Canadian Pulse

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The Montreal Health Press' struggle to survive is now critical. The organization, which has
always operated on non-profit basis and as a collective, has been providing Handbooks to health and educational organizations since 1968 at the lowest possible price.

But today, because of cutbacks to public spending and rising costs in general, they are unable to reprint out of stock Handbooks (Sexual Assault and Contrìle des Naissances) without confirmed orders or other financial backing.

They are urgently appealing for support from individuals and organizations, either in the form of contributions or orders for their books.

Since its inception, when a group of courageous students at McGill University produced the first Birth Control Handbook (when providing this information was illegal), the Montreal Health Press has been providing Canadian and American men and women with information on health, sexuality, reproductive rights not only the facts but the analysis and social context which give meaning to the facts.

This year, they published the 30th anniversary edition of the Birth Control Handbook, and updated their STD Handbook.

Montreal Health Press
P.O. Box 1000, Station Place du Parc
Montreal QC H2W 2N1
Tel: (514) 282-1171
Fax: (514) 282-0262
E-mail: mhpmontreal@msn.com
















www.worldsfinest.com/mhp

French Feminists On-line

Anyone who trying to find information in French on the Internet quickly realizes what an English- based world the WWW is.

In an effort to make French feminist web user's lives easier, Women'Space's web site now offers a French section, with a list of 30 categories of French feminist web sites. They also offer other pages of links to handy Web sites about the Internet, Work, Politics, Finance, Human Rights, and more, mostly in French.

They promise more is to come this fall at http://www.womenspace.ca/.

For more information contact: Nicole Nepton at nnepton@cam.org

Pesticide Alert in New Brunswick

Because of the phenomenal increase in pesticide use over the past decade, and results of a study published in Spring 1997 indicating higher infertility rates in women who work in agriculture, the Healthy Environments Programme of the Conservation Council of New Brunswick (CCNB) has launched The Rural Pesticide Awareness Campaign in coordination with the Farm Women's Network.

The campaign is an outreach programme, developed in collaboration with the NB Partners in Agriculture, and will raise awareness of the risks of pesticide exposure to children's health and women's fertility in order to reduce the use of pesticides in New Brunswick.

The project will focus on:

• gathering and presenting scientific evidence about how endocrine disrupting chemicals can affect human health;
• encouraging changes in federal pesticide regulation policies which do not periodically review chemicals and pesticides currently in use;
• educating policymakers and the public about the need to decrease the risks of pesticide use, especially the risks of agricultural pesticides containing endocrine disrupting chemicals;
• providing information to farmers to encourage them to switch from the intensive use of fungicides to alternatives such as copper sulphate, or to reduce the number of sprays by incorporating alternative strategies.;
• incorporating facilitators/trainers in each farm community to distribute the message concerning the risk to children's health by exposure to pesticides.

The project will also encourage farm households to take greater precautionary measures
against pesticide exposure. For further information, contact:

The Conservation Council of New Brunswick
180 St. John St.
Fredericton NB E3B 4A9
Tel: (506) 458-8747
Fax: (506) 458-1047
E-mail: ccnb@nb.aibn.com
www.web.net/~ccnb

Polar Women Get Together

Northern Women: Different Lives, Common Threads, a conference to bring together women from across the Circumpolar North to share their knowledge, wisdom and experience, will take the time to examine and learn from women's perspectives on the northern experience. To be held in Whitehorse November 18th to 20th, the conference promises to showcase the talents of northern women in a variety of fields. It will also celebrate the accomplishments and contributions of northern women, bringing together women from the north from Canada, but also from as far as Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Russia.

PO Box 5643
Whitehorse YK Y1A 5H4
Tel: (867) 667-5740
Fax: (867) 393-6270
E-mail: conference@circumpolar.net




www.circumpolar.net

Family Violence in Canada

The following statistics were reported by the National Clearinghouse on Family Violence.

• Abuse occurs in all forms of relationships, including: parent-child, caregiver-client, adult child-parent, dating, gay and lesbian, marital and common-law and sibling.
• Since the age of sixteen, 51% of Canadian women report having experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual violence.
• Nearly three in ten Canadian women (29%) who have ever been married or lived in a common-law relationship have been physically or sexually assaulted by a marital partner at some point during the relationship; 21% of these women were assaulted during pregnancy.
• Of 22,000 victims of spousal violence reported to a sample of 179 Canadian police agencies in 1997, 88% (19,575) were female and 12% (2,679) were male.
• Children witnessed violence against their mothers in almost 40% of violent marriages; in many cases of children witnessing violence, the violence was so severe that the women feared for their lives (52%) and/or were injured (61%).
• Nearly one quarter of women (22%) who have experienced wife assault never told anyone about the abuse.
• Violent men are three times as likely as nonviolent men to have witnessed spousal violence in childhood, and women who were raised in similar circumstances are twice as likely to be victims of spousal violence.
• Between 1978 and 1997, 1,485 females and 442 males were killed by their spouses in Canada.
• A total of 90,792 women and children were admitted to 413 shelters for battered women across Canada in 1997-1998.
• In 1996, children under 18 represented 22% of victims of assaults reported to a sample of 154 police agencies; children represented 60% of all victims of sexual assault and 18% of all victims of physical assault.
• Of sexual assaults by family members reported to police, girls were victimized in 79% of cases (1,662); while boys were victims in 21% of cases (440).
• The degree of risk of sexual abuse of persons with disabilities is "at least 150% of that for individuals of the same sex and similar age without disabilities," according to a report published in 1988.
• In 1997, older adults accounted for 2% of victims of all violent crime reported to a sample of 179 police agencies; of these, 53% reported sustaining some type of injury.
• Almost 25% of violent incidents against older persons reported toa sample of police in 1997 were perpetrated by family members; and while more older men were victimized by their adult children (41%) than by a spouse (28%), older women experienced violence by adult children (40%) and spouses (40%) in equal proportions.