Violence against women: “there is an awakening in society”, according to Sophie Grégoire Trudeau

Photo Agence QMI, Dario Ayala
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, wife of the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, and Valérie Plante, mayor of Montreal.

QMI agency

Wednesday, 6 December 2017 18:10

UPDATE
Wednesday, 6 December 2017 18:12

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MONTREAL | Sophie Grégoire Trudeau said they felt the pain of the families of the victims of Polytechnique Montréal, 28 years after the massacre that claimed the lives of 14 women in the flower of age.

• READ ALSO: violence against women

“Even if I have not lived, I can imagine the heaviness, the pain the families still feel and we as a society,” said Wednesday the wife of the prime minister of Canada in an interview with “100 % New” to the antenna of LCN.

“These are our girls who were studying, with a promising future, it is unacceptable,” continued Ms. Grégoire-Trudeau. I think that increasingly, we speak of this violence that is based on sex, which is turned toward the woman, for several reasons. It is necessary to talk about it more and more and that is what we do.”

The magazine “Time” awarded Wednesday the title of “Personality of the year” to the people who have “broken the silence” in the face of sexual harassment in the case of Weinstein in the United States. This movement has become global and is a direct challenge to the one who refuses the label of “First lady”, seeing himself rather as a “woman to head a stubborn one”.

“It grieves me to be obliged to say that they have recovered their right to speak. I think that when one condemns the actions inappropriate and that we share our stories of suffering, […] there is an awakening in the society,” said the wife of Justin Trudeau.

“The more women will share what is happening to them and that hurts them, the more we will be able to accept these stories, to talk more about it and find ways to counter it and to ensure that it happens less and less with time,” she added.

Ms. Grégoire-Trudeau discusses the importance of awakening the collective in the face of violence against women and girls. “Be it in a subtle way, by a comment or comments on the social networks, which are sometimes not subtle at all, by the representation of women in the society, in magazines, on tv, or even women who are victims of domestic violence…”

The boys will also need to be included in the questioning, she said, in the way of “asserting the woman and how to incense it in all its glory, his intelligence, his beauty. And that the girls can become free human beings, such as boys and men on the planet, to be able to contribute the most to society,” she said, specifying that the costs associated with sexual assault and domestic violence are in the billions annually in Canada.

“We need to wake up,” concluded the mother of three children who is very involved in the cause of women. “And I am going to devote up to my last breath,” said the woman, 42-year-old.