This morning's Globe and Mail reports on the aftermath of last Friday's brutal beating of a 14-year old girl in Montreal North. We are painted a grim picture of two student bodies shaken by the incident, watching their backs, walking in groups, weary of more violence. Ingrid Peritz writes,
To some observers, the tensions are merely cracks in the Canadian ethnic mosaic that are inevitable in large, cosmopolitan cities such as Montreal. Lester B. Pearson is an English-language school with a predominantly Italian student body; Henri Bourassa is a French-language school with many Haitian students.
Still, community workers say, the flare-up highlights the risks of isolation among ethnic groups in Canada's largest cities.
"What happened reflects how multicultural communities in Montreal can live side by side while ignoring one another," said Pierreson Vaval, a youth protection worker active with schools and police in the area. "These young people are just acting out what their parents are saying at home. Unfortunately, it leads to incidents like this.
"They live in the same neighborhoods. But they don't exchange."
On the French side, TQS interviews students and parents. They also have footage of the beating, taken by a student with a cellular-phone camera:
As I watch the video of the beating, I am stricken by the sheer brutality of it all. That these students would kick a young girl like that as she curls up on the pavement betrays something very ugly about this community, and so about Montreal and Quebec society in general. That this spasm of violence coincides with an ongoing province-wide debate about reasonable accommodation, a controversial PQ proposal concerning Quebec citizenship, and still more debate about the unveiling of Muslim women who want to vote, is certainly no coincidence. The problem is systemic, it is enduring, and it is hurting our students.
No comments:
Post a Comment