The fast and furious successes of the #MeToo movement have inspired allegations of excess. A recent episode of CBC Radio’s The Current, for instance, was titled “Has the #MeToo Campaign Gone Too Far?” — citing “critics [who] are now questioning whether the campaign has created a moral panic.”

Commentators fixate on the possibility that the #MeToo groundswell will go too far in penalizing individual men — while often overlooking the reality that it has not gone nearly far enough in addressing the systemic abuses experienced by the most marginalized women, who have long been at the forefront of resistance to sexual violence.

Are we seriously asking whether #MeToo has gone too far — when it has so far largely failed to confront the sexual violence committed by police forces with impunity, particularly victimizing Indigenous women, Black women, and other women of colour?

Between 1990 and 2016, Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit (the agency meant to oversee policing bodies in the province) received 591 complaints about sexual assault by police officers: the third most common type of offence handled by the SIU, even with severe under-reporting.

According to a recent analysis by the CBC, only 13 per cent of sexual assault complaints against Ottawa police over the last 10 years resulted in criminal charges — even lower than the charge rate for sex-assault cases in the general population, which is 34 per cent.

Human Rights Watch has repeatedly documented the brutalization of Indigenous women by police in Canada, a continuation of centuries of colonial violence. Women have described being aggressively strip-searched by male officers, being gang raped by police, and waking up in jail cells with their pants and underwear missing.

“Researchers were struck … by the high levels of fear of police among the women interviewed, levels of fear normally found in communities in post-conflict or post-transition countries such as Iraq where security forces have played an integral role in state abuses,” Human Rights Watch observed in Those Who Take Us Away, a 2013 report on policing in British Columbia.

Are we seriously asking whether #MeToo has gone too far — when the violence suffered by migrant workers is still peripheral in its scope of concern?

Canada’s temporary foreign worker program “allows employers to target vulnerable women for sexual abuse,” writes law professor Fay Faraday, who has studied the program extensively. Closed work permits, precarious immigration status, poverty, and social isolation make migrant workers highly dependent on their employers, leaving them with few defences against violation and exploitation.

“Migrant workers’ insecurity is … not inevitable,” Faraday notes, but “a product of choices that federal and provincial governments have made.”

In 2015, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal awarded compensation to two sisters from Mexico, who were pressured to engage in sexual acts with their employer under threat of deportation. But such redress is exceedingly rare; in that very same case, 40 other complainants were sent back to their home countries before the tribunal made its decision, and so received nothing. Abuses are widespread, while justice and accountability are scarce.

Are we seriously asking whether #MeToo has gone too far — when its ambit of outrage has not yet extended to the many depredations committed by Canadian corporations abroad?

From Tanzania to Guatemala, Canadian mining companies have been implicated in rapes, killings, and other atrocities against women and men living on the lands miners extract their wealth from. These abuses have been recorded and publicized by Canadian and international human rights organizations. But instead of effectively restraining the crimes of the mining industry, the Canadian government has bolstered it with economic and political support.

How can we ask whether the current #MeToo movement has gone too far, when it has barely scratched the surface of deeply entrenched legal, economic, and political structures that make Indigenous women, Black and Brown women, migrant women, queer women, trans women, and poor women disproportionately vulnerable to violence in our society?

The questions we choose to ask limit the range of possible answers in response — and as feminist science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin remarked, “there are no right answers to wrong questions.”

Questions about the alleged overreach of #MeToo reveal the pervasiveness of the expectation that the social burden of fear and responsibility for sexual violence should be borne by women (and by some women more than others) — so that any shift of the burden from the shoulders of a limited subset of women onto the shoulders of men incites accusations that the movement has gone too far.

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The fact that so many are asking whether #MeToo has gone too far shows how very far we still have to go.

Azeezah Kanji is a legal analyst, and usually writes in the Star every other Thursday.