This subject matter is extremely heavy and tragic. Begin by ensuring you are feeling grounded and safe right now. Make yourself a cup of tea, grab a comforting snack, light a scented candle, anything that will offer you the gentle reminder that you are safe and that will give you the courage to fight.

We encourage you to engage with this story with an abundance of empathy, for the survivors, victims, their families, for yourself, for the Cabot Square community, and also, for the perpetrator of this violence. This story is extremely complicated and cannot fall into binaries of inherent “bad and good”. When you read about what happened, we understand that it is very easy to say that the alleged perpetrator in this scenario is inherently evil and bad, to want to label him as a “psychopath” or “sociopath”. We understand this urge, however, we invite you to withhold this judgement. We encourage you to remember nuance, that some survivors still love their alleged perpetrator, that many of the women still care for him and simply hope he will change. People in Cabot Square are some of the most abandoned people in this city, they only have each other when bad things happen, and there is a staunch refusal to turn on one another, even in cases where someone has caused deep harm. This commitment to non-abandonment offers hope for a new world where no one is disposable. We also offer you this question: what happened in this person’s life that made him so angry and hateful?

In simply labeling this one perpetrator as inherently “evil”, we absolve systems of power from having to take responsibility for the role they played in this situation. Unpacking and looking at every systemic failure that allowed this situation to unfold for as long as it did holds the secrets for true justice and transformation. How could this situation have been different if Inuit women could access medical care in their home communities, instead of being forced to come to Montreal or Ottawa to seek care? What if the alleged perpetrator in this situation had received adequate intervention, care, and support to change his ways at the first instance of violence? What if people who engage in harm had pathways to seek transformative change without fear of incarceration or violence? What if sex workers had true and meaningful opportunities to engage in labour without paternalistic laws from the state? What if the women in Cabot Square had safe places to go? What if non profit organizations were community lead and run in non-hierarchical ways so that the most marginalized people’s voices were centred, instead of being run like mini corporations? How do we help non profit workers stay connected to the communities they serve and remember why they got into this work to avoid the deep abandonment and fragmentation that happens when they place funders over human lives?

Once again, these questions that target systems are what hold the answers to justice and truth. While we understand the urge to want to blame individual people, we invite you to resist jumping to this immediately. We encourage you to sit with this feeling and remember that blaming individual people does not help bring justice, and it certainly won’t bring any of the women back. As you sit with your anger at individual people, try to look for what message is underneath it. Is there anger? Guilt? Shame? Disgust? Whatever it is, welcome it with a friendly and gentle compassion and try to understand what this is telling you. Bring forward forgiveness, compassion, and hope.

We also want to be very clear that we do not know what happened to each of the missing and murdered women, other than they died under suspicious circumstances while facing extensive violence, that there is a clear pattern here, and that police did not properly investigate. We do not know what happened to these women, and we are not claiming to know the answers. We remain open to all answers in terms of who is responsible and what happened to these women, so long as a thorough, unbiased, and evidence-based investigation is conducted. We are not casting blame on any one person, but rather, we are trying to present what we know and the information we have. We are standing with the survivors of extensive violence in and around Cabot Square and asking you to pay attention and not turn away

Join us as we build a world where no one is disposable.