the paint used by virtually all the authors to paint the largely innocent male population. Except for moments in the chapters on child sexual assault, sexual harassment, and pornography, this book is at best a series of articles designed to further the radical feminist viewpoint. At worst, many of the chapters degenerate into feminist propaganda and a diatribe against the male population in general, with particular criticism aimed at our law enforcement agencies and our legal systems.

Perhaps this book would be more palatable to the non-feminist professional reader if the statistics were more up to date. In 1986 it is hard to credit studies done in the 1970s which are used to back up the authors’ views. Only two or three of the chapters use statistics from the early 1980s; many of the studies cited and cases presented are well back in the 1970s, some as early as 1974. While the authors are to be commended for trying to keep the book exclusively Canadian in nature, using Canadian statistics for the most part, the use of more current, if American, statistics would not have come amiss. While the articles are basically well written, the book will probably be read only in feminist circles. The authors presumably are seeking to inform Canadian women about a pressing issue — namely, violence against women and children; but the tone of the book will turn off many of the audience sought.