Not infrequently, an action brought to a human rights commission or a court of law has significance far beyond its effects on the principals. The decision made can create new precedents, or reinforce old patterns. Now, each case must be decided on its own merits, within its own parameters. But when one such has precedential importance, it is singularly crucial that it be decided justly: it will affect the lives of unknown numbers of other individuals. Our complaint against the Family Centre is such a case. Here, very briefly, is why.

The first point to be made is that the public announcement on which our complaint focuses is far from being an inadvertent slip-up or an anomaly; it is typical of a great deal of literature produced for the Alberta public on the subject of violence within the family. For years, anti-male falsehoods and stereotypes of exactly the same variety have been promoted in this fashion.

For just one specific example: The three major public surveys on spousal abuse conducted in this province by social scientists in the mid-1980’s are the source of the Family Centre brochure’s claim that one in eight Alberta women is assaulted by her partner. But all three studies found that as many men were assaulted by their wives as the other way around. And, since the great majority of assaults tabulated in those studies were relatively minor, the typical male and female victims were harmed little or not at all--hence the men and women surveyed were also about equally harmed, as well as being equally assaultive. (In really serious cases of physical violence, women are evidently the victims two or three times as often as men--but the incidence of those cases in the population at large is far, far lower than one in eight. And even if one were to focus only on the really serious cases of spousal abuse--which the Family Centre’s flyer certainly does not--the black-and-white stereotype that only men commit it and only women suffer it would still be grossly false.) Again and again over the years, however, half of those scientific studies’ data--the half which reveals the female violence--has been suppressed in publications in this province, just as was done in the Family Centre’s flyer.

Nor is this all. For years, members of the group making this current complaint, and many others, have gone to various organizations promoting the misinformation to ask that they change. Some of them have been receptive; they were merely misinformed themselves by the biased milieu. Others--and this specifically includes influential persons at the Family Centre--rejected such overtures. No amount of evidence regarding the actual facts, or of appeals based on the harms to individuals and society caused by prejudice, could break through their ideological armor.

In those earlier years, moreover, there was evidently no other recourse than appeals to their good will. Until recent changes were made in the Individual Rights Protection Act, it was not unequivocally clear that discriminatory portrayals were forbidden under its regulations. Because of this background, and because of the ongoing serious problem of which the complained-of document is only one instance, it is crucial that an unambiguous condemnation of such biased messages result from this proceeding. A message must be sent to all the producers and conveyers of seriously biased literature on this subject.

Such a result, however, faces a second pervasive problem: the widespread feeling that discrimination against men is no big deal, or possibly even a good thing. Indeed, we submit, this wider attitude is part of the reason why anti-male stereotypes of this particular type have been allowed to flourish, in spite of their dishonesty and in spite of all the harm they do. It is a sad fact of human nature that people can be acutely aware of certain injustices, while not having their consciousness raised to certain other injustices which are closely analogous. That is why our submission included a race-based paraphrase of the publication under complaint. As recently as the 1950’s, most people would not have seen anything wrong with the racial version; today, most would recognise it as the bigoted and falsehood-promoting document which it is. That it is not today equally obvious to many that the Family Centre’s gender-based original is the same sort of thing--a bigoted and falsehood-promoting document--is because their consciousness to the evil of discrimination has been only partially raised.

Now, our intent in presenting the racial analogy must be clearly understood. We are not claiming that the consequences of the anti-male prejudice displayed are (or are not) equally harmful as those of the racial prejudice. We are claiming that the two are equally discriminatory--equally dishonest, equally stereotypical in their portrayals. The harm that is done by such portrayals, of course, is the reason why they are evil. And we are prepared, if asked in the course of the investigation, to bring forward specific evidence of all the injustice and pain caused by anti-male stereotyping--e.g., serious bias in police actions and in courts of law. But this society is already painfully aware of how much harm, in general, is done by negative stereotypes and group-based falsehoods. Hence the human rights law involved here does not require evidence of resulting harm; it simply forbids the prejudicial portrayals themselves.

The problem in this case, to repeat, is that some people are willing to recognise only "politically correct" kinds of discrimination. Corresponding to this partial recognition of injustice, the debates in Canada over equality laws have raged around the question of whether they provide equal rights for all individuals, or special rights for persons in certain "designated groups". Generally, those accused of taking the "special rights" approach vehemently deny it; the laws are to protect all Canadians, they say. And that, surely, is both what the laws literally say and what is morally right.

This, then, constitutes a wider reason why it is so important that an unambiguous decision come out of the current inquiry involving the Family Centre: to send the clear message that all invidious discrimination is wrong, and that the equality laws are indeed for all Canadians. For all that, moreover, it is largely men from disadvantaged groups who are hurt by anti-male discrimination such as that in this case: native men, men of color, and poor men in general are doubly victimised when other kinds of prejudice are compounded by anti-male prejudice. The reasons are manifold why such portrayals must be officially recognised as the evil which they are.