Exactly three years ago, Hurricane Katrina struck the U.S. Gulf Coast, only eight months after walls of water two stories high swept entire villages to sea and killed a quarter of a million people in a dozen other countries. The Indian Ocean earthquake that raised those walls is said to have released the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs.

Katrina had nowhere near that force, yet after nearly every levee in metro New Orleans was breached, 80% of the city and many areas of neighboring parishes were flooded for weeks. Seventy-one percent of New Orleans’ occupied housing was damaged, making it the largest residential disaster in U.S. history.
The title story of my collection, Silent Girl, is bookended by these catastrophes of biblical proportions. I researched them for that story and like to check in from time to time to find out how recovery is proceeding. Whether we’re talking about New Orleans or Asia, the ones who suffered the most were the most disadvantaged to begin with.

For example, over 100,000 undocumented Burmese migrants were working in the rubber, construction, and tourism industries on Thailand’s western coast when the tsunami hit. Those who survived were deliberately excluded from all official assistance, denied shelter in camps, and left on their own to survive.

Remember the pictures of the mostly poor, mostly black people in New Orleans abandoned to primitive conditions at the Superdome?  As Ruth Gidley reports in this Reuters News article, “Katrina not only changed the way the rest of the world views one of the richest countries on the planet, it changed the way storm survivors think about their government.”

A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey revealed that most New Orleans residents still feel forgotten by their government and their fellow citizens. Contributing to that feeling is the fact that less than half the federal money set aside for rebuilding has actually been spent on it. Similarly in Asia, $1.6 billion was earmarked for rebuilding after the tsunami but war and politics have slowed down the work. A UN-led effort has begun to install tsunami-warning systems in the Indian Ocean, but work on strengthening the levees in New Orleans won’t be done until 2011.

This is on my mind right now because I’ve been following coverage of the Democratic Convention in Denver and trying not to get swept away by the rhetoric on change. It’s tough, though. I shed a few tears during Ted Kennedy’s speech. Not due to affection—I haven’t forgotten Mary Jo Kopechne—but because of his call for “a better world” with “justice for the many.”  It brought me back to the days of JFK when I, like the many young Obama disciples today, were eager to stand on the edge of the “new frontier” he spoke about. I wept during Michelle Obama’s speech, too, when she recalled Barak saying we too easily accept the distance between “the world as it is” and “the world as it should be.” And I wept during his acceptance speech when he said, “Enough!” and “America, we’re better than that.”

I’d like to believe he would lead the effort to bridge the distance between what is and what should be but my hope is tempered by history. Time and again we demonstrate how little we care for the poor and the others we marginalize.  We send money when disaster first strikes but we quickly lose interest, junkies for the next sensational story, unwilling to share long-term with others. It’s difficult for us to sustain the effort required to effect lasting change. In New Orleans, that would involve dealing with the deep-seated racism and class divides that are barriers to a good education for all, decent housing for all, and livable wages for all.

In Canada and many other parts of the world, I’m guessing it would be the same.

A few days ago, as part of an outdoor arts event, I read excerpts from two stories in Silent Girl, one of them “Kesh Kumay,” which takes place in Kyrgyzstan. I related the statistic that a third of marriages in Kyrgyzstan result from non-consensual kidnappings (versus the consensual kind we call elopements). A woman came up to me afterward and told me she had traveled extensively in countries we criticize for their treatment of women.

“We shouldn’t be too quick to judge them,” she said. Maybe a third of marriages result from kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, she noted, but “one in four women” in our country are assaulted by their partners. “Exotic” abuse is always more interesting to talk (and write) about.  We should mind our own business before pointing fingers overseas.

So, is it one in four – 25%? The latest stats I could find, from Family Violence
in Canada: A Statistical Profile 2005 from Statistics Canada, indicated that seven per cent of women and six per cent of men end up abused by their current or former partners. In terms of numbers, that works out to an estimated 653,000 women and 546,000 men. The reported abuse included having something thrown at them and/or having been:

•    pushed, shoved or grabbed;
•    threatened to be hit;
•    beaten or choked;
•    slapped;
•    kicked, hit or bit; and
•    sexually assaulted

The data showed that female victims of spousal violence were more than twice as likely to be injured as male victims. Women were also three times more likely to fear for their life, and twice as likely to be the targets of more than 10 violent episodes. And, overall, female victims were twice as likely as male victims to be stalked by a previous spouse.

So, women are at greater risk of serious injury than men but what are we to conclude about the nearly equal numbers of men and women reporting spousal abuse?

When I began writing my story “Deep Dark Waves,” I intended to portray a  “typical” domestic abuse situation: man as aggressor, woman as victim.  But my research unearthed a more intriguing scenario: woman gets off on violence, is in fact addicted to it. It was so much more interesting to me as a writer. But I realized the story could be controversial. A woman who interviewed me on the radio said she was “conflicted” when reading “Deep Dark Waves” for that reason.

Several people have reviewed the book but, so far, the radio interviewer is the only one who has commented on the disparity between what we believe to be true about domestic violence and the scenario my story presents. Because we don’t believe that women are violent, we don’t have any services in place to counsel those who are. And because our society considers a man who can’t defend himself against a “mere” woman to be weak, he may be too ashamed to seek help. If he does, we can’t offer him much. So, our beliefs aren’t doing us much good.

That is…if we believe the stats. Do you?