Status of Women Committee on March 3rd, 2014

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

I'm going to pass that to my colleague, Mr. Young.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Thank you.

I'd like to go back to Valerie Steeves, please, because as I mentioned, I find your research fascinating.

With regard to the social sites, I understand you weren't ready to describe them as dangerous, and I understand that as an academic you have to be objective and dispassionate, etc. But you also mentioned you're a mother. You mentioned that the sites create pressure to conform, and there was the term “a new environment”. To me it sounds as if it's almost like a parallel universe, where things aren't real, but we're meant to believe they are real, with doctored photos, photoshopped pictures of women, and this pressure. And the Google ads allow corporations to target young girls by their age, their demographic group, to sell them diet products, plastic surgery, and other things that also have their own risks.

You didn't say this, but I know from my own research that they're getting them when their commercial guard is down, if they're mature enough to even have a commercial guard, if their parents have had some training, as you have, or if they have parents who are wise to this and say, listen, don't believe everything you see, and they lecture them. But I would suggest most children don't have that training. Maybe you can comment on that. You also mentioned deceptive and unfair trade practices.

Would you feel comfortable describing these social sites as risky or inappropriate for girls at—and I'm going to give you four different ages, because you mention age too—six years old—because I know a six-year-old who uses social websites—12 years old, 13 years old, and 15 years old?

What advice do you have for parents of girls in those age groups?

[Dr. Valerie Steeves]

My response to the question of whether these sites are risky is that when you sit down with kids and ask them that question, they go, “But look around you. It's everywhere. It's not just online. It's in movies, it's in TV, it's in the ads when I walk through Bayshore.” It's everywhere.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

When you say kids, I get confused because....

[Dr. Valerie Steeves]

I'm talking about 11-year-olds to 17-year-olds. They will articulate that quite clearly.

My project is focused on social media, but at the same time I think it's important to recognize that social media provides a snapshot of teen life that we wouldn't necessarily be able to see without social media because it has a public-private aspect to it. But I don't think these are problems that exist on social media only. I think social media gives us a good way of trying to understand the way the commercialization of childhood is affecting young people, both online and offline.

Clearly, kids will say there is no difference. It's all one big social space. They don't see it as a brave new world; it's just the world they're in.

Having said that, I want to second the idea that there's a body image spectrum we're talking about. One of the reasons that media images are relevant to this discussion when you're trying to help people who are suffering from this illness—and it is an illness—is that they can act as triggers. They can silence kids. It makes it harder for people to say they are having this problem, because they're getting all of this feedback saying that being skinny is something girls in particular should pursue, and that type of thing.

I think there is an interrelationship. It's not that girls have bad body image and they become anorexic. I think that's far too simplistic. What I'm trying to say is that particularly for the most vulnerable in our society, girls who are suffering from this particular illness, these are triggers, and we have a responsibility to deal with them. We also have the broader mental and social health of girls as a whole to consider.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Ashton, you have a couple of minutes.

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill, MB]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Steeves, one issue that has become apparent not just in this study but in other studies in this committee has been the lack of voices that we have in civil society in particular to speak out on the issues that women face. I remember growing up hearing about campaigns around MediaWatch, and about fighting back when sexually explicit ads, or misogynistic ads, were out there. Now we don't hear those voices in the same way.

I'm wondering if you could speak a bit, as an academic, about what you've seen. I mean, who are the voices out there? Are we supporting young women's work in advocating, older women's work in advocating?

[Dr. Valerie Steeves]

Yes, I think there are some best practices and some sites that are particularly useful. Certainly some campaigns have been started by young women to push back against this. One thing we see through social media is that it becomes a snapshot to see the kinds of responses they encounter when they do stand up and say, “Hey, there's something wrong with this.”

Certainly what we see in our research is a rise in slut-shaming; that is, if a woman or young girl does stand up and say something, then she's attacked basically on the grounds that she's a woman. There's the recent thing at the University of Ottawa just over the last few days, where the female president of the student body was attacked, and was basically threatened with rape, in a conversation among her peers on the student government.

That's misogyny at work. I mean, she's being attacked because she's a women, and we know how to attack women: we attack them by threatening to assault them, by threatening to rape them, and by calling them fat and ugly.

Interestingly enough, again, the eGirls Project expected to find a multiplicity of voices and a space for a diversity of views. We're finding that the media, as it's developing, is actually shutting down those spaces in really interesting ways. I think it's happening because the impact of the mainstream message is just becoming more powerful. We look for conformity to a norm, and we're putting more pressure on young people to conform to norms of behaviour, body size, and those types of things.

So it's kind of paradoxical.

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill, MB]

Ms. Lemoine, we heard about your blog. If we do see initiatives that young women are starting, is there a role for government to support that advocacy? I don't necessarily mean your blog in particular, but is that something we should be looking at?

[Patricia Lemoine]

I think there certainly should be systems in place to support initiatives that would be taken into schools. I think kids will spend most of their time during the day not with their parents or at home, but just being in school with their peers, hearing the dialogue of the thigh gap. If you spend three or four hours a night with them as a parent, you can't reverse that whole dialogue that was done throughout the day.

I would say it would probably be helpful to have school initiatives to support positive body image, initiatives on how to detect when someone is going through a difficult time when they have low self-esteem, or initiatives on the dormant triggers that are there.

[Dr. Valerie Steeves]

I would just add that we have a Canadian centre of excellence that excels at this type of outreach and education, and that's MediaSmarts. It's one of the largest media literacy and digital literacy organizations in the world. They have phenomenal education initiatives that are geared to do precisely that.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

I can't begin to thank you enough for, first, having testified about such personal things, but also for having shown us that there is light at the end of the tunnel. That's what I really appreciated. Despite the challenges which were mentioned, there is hope. So our meeting is ending on a positive note.

I would like to remind committee members that at the next meeting, during the first hour, we will hear from witnesses. During the second hour, we will prepare for our next study. I would invite you to submit your ideas on paper so we can talk about them, with a view to deciding what our next study will be on.

Thank you once again.

The meeting is adjourned.