Bonnyville mayor Gene Sobolewski will be among a group of local men rocking some red high heels and collecting donations for the Dr. Margaret Savage Crisis Centre at Sunday’s Bonnyville Pontiacs game.
The event is the Centre’s take on “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes,” their first big push in the community since opening up a branch in Bonnyville last year.
“There is an old saying: ‘You can’t really understand another person’s experience until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes,’ the international march’s website reads. “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® asks men to literally walk one mile in women’s high-heeled shoes. It’s not easy walking in these shoes, but it’s fun and it gets the community to talk about something that’s really difficult to talk about: gender relations and men’s sexualized violence against women.”
While the volunteers at 2PM Pontiacs game won’t be walking a full mile, they will be going around the R.J Lalonde Arena asking for donations to the DMSCC and speaking between periods. The men will be afforded a bit more comfort than they might have otherwise in the shoes. Each pair of red heels is specially made for a man’s feet.
Don’t think family violence is any laughing matter in the Lakeland though. The Centre has had lots of work to do in Cold Lake for years, and Bonnyville has been keeping them plenty busy as well. They’ve already made contact with fourty eight women in town in less than a year of operation with little in the way of public awareness.
Things don’t look much better around Alberta either, which has the second highest rate of domestic abuse in Canada.