Status of Women Committee on Feb. 3rd, 2015

[Jane Doe]

Absolutely.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Do you see other ways we could redress something that has happened? When it comes to sexual assault, it's obviously more, but when it comes to sexual harassment and other forms of violence against women in society, how else could we redress it?

[Jane Doe]

I think that I and my colleagues have both, as you know, spoken to that.

Sex education that's consent based is critical, and that talks about pleasure and joy in addition to responsibility and sharing at a very early age. My standard programs, which are being initiated across the country, are showing young men and young women what they can do, how they can get involved in what they see happening without putting themselves directly in harm's way.

As for education, I think that we need to look at our universities and our colleges. One thing that I would suggest and that I'm working on currently is modules—say three or four classes—that are dropped into the existing curriculum in law, in journalism, in health care practice, in religious studies, in humanities, and in social work. All of these people deal with sexual assaults; they're all first-liners in different ways. None of them, including lawyers, have any background education about the crime.

That's one or two or three....

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

I'll come back to the idea of understanding consent in society. Do you think that we can spend a lot more time educating specifically on that issue? It seems that there's a complete misunderstanding of what that is.

[Jane Doe]

Yes, and we must.

What I like to say is, rather than consent, I always say consent that is hot—hot and consensual sex. We lie to our young people about sex. We never speak to the pleasure component, which is extremely natural. From a very young age we are engaging in some form of it, whether it's masturbation, it's the pleasure you get from touching yourself.... We're so in denial. Our children at about the age of two or three understand the pleasure they get from their bodies and begin to understand their sexuality even when we think they don't and stop them from doing that.

Consent is critical. As you said, we need to be really careful about what we mean and the definition that we put on it.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much.

Ms. O'Neill Gordon, the floor is yours for seven minutes.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

I want to thank all of you for your presentations today. You certainly gave us lots of food for thought.

My first question is for Todd.

I certainly liked your words and agreed with your points of how important it is for young boys to be shown the proper way and be led and how important it is that we all work together. I found your presentation to be very positive and very powerful. I want to congratulate you on your presentation, as well as all the hard work you are doing. We certainly value the White Ribbon campaign.

I have one question for you. Being a former educator, I was just wondering if there is any certain age on which you focus your presentations? What is the age group that you pretty well work with on this topic?

[Todd Minerson]

That's a great question. Thank you for those nice remarks as well.

One thing we talk about at White Ribbon is what we call a strength-based approach. We know that fear-based, guilt-based, and shame-based approaches with men don't actually make the kind of behaviour change we want to see, so that's something that is very important to us.

To specifically answer your question about age, I would say that every time we go and talk to educators, they say to us, “What are you doing before they get here?” A lot of our programming actually starts to focus around ages eight to fourteen, because that's where a pretty transitional moment happens for young people and they can start to think about gendered relationships and things like that.

But we can start even earlier. It looks a little bit different. It looks more like talking about respect, diversity, equality, tolerance, and inclusivity. You have to make the links to things like bullying and other elements of violence that happen in schools. But much of the funding for programming that we do and much of the access for young people comes around age eight at the earliest.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

That's a good age. I taught primary students in grade 1, so I know that there would be some links and some very important ideas that we would be presenting to them in the classroom. But to go and speak, it would have to be to eight-year-olds and up.

[Todd Minerson]

The ideas are already starting to form. We do a workshop with nine-year-old boys in grade 4. I have an eight-year-old son, so this is very near and dear to my heart. We ask them the question, “What do you not like about being a boy?” The number one thing on this list that some young boys put together was not being able to be a mother.

We talked to a boy afterwards and asked him what he meant by that. He told me that from what he sees on TV and around the world, it is always moms that get to care for the kids; it's always moms that get to be loving. Dads are always portrayed as dumbbells, goofballs, klutzes. At age nine, this boy already knew that was potentially inaccessible to him as a boy.

There were other things on that list, like growing hair everywhere and smelling bad, which we couldn't do much about, but there was also having an automatic bad reputation. So at age nine, these boys felt that the thing they didn't like about being a boy was that people would automatically assume they have a bad reputation.

So to Rosemary's point earlier and to what we're trying to say at White Ribbon, this is a terrible system especially for women and girls, but also for men and boys, when our nine-year-olds are telling us that.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

That's very interesting to hear.

Thank you for your presentation and your good words.

My next question is for Rosemary. Plan Canada is, as we all know, one of the oldest international development agencies working in partnership with millions of people around the world to end global poverty. This is such an important initiative, and I'm wondering how many countries Plan Canada works with around the globe.

[Rosemary McCarney]

We work in more than 70 countries.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

How successful have the efforts of Plan Canada been in achieving your goals?

[Rosemary McCarney]

I think we're very practical in how we go about it. Our goal is to actually empower communities and individuals to take ownership and responsibility for their own communities, because it really is about empowering others to do the work.

Our teams across the world have about 8,000 staff across those 70 countries, and maybe all but 100 are local citizens of those countries. So we are supporting them with both technical assistance and financial assistance to achieve the key priorities that communities themselves identify.

The consultative process we talked about with the national action plan holds true wherever you go in the world, because if I sat down and spent a year consulting with a community about its priorities, the chief or the traditional leaders might say what they need is a health clinic, because there is not a health clinic; that's down the road. What the women might say is, no, what they need is early childhood education and a primary school classroom right there in the village because it is too full. If I sit down and talk to the adolescents in the community, they might say that what they actually need is safe transportation to the high school because they won't be able to go to high school if they have to go to another town. The little children might say something entirely different.

Those perspectives are all valid, but it's about the community and bringing a community together to decide its priorities in laying out a plan of what they can contribute and the help we might be able to bring to be able to achieve those goals that they set.

Those goals are very contextualized.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

Yes. That's for sure.

You mentioned funding. I know you certainly do a lot of work, so you would require a lot of funding.

I'm wondering if you receive funding from Status of Women, and in what areas.

[Rosemary McCarney]

We do actually. Status of Women is a terrific partner of ours.

As with Todd, the vast majority of our funding comes from individual Canadians. We have about 250,000 Canadians who are recurring donors to our work and who every month make a decision to contribute across the country, and then we have other support from foundations, etc. But the balance is projects with DFATD, Status of Women, and with international organizations such as the World Bank, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the World Food Programme, etc.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

That's good to hear.

[Rosemary McCarney]

That includes Status of Women. We're doing some wonderful work with Status of Women right now and with the Ys across the country helping young girls identify actions they want to take to address problems that they are identifying in their communities around violence and discrimination, exclusion, etc.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

Do you know offhand how much is received from Status of Women?

[Rosemary McCarney]

Over several years...because we've done a number of different things with Status of Women, so aggregated, I wouldn't know, but I'm happy to provide that to you.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much. We would appreciate it if you could send that to the clerk. We'll distribute it to all the members.

Thank you very much Mrs. O'Neill Gordon.

Ms. Bennett, you have seven minutes.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Thank you all. I particularly appreciated all of your focus on the young boys. As a mother of two sons, it's worrying every day that kids can grow up thinking it's okay.

Since 2002, when the WHO's first report on violence came out, I don't think we've done a good enough job explaining what violence is. Whether it's online, or it's a put-down remark, I don't think we've done a very good job.

I think the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health...or a lot of people have felt that we need to flip this around to explain what respectful relationships are and what they look like, as opposed to this really narrow definition that we don't seem to be able to break out of, that if you don't punch somebody, you haven't been violent.

I was wondering if in addressing violence you have examples of how you get in early with little boys and girls about respectful relationships, as opposed to immediately labelling it something that people will deny.

I was wondering—this is for the clerk—if the committee has the Australian action plan and the British one, as well as both the WHO 2002 study, and its report from 2014 that actually tried to examine how well we've done, which doesn't seem to be so great.

I think, Jane, you would agree that long before people get to court, the work has to be done to prevent it such that people get what “unwelcome” means and what “consent” means.

Can you share with me any experiences you may have in the work you're doing in regard to flipping it onto respectful relationships instead of just talking about violence?

[Todd Minerson]

If I could, I'll start with one quick one.

We have a project that's funded by the Ontario government that's part of their healthy and equal relationships funding stream. It's called “It starts with you. It stays with him.” It's about a research insight. When we asked men about how they wanted to get involved, the one thing that jumped out was that they would talk to young men in their lives.

This is a project that encourages men as fathers, as educators, as community leaders, and as faith leaders and coaches to do exactly that kind of thing in conversations and engagements with young men in their lives.

What we have tried to do is identify the barriers and take them out of the way. Men tell us they don't know how; they're afraid they'll get it wrong; nobody ever modelled it for them.

This campaign is all about building those resources for men to actually activate that role and to talk to young people in their lives about healthy, equal relationships, about active consent, about all of those things as part of their—

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

So where does I Am a Kind Man fit into that?

[Todd Minerson]

I Am a Kind Man is a project that we helped initiate with the Ontario Federation of Indian Friendship Centres. That's an adaptation of a lot of our work for aboriginal communities. It's an unbelievable project as well.