Feminist Research Education Development and Action Centre Reports Index

The FREDA Centre for Research on Violence against Women and Children Reena Virk: The Erasure of Race Yasmin Jiwani, Ph.D. December 1997 A version of this article appeared in the Dec 1997/Jan 1998 edition of Kinesis: News About Women That's Not in the Dailies. November 14, 1997, marks the day when fourteen-year-old Reena Virk was severely beaten, brutalized, and drowned in Victoria, BC. Her crime, according to newspaper accounts, was that she was "an overweight teen" who didn't fit in. In the initial reports, 7 girls and 1 boy were allegedly responsible for her death. The unfolding coverage of the event initiated a moral panic with public calls for a more stringent approach by the criminal justice system in dealing with the issue of youth violence. Subsequently, 6 girls and one boy are to be charged. As the events leading to Virk's murder unfolded in the daily papers and television newscasts, the horror of what "girls to do other girls" was highlighted and quickly overshadowed the issue of male violence. In contrast to the numerous deaths of women by their spouses and ex-spouses, Reena's death was held up as symbol of how girls are not immune to violence. Story after story in the daily papers covered the issue of teen girl violence, quoting research to support the main contention that girls are just as dangerous as boys. Even though existing research clearly links the issue of teen girl violence to the internalization of a dominant, patriarchal culture which values sex and power, this connection was trivialized if not side-stepped altogether. Unlike stories of male violence against women which tend to address this violence as aberrant and singular, news stories focusing on Reena Virk quickly mentioned other related cases of girl violence across the country. Statistics confirming the rising incidence of girl violence were repeatedly stressed to emphasize in effect that girls are no different from boys. The overall message was that this is an epidemic and something needs to be done about it. And, the implicit yet compelling message was that gender-based violence no longer exists within the younger generation. Headlines from The Vancouver Sun screamed: "Teenage Girls and Violence: The BC Reality," "Girls Fighting Marked by Insults, Rumours, Gangs," "Bullies: Dealing with Threats in a Child's Life," "Girls Killing Girls a Sign of Angry, Empty Lives," the last headline suggesting that if girls followed a traditional (gender-based) lifestyle, their lives would not be so empty and frustrating. Throughout the coverage, the media dwelt with puzzlement on the increasing violence of teenage girls at a time when they were supposedly enjoying greater access. Statistics indicating the growing numbers of girls over boys graduating with honours were used to demonstrate this perplexing contradiction. Implicit throughout was the sense that girls don't deserve to be violent because of the privileges they are now enjoying, and further, that girls are not used to the demands inherent in these privileges and therefore, can not cope. At no time did the media provide any in-depth analysis of the violent nature of our dominant culture, or examine ways in which violent behaviour is internalized as a function of coping with a violent society. Feminists have long argued that violence is about power and dominance. Understood in this way, male violence against women is now viewed as a direct outcome of the unequal power and dominance that males exercise in contemporary society. In the Reena Virk case, these same notions of power and dominance were rendered invisible. Instead, any reference to unequal power relations was subsumed within a frame of "the girl who tried desperately to fit in" but could not. Reena Virk could not "fit in" because she had nothing to fit in to. She was brown in a predominantly white society. She was supposedly overweight in a society which values slimness to the point of anorexia, and she was different in a society which values "sameness" and uniformity. And she was killed by those who considered her difference an affront to their sense of uniformity. Their power and dominance, legitimized by and rooted in the sexism and racism of the dominant white culture and its attendant sense of superiority, was used to force her into submission - a submission that amounted to her death and erasure from society. In the public presentation of the murder, Reena suffered yet another erasure. While the daily papers plastered her picture on the front and back pages, no mention save one noted that Reena Virk died because of racism. Instead, the stories repeatedly stressed her lack of fit, and her overweight appearance. The implicit message was that had she been white and had she been thin, she would have fit in, and there would have been no reason for her to be killed. This erasure of race/culture is all the more interesting in light of the media's obsession with culture in the mass killing of the Gakhal and Saran families in Vernon, BC last year. There, despite repeated statements to the contrary by the Coalition of South Asian Women Against Violence, the media continued to emphasize the cultural background of the murdered victims. In Reena Virk's story, the coverage makes no mention of her cultural background even though she is clearly South Asian. Could this absence be due to the fact that she was not killed by one of her own? However, in contrast to the members of the Gakhal and Saran families, Reena's family is identified as being Jehovah's Witnesses. And interestingly, the eulogy delivered by one of the Church elders was used to emphasize Reena's supposedly deviant character. Reena didn't fit in. She had "alleged" incidents of sexual abuse from her father. The Jehovah's Witness who delivered the eulogy carefully recounted how Reena had recanted these allegations, and had in fact made up the allegations in order to obtain personal freedom. She had subsequently been moved to a foster home. Nowhere did the papers mention the pressures that she faced, nor did the papers consider the research on child sexual abuse and the reasons why children recant "allegations" of sexual abuse. In Reena Virk, the sexism and racism of the dominant society found a victim that fit all of its stereotypes. Yet Reena's erasure in the public world marks her as a double symbol of warning to young South Asian girls - that they had better fit or find other ways of survival if they are to continue to live in the white, patriarchal culture of contemporary Canadian society. What happened to Reena could have happened to any number of us who are visibly different and doubly or triply marked in this society by virtue of race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability.