So, 71% of post-secondary students have been subjected to or have witnessed sexual assault or harassment. Much of that includes alcohol-facilitated sexual assault. During the first time that it was appealed, and then the Supreme Court decision, we had survivors come into our office in tears, come up to us during training, saying, “Well, I guess I can't report. No one is going to believe me. He's going to get off.” They would say in workshops that there is no point in reporting because no one is going to go forward with this, because now they can do it without any repercussions. It was a consistent thing. We actually had to change the way we did our training.
I am a part of the federal government-funded project called “Courage to Act”, which is leading the conversation on gender-based violence at universities and colleges across the country. We were working with organizations from across the country having the same conversation. They had survivors coming in terrified that they no longer could report, or, if they had reported, that during the trial it would be pushed out because of this decision.
We actually worked really closely with LEAF. We approached them and talked to the ministry of justice and said, “There's a problem here. Can you give us more information that we can have about this?” You should not need a law degree—because most survivors don't have one—to understand the decisions that the SCC makes. That's the problem we have a lot of the time. It's not that people aren't smart. It's not that people don't know things. It's that they know other things. Making sure that it's plain language, making sure it's accessible, is really important to us. It's about making sliders on Instagram and talking to our peers, but I think there's a big challenge in that social location impacts the ways in which people feel safe to report and the ways people are criminalized.
Another part of that was talking about what could be done differently with people who have sexually assaulted someone—alcohol-facilitated sexual assault. I would say to you all that we need to invest also in accountability counselling, and work specifically with men who have committed sexual assault, young men. If women between the ages of 16 and 24 are the largest age group who are targeted for sexual assault, that means the majority of that is done by their peers. We're not doing that work, and it's important.