1. Youth Protection Failures: Most of this women were former youth in care, under the supposed care of Batshaw. Many of the women and children met the Cabot Square Serial Predator when they were minors and were supposed to be protected by the Director of Youth Protection (DYP)/Batshaw. Many of the victims of the Cabot Square Serial Predator reported experiences of sexualized violence, abuse, racism, intentional destabilization through repeated moves to different foster families, and cultural destruction while under Batshaw care. Batshaw received a number of calls about this situation yet failed to address these systemic issues and protect these vulnerable children and youth, most of whom were Indigenous. Many of the older women are in Cabot Square because their children were taken by DYP. These women gave up hope after trying to get their kids back, after being repeatedly faced by racist practices by DYP. These women are trapped in a cycle of hopelessness. DYP failed to adapt their practices to these women to give them and their children a semblance of hope. DYP has an office minutes from Cabot Square. If they wanted to adapt their practices, they would have already.

2. Police Failures: The Montreal police were aware of the violence occurring in and around Cabot Square for years. Instead of appropriately intervening, the police chose to criminalize people in and around Cabot Square, many of whom were victims. The women were repeatedly ticketed for practices related to being unhoused (i.e drinking in public, loitering, self-defence in response to violence, etc). Victims and survivors were afraid of going to police in fear that they may have an outstanding warrant due to unpaid tickets. The victims of this serial predator were disproportionately sex workers, Indigenous, and drug users. Police failed to adapt their practices to these highly vulnerable communities, particularly considering the historic mistrust between police and these communities. Police have also failed to investigate the deaths of 6 Inuit women, and one disappearance, in downtown Montreal, despite the similar pattern, demographic, and involvement with the sex trade of all of these women. This is despite an omission from the Cabot Square Serial Predator to the media that “The best way to dispose of an Inuit is to make it look like suicide.”

3. Failures by the Coroner System: The coroner’s responsible for investigating the causes of death of the women in and around Cabot Square were quick to rule the deaths of many of these women a suicide, while failing to look at the broader context of their lives and consider what other possibilities might exist. Each of these women were in known situations of violence, and this could have easily factored into their deaths, as it has in the deaths of countless other Indigenous women across so-called Canada. Each Coroner’s Report of the women is approximately one and a half pages long. How can this possibly reflect the nuance of each of these women’s situations? From a clinical perspective, the differences in presentation of suicide by hanging versus a homicide later covered up as suicide by hanging are extremely subtle, and in prematurely classifying these deaths as suicides, a critical opportunity to gather forensic evidence was missed. Even if each of these deaths were a suicide, the fact that so many young Inuit women are dying by suicide in one specific part of Montreal should be cause for concern. Despite coroners in Quebec being tasked with producing recommendations to prevent future deaths from occurring, no recommendations were produced in any of these cases.

4. Failures by Community Organization and Victim Services: To this day, no women and gender-diverse only space that uses a harm reduction approach exists in the Cabot Square area. These spaces are necessary, considering the way in which vulnerable women who use substances were and still are still being targeted. Many of the survivors of the Cabot Square Serial Predator currently face “life time” service restrictions from nearby community organizations. Women involved in the sex industry report inaccessible services and barriers to services, such as unreliable access to showers, lack of condoms and safer sex materials, and curfews at shelters that directly impeded their ability to safely work and earn an income. Additionally, existing anti-violence and victim services agencies in Montreal did not adapt their services to unhoused Indigenous women in Cabot Square, despite the rampant violence they were and still are facing. The victims of the Cabot Square Serial Predator were abandoned by community organizations who serve unhoused women, by failing to adopt culturally sensitive, anti-violence specific approaches, by Indigenous serving organizations, who failed to adopt a harm reduction, anti-violence approach, and by anti-violence organizations, who failed to adapt to the needs of unhoused Indigenous women who use substances and are facing violence.

5. Harms and Animosity in Public Discourse: The issue of “cohabitation” has long been a source of contention in Cabot Square. Years ago, when the city made the decision to build luxury condos across from Cabot Square, this only furthered the inequality division. Most people living in Cabot Square are living in the extremes of poverty with a total lack of support from surrounding community organizations and institutions. The City of Montreal made promises to build social housing where luxury condos now sit. Where the city could have invested in housing, poverty reduction, and violence prevention, they instead chose the interests of a rich few over the needs of some of the most vulnerable in this city. The City of Montreal has made efforts in recent years to “clean up the park” by offering social programming like concerts and other activities in Cabot Square. People in Cabot Square don’t care about seeing a concert on Friday night. They want to know that they live safely, that someone will believe them and support them if they are raped. For some people, Cabot Square is all they have known, and now they are being pushed out. Judgemental and violent language about people who use drugs, complaints from neighbours about “not in my backyard” (NIMBYism) and wanting to disperse unhoused people from Cabot Square, and a framing of sex workers as being dirty and immoral has led to a view by many Montrealers that Cabot Square is the scum of the city. Every day people in Montreal who know nothing of the lives of people in Cabot Square cast judgement and hold animosity about this part of the city. Residents who are safe in their luxury condos complain about feeling “unsafe” because of the residents of Cabot Square who have lived there long before the condos existed, and these discourses have been allowed to dominate and obscure the reality of the lives in people who live in Cabot Square. No one was asking about the safety of Indigenous women and girls, about the safety of sex workers while they were being targeted en masse for years. Calls by people who are uninformed about the reality of Cabot Square ask for more police, and police only serve to criminalize homelessness, pushing them to places that are more hidden and therefore more dangerous. Once again, this contributes to the narrative that people in Cabot Square are disposable. That their lives do not matter. So when a serial predator targets the most vulnerable members of Cabot Square, no one thinks twice because we have already written them off.

6. Failures by the Medical System: By the Quebec government failing to provide adequate, culturally safe care in Indigenous communities, and forcibly displacing Indigenous people to Montreal in order to seek medical care, this had also contributed to the situation of many Indigenous women in Cabot Square. In many cases, once patients arrive in Montreal, there is a significant lack of support on the part of medical institutions and services. Without support, Indigenous people often go to the place where they know they are most likely to see other Indigenous people, Cabot Square, where non-Indigenous people know they can target newly arrived Indigenous people to Montreal for violence and exploitation.

For for details on the root causes underlying the situation of MMIWG2S+ in Cabot Square, be sure to read our report.