On Thursday, the Vancouver Sun published a letter from Christy Clark talking about her personal reasons for supporting the bill ordering all post-secondary institutions in B.C., including UNBC and CNC, to have sexual assault and misconduct protocols in place.
In the letter, she recounts a harrowing story about narrowly escaping from a man who pulled her into some bushes as she walked to her part-time job in Burnaby when she was 13 years old. To put her story in a broader and terrifying context, Clifford Olson's started raping and murdering teenagers across the Lower Mainland just two years later.
Part of the reaction to Clark's admission is sickening. The truth of her story is being challenged by some, while others are granting that it might be true but saying she's just jumping on the politically-correct "me, too" bandwagon, just a year before the next provincial election.
Why should a woman's politics shape the reaction to her admission that she was the teenaged victim of an attempted sexual assault? Connecting the two is all but saying that only some women deserve to share their stories and the rest should stay quiet.
From there, it's a short step to believing that some women deserve to be raped.
In her letter, Clark admits right off the top that neither she nor the B.C. Liberals sponsored this bill before the legislature. The sponsor of the bill is Green MLA Andrew Weaver and he deserves thanks for taking the initiative.
The praise doesn't belong to him alone. Clark and the B.C. Liberals are supporting the bill because of its merits. The premier has stressed the importance of this legislation with her own personal story, when she was under no obligation to do, knowing full well the criticism to come.
Making university and college campuses safer for young women benefits everyone and it's the right thing to do. Complimenting Clark on both her decision and her courage to step forward is also the right thing to do. But so is criticizing Clark on Liberal Party donations, the stipend the B.C. Liberals pay her over and above her salary as premier, the brass knuckles handling of the unions representing government employees, the LNG file and her other political choices.
There is no contradiction for anyone to praise the premier for backing Weaver's bill, thank her for sharing her connection to this issue and then declare she's the worst premier in B.C. history in the next breath.
There are two other points of Clark's letter that should be noted.
"I never told anyone," she writes. "Not about this or any of the other frightening things of a sexual nature that happened to me as a child or a teenager."
That means there were other incidents in Clark's past, perhaps minor, perhaps far more serious. She has chosen to keep those private, as is her right. No young girl or grown woman should ever have to experience a single incident, never mind multiple "frightening things of a sexual nature."
It's also clear she didn't reveal this incident sooner because she is aware of and likely knows women with stories of rape or sexual abuse. She didn't want to do or say anything to diminish those survivors. She processed what happened to her as what didn't happen - she wasn't killed, she wasn't raped, she wasn't beaten.
Worst of all, she felt ashamed to speak, that polite girls and strong, modern women did not acknowledge such transgressions. She felt that this was her burden to bear alone.
Thankfully, that is not the case anymore but in the aftermath of the Jian Ghomeshi trial, women more than ever need to hear that just because a judge is bound by the law and the evidence presented to acquit, that doesn't mean sexual violence doesn't happen and no one will believe the women who say it happened to them.
Clark doesn't want sympathy for herself. She just asks for understanding for women who have endured and survived sex crimes.
Even nearly four decades later, she's still haunted by the cost someone else may have paid for her silence, that the next girl wasn't as lucky as she was. If she had stepped forward then, maybe police would have caught the man and prevented him from trying to grab more girls.
The most politically powerful woman in the province has stepped forward now. If just one 13-year-old girl tells a parent or a teacher about something that happened to her after reading Clark's letter, then the premier has truly done the province a great service.
