December 6
National Day of Remembrance and Action Against Violence Against Women
December 6 is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. This day culminates the annual 12 Days of Action Against Violence Against Women. The December 6 commemoration was established by the Canadian Parliament in 1991, to mark the anniversary of the murder, in 1989, of 14 young women students and workers at the École polytechnique de Montréal, who were killed because they were women. This year marks the 34th anniversary of their deaths.
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The women killed in this brutal act were Geneviève Bergeron, 21 years old, Hélène Colgan, 23 years old, Nathalie Croteau, 23 years old, Barbara Daigneault, 22 years old, Anne-Marie Edward, 21 years old, Maud Haviernick, 29 years old, Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, 31 years old, Maryse Laganière, 25 years old, Maryse Leclair, 23 years old, Anne-Marie Lemay, 22 years old, Sonia Pelletier, 28 years old, Michèle Richard, 21 years old, Annie St-Arneault 23 years old, and Annie Turcotte 20 years old.
Today, 34 years after this tragedy, numerous commemorations throughout Quebec as well as in Canada are being held to pay tribute to all these women and all the people whose lives were cut short by gender-based violence. These include the missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQI+ people; and children taken from their families by the Canadian colonial state and placed in the Indian residential school system.
Even more, today we have in our minds and in our hearts the thousands of women and children of Palestine who are the targets of the violence of the Zionist state which applies its genocidal policy against the Palestinian people, with the approval of the Canadian government. This criminal state attacks youth, children and newborns who are the life and the future of Palestine, and the women who give birth to future generations.
These events commemorate the suffering inflicted and the lives lost, but they also aim to treasure the collective memory which cannot be erased or forgotten. Women, fighting courageously day after day to end all forms of violence, demand that governments be held accountable for the violence they impose at home and in which they are complicit abroad.
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