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COMMUNITY NEEDS TO DEAL WITH ISSUES OF
ANGER MANAGEMENT AND CONTROL OF WOMEN AND KIDS
By Rattan Mall
Last Sunday’s horrendous tragedy in which Mahendra Singh
Johal, 66, of Surrey faces charges of second-degree murders of brothers Amarjit
Gill, 17, and Ranjit, 15, and attempted murder of their mother, Sukhwinder,
35, who had recently married Johal once again highlights the burning issues
of anger management and control of women and kids in the community.
The tragedy has also brought up the issue of marriages of
convenience because it appears that Sukhwinder had married Johal so that he
could sponsor her and the kids to come to Canada. There are conflicting
versions from neighbours about whether her first husband was still alive. The
kids who were attending Tamanawis secondary school told their friends that
Johal was their uncle and one neighbour claimed that Sukhwinder told her that
Johal was actually her uncle.
Whatever the truth about their actual relationship,
Sukhwinder and the kids seemed to have problems with Johal and had planned to
move out of the townhouse in the 6300 block of 126 Street to a basement suite
nearby next month.
That apparently triggered off the tragedy. Integrated
Homicide Investigation Team spokesperson Cpl. Dale Carr told The VOICE on
Thursday that police had yet to verify whether the gun used in the crime was
registered.
Shashi Assanand, Executive Director of the Vancouver and
Lower Mainland Multicultural Family Support Services Society, who has worked
extensively with South Asian and other communities for the past 25 years and
has been quoted in The VOICE for over the last 15 years has consistently
pointed out the various issues that the community needs to tackle on the
domestic violence front.
Just last February she told me: “I must say that the South
Asian community is now talking about it openly.” But she also warned: “It’s
still very much there. It’s the largest group [South Asians] that we deal
with.”
When I asked her how this situation could improve, Assanand
said: “There are so many programs out there for women and women are taking
the opportunity ... [there are] discussions that are happening on radio and
TV. I think all those things are going to say to people that trends have to
change. People will learn that there
are other ways to resolve conflicts instead of killing the vulnerable members
of the family. Violence is about
power and control. The person who has power finds that the only way to
maintain that power is through control which continues to increase over time
and sometimes results in a death or multiple deaths.
And it appears that that is what happened with Johal last
Sunday as he apparently could not accept Sukhwinder and the kids leaving him.
Back in August, when The VOICE was reporting on yet
another domestic violence incident, Assanand told me that two factors were
involved, the first being that “violent men are not being able to manage
their anger because we never specifically teach that to our sons. We really
impress it on our female children how to suppress their anger, but, in fact,
we accept and encourage display of anger by our male children. We treat it
like a boy’s thing, that it’s okay for them to be (angry) – it’s a man’s
thing.”
The other factor that worried her was “the idea that wife
and children are possessions to be treated any way violent men want to treat
them. In violence, that is one of the biggest things – it’s across the
cultures. The ownership of wife and
children is a really embedded emotion that we seem to practice in our
culture.”
Interestingly, a highly educated and well-placed
Indo-Canadian woman, who did not want to be identified because she feared her
family could be targeted, told The VOICE at the time that she found it
disgusting to hear a very popular song by a Punjabi singer – whose lyrics’
translation in English goes: “Take up your two-barreled rifle, you have to
take revenge” – everywhere she goes, at homes and at social events.
She said there are many such popular songs by other
Punjabi singers, too, that glorify violence and the negative aspects of a
macho culture.
And last July, when reporting on the sentencing to life in
prison of Jatinder Singh Waraich, 25, after a jury found him guilty of the
second-degree murder of his wife, Navreet, 23, in October 2006 in their
Surrey basement suite, The VOICE noted that he said he didn’t realize what
was happening to him after the first time he stabbed her. He stabbed his wife
39 times.
Assanand told me at the time: “I worry that the anger is
so great here that [the men] totally lose control of their minds.”
She said that until there is a shift in the attitude of
men who view women as “property,” such incidents could happen again.
She pointed out that the same men do not go about hitting
or killing their employers. Yet they think it is okay to hurt their wives and
children.
Though Assanand said that the community had “definitely
progressed,” she feared that the situation might get worse before it gets
better.
She said: “I am sort of afraid to raise my hopes because
the moment you start saying it’s improving, you suddenly find so many
murders.”
She stressed the need for “a complete attitudinal change
on how we regard our women in our culture, that they are not a possession but
are people who have similar feelings as men.”
She also noted: “Wife-killing and child-killing come
together – they are like a package – and I think we need to focus on both
because the whole point is that the men haven’t learned to control their
anger.”
She said that in talking to young men and young women in
the community she still finds a divide in the way that they think what family
life is and that “freedom to be equal is not there.”
Indeed, it’s time for ethnic media and community leaders
to highlight these issues more prominently on a regular basis.
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