when is enough really enough

Periodically I have been reading the Zerb’s blog at the Toronto Star. Yes, she’s back to blogging. Some people think of her as a progressive kind of evil but I haven’t ever been able to see her that way. At times, she can turn a phrase and she has made me laugh outloud on occasion. What can I say? A blog detailing an older woman’s quest to loose weight and be fit - what’s not to like? Anyhow, I stumbled across this tidbit from Brian Valle’s book, War on Women, on her blog and I was so utterly stunned that I had to reproduce it on my own:

In Canada, the federal government estimates the annual cost of violence against women at $1.1 billion in direct medical costs alone. That figure rises to more than $4 billion a year when social services, lost productivity, lost earnings, and police, court, and prison costs are factored in.

Wars usually produce large numbers of refugees: witness the United Nations camps scattered around the world. And the War on Women has its own refugee camps, in the form of the 2,500 or so shelters for battered women and their children across North America. In the United States, more than 300,000 women and children seek safety in shelters each year. In Canada, the number is between 90,000 and 100,000.

“annual cost of violence against women at $1.1 billion in direct medical costs’. Jaysus H. Roosevelt. I cannot voucher for the accuracy of those figures but even at a quarter of a billion it is a quarter billion too much.

I am 45 years of age, and truthfully, I have known more women who were beaten by their spouses than I care to count. Sometimes, it’s a one off thing, sometimes not. I worked as a criminal law clerk and have sat across from women in various shades of injury who were beaten by their spouses. In fact, once I had one woman come into my office on crutches who possessed one of the most mangled faces I have ever seen. A cauliflower looked more human than that woman’s face. I listened to her tell me she was a hooker and was beaten by a ‘john’ and not by the live-in boyfriend who the police apprehended in the act of bludgeoning her with a baseball bat. My firm had undertaken to represent him at the bail hearing. The truly sad part was just how downright desperate she was to get him out of jail. I believed that she truly believed, if he was not released on bail, her life would be forfeit the day he walked out of jail as a free man.

One of the reasons I left criminal law field was because I could not stomach having a hand in defending the lowlifes who regularly mangled their wives and daughters. I didn’t mind the drug dealers/addicts, the bank robbers and stick-up/con artists, the petty thieves, the mentally ill or even the odd murderer or three or four, but it was the men who regularly beat their wives and daughters who sickened me beyond the pale. At least a good thirty-five per cent of all the cases my firm defended revolved around domestic violence. That is just one firm out of how many in the city of Toronto.

This isn’t a general indictment of men. I have known many fine, fine men who would never even think of raising a finger to their wives or daughters, let alone do it, but there are those who do. And quite frankly, as a Thatcherite Conservative living under socialist health care in Canada; I find it completely unconscionable that I have to pick-up up the bill for the scumbags who obviously belong at the outer edges of the human gene pool.

I am not suggesting that we deny women and children medical treatment for their injuries but maybe it is time we took a serious look at all the financial recourses available to recoup the outrageous costs these men are costing the rest of us. Let me recap it this way; recoup $1.1 billion in healthcare costs and you can do an awful lot of MRI’s, CAT scans, or hip/knee replacements…did you get where I am going with this? Stephen Harper, I am gifting you a plank in your next election platform.