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| THE REENA VIRK CASE | ||||
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The following transcript is from the award-winning It's About Time video, produced by Lalita Krishna for CASSA's Say No to Hate project.
Anon journalist: At school, she was a target for cruelty, overweight and dark complected she was mercilessly teased.
Sheila Batacharya: Reena Virk was a young South Asian woman that lived in Victoria, British Columbia and on November 14th 1997 she was lured to a park by two young women and she was assaulted...One of the two young women took a lit cigarette and stubbed it out on her forehead between her eyes. And then they all sat upon her, and they kicked her and punched her. After the assault she was assaulted a second time, 2 of the youth that were involved in the first attack beat her unconscious and then drowned her in the gorge waterway.
Journalist: The incident was all the more shocking for the racial implications of the attack and the fact that most of the assailants were teenage girls.
Reena's grandfather: It's not easy to lose a child or any member of your family, and especially when she is murdered.
Sheila Batacharya: We were just horrified both by what happened but also by the fact that Reena Virk as one person faced so many of the issues that face young South Asian women in general...One of the things that really angered me was that the crime was being discussed as an example of girl violence so there was no mention of racism. It was almost that because no one ever called Reena Virk a 'Paki' or some other racial slur that people couldn't get their heads around the fact that so many other examples of their behavior and other actions indicated racism. The fact that the attack was initiated by somebody stubbing a lit cigarette out on her forehead between her eyes which is where you would wear a bindi. And even in the final days of the testimony it was really interesting because Judge Morrison did not have any evidence presented to her throughout the whole trial that a motive for this crime might have been racism. But at the sentencing she felt compelled to say that this was not a race motivated crime, she just said that without referring to anything in the court proceedings which says a lot I think. I definitely consider this crime a hate crime. It was not taken up as a hate crime either in the media or in the court proceedings. |
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