Status of Women committee  Another really dominant myth is the idea that the most common places that assaults happen are in bars or in the park, when in actuality we know that most assaults happen in your own home.

Status of Women committee  We want to define consent. At AVP, we define consent as the mutual, emotional, physical, and psychological understanding between people without the use of force of any kind. You will also see in the package that you have one of the tools we use when we do our consent workshops and when we go out and speak to students.

Status of Women committee  We also have a handout with a glossary, if you folks would like to look over some of our terms more in depth. With these definitions in mind, we would like to talk a bit about the work that has happened in B.C., where we're from, and why legislation around campus sexualized violence is so important.

Status of Women committee  With all this in mind, why is there a need for federal leadership on these issues? We need federal leadership because we need the campaigns, the resources, and the dialogues to really be across the country. While post-secondary education currently rests in the hands of the provinces, we're not just talking about legislation and policy.

Status of Women committee  The Anti-Violence Project is the on-campus sexual assault centre at the University of Victoria. We were officially founded in 1998, based on a student referendum. I think it's really important for us to note that we are solely funded by students. In terms of our services, while they're open to the whole community, we're accountable to our student community in a very big way.

Status of Women committee  My name is Kenya Rogers, and I am a policy adviser at the Anti-Violence Project. I'm a fourth year political science student at UVic.

Status of Women committee  Thank you, honourable members, for having us here today. Paloma and I are going to share this 10 minutes, so we'll be going back and forth. I would like to acknowledge the host communities and nations on whose territories we're working, and learning, and unlearning here today. Those are the territories of the Algonquin people.

Status of Women committee  At the AVP we aim to offer our space to our community by coming from an anti-oppressive intersectional feminist framework. This means that we're always challenging and engaging in a process of opening up our spaces, our dialogues, and our work to include the voices and experiences of everyone.

Status of Women committee  This violence has continued to exist despite our individual responses to it. This is because those institutional responses so often haven't navigated the systemic roots of the violence in the first place. This is what we call “rape culture”. It's important for us to root ourselves in understandings of the language that we're using.