Evidence of meeting #20 for Status of Women in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was online.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff
I call the meeting to order.
Thank you to our witnesses for coming. We're resuming our study on violence against young women and girls in Canada, and today we're looking at cyberviolence.
I want to thank our first panellists, Shaheen Shariff and Lara Karaian. I understand, Shaheen, you've come by train from Montreal, so we want to thank you for going out of your way to be here with us today.
You have 10 minutes for your presentations, and then we'll go to questions.
Dr. Shaheen Shariff Associate Professor, Faculty of Education and Associate Member, Law Faculty, McGill University, As an Individual
Shall I start?
Associate Professor, Faculty of Education and Associate Member, Law Faculty, McGill University, As an Individual
Thank you for the opportunity to address this committee this afternoon to speak on the nature and extent of cyberviolence against girls and women and the best practices to address and prevent it.
I will discuss pertinent issues in the context of two key areas that I understand the committee is examining, because my work is moving in that direction, building on earlier research on cyberbullying and sexting.
The role of universities in addressing online and on-campus rape culture is one area. A second one is the impact of hypersexualization of women and girls in popular culture and media. The third is opportunities to engage these sectors with universities encountering such practices.
I would like to emphasize at the outset that sexual violence, whether online or offline, cannot be reduced or prevented without increased recognition of rape culture as deeply rooted within every aspect of society, and that there is a need for concerted, long-term, collaborative efforts by key segments of society to unearth, dismantle, and address it.
The definition of “rape culture” that best describes my understanding of it, drawing on feminist theories, is as follows, and we'll be providing references with a proper brief: rape culture is the way in which sexist societal attitudes, assumptions, and language tacitly condone, minimize, and/or normalize sexual violence, mostly against women but also against other genders, through institutions, communities, and individuals.
Rooted in discrimination, rape culture surfaces—and this is important—along a continuum of intersecting sexist behaviours which include jokes, innuendoes, harassment, online and offline threats, non-consensual distribution of intimate images online, physical assault, and rape.
There are several challenges for universities. Canadian universities have come under significant student criticism and media scrutiny for slow or inefficient responses to reports of sexual violence. Examples involving cyberviolence include sexually offensive postings, such as a dental school case in which students created a social media page and discussed raping their female classmates after drugging them with chloroform, and one in which male student leaders joked online about raping a female student union president because of her leadership position.
Some of the task force reports that followed some of these widely publicized incidents observed that although rape culture in broader society is mirrored within universities, few empirically based studies have focused on the influence of media and popular culture on the university communities. They also highlighted a lack of communication between central administration and faculties and a lack of clarity on reporting processes and responses that ensured due process.
Policy administrators and the legal community, including judges, are often out of touch with young women's or in fact young people's realities and evolving social norms in an online society, as we have seen. Many of you may have heard about the recent rape case at Stanford. It is important to remember that university and high school students are prolific consumers of social media and popular culture, comedy, sexist and misogynist online jokes, music lyrics, hypersexualized advertising, etc., but it is adults who, by and large, create and perpetuate this type of content, so why are we surprised that young people internalize it?
Shifting norms and a higher threshold for sexism and homophobia start at a younger age, and this goes back to our research on sexting and cyberbullying. In this research we looked at young people between the ages of nine and 17. We found that at least 65% said that they would engage in the non-consensual distribution of intimate images and sexting for fun or to make friends laugh—65%—especially the age group between 13 and 17.
The legal intent in online offensive postings is difficult to establish. I'll just tell you about two scenarios that we gave the students as part of our research. We received some interesting findings.
The first scenario was that Dana is drunk, and a video of her being drunk is posted online. Does Dana have a right to be upset about it? Ninety-eight per cent of the students, both male and female, said that yes, she has every right to be upset about it because her parents will find out she was drunk at a party.
The second scenario was that Ashley sends an intimate video or photograph of herself to a boyfriend, in trust. That boyfriend takes that video and puts it online. Does she have a right to be upset? Well, 51% said it was not okay for her to be upset because she brought it on herself, supposedly.
There was less emphasis on the breach of trust by the boyfriend or on him having any accountability for his actions. The irony is that victim blaming is so prevalent in our society, and as we have seen in recent cases under the criminal justice systems both in Canada and the U.S., it's mirrored in how these teens are behaving or thinking. This increases the threshold for rape culture. It becomes normalized in the way our young people speak, the music lyrics they listen to, and the violence and sexism they witness in popular culture and gaming, but it's also part of adult society. It ends up that applying traditional institutional policies and punishments is of no use, because they are no longer relevant. Social norms have changed and need to be addressed through responses that resonate with young people and responses that are comprehensive and holistic.
In this regard, I want to emphasize and highlight the power of social media to uproot rape culture and promote positive cultural change. Social media provides—as we have again seen in some of these recent cases—a wide platform for standing up to sexual violence. Critical and educational dialogues can be carried out over social media to unearth and expose rape culture. People can stand up to offensive online postings.
It has enabled—for example, in the Jian Gomeshi case very early on—people to come forward through #rapebutneverreported, which went viral, as well as the one in Quebec that was in French. The Stanford rape survivor's heart-wrenching statement was spread prolifically online, and people were upset about the lenient six-month sentence, which drew harsh criticism. The response by the rapist's father as well—that his son would pay a high price of six months for 20 minutes of action—also drew a very angry response. The New York Times, for example, noted that this suggests that society has begun to turn the page and stand up against sexual violence and that the Internet has been instrumental in raising awareness.
How much time do I have left?
Associate Professor, Faculty of Education and Associate Member, Law Faculty, McGill University, As an Individual
Big-stick sanctions won't work. We're obviously looking for greater accountability on the part of perpetrators, but this cannot be achieved by harsher, reactive laws within our criminal justice system, because when rape culture is so normalized, such laws will not necessarily help young people understand where they are going wrong or where they crossed the line to engage in illegal activities.
One example is the application of child pornography laws that are designed to protect young people being applied against them when they engage in sexting, especially at a younger age. For example, a number of 11- to 13-year-old students who were playing with Snapchat got their female classmates to send them pictures; these students were charged with distribution, possession, and production of child pornography. In the Maple Ridge case in 2011 in British Columbia, in which a girl was gang-raped and a teen posted it online, the teen was sentenced to write an essay on the evils of the Internet, which just shows how disconnected some of the judges are and calls for a need—and this is just one case, along with the Stanford case—for education of judges and people in the legal profession.
The Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, although it has a section on non-consensual distribution of intimate images, is not likely in and of itself to have great impact on reducing this kind of behaviour.
As conclusions and recommendations, it's essential for universities to reclaim responsibility—and I'm just going to focus on universities here, being from one—and as central educational institutions of higher learning to take ownership and to educate on owning the problem. We have the capacity to develop curriculum models and policy models that would position Canada at the forefront internationally on an informed and evidence-based strategy on addressing sexual violence.
We have started this process at McGill—and I'd be happy to give more details in the question time—working with several universities and arts and media sectors towards understanding how each sector either tacitly condones rape culture or can mobilize change through changes to policy and practice.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff
You actually have almost an extra minute there.
Thank you very much.
We'll go to Ms. Karaian.
Dr. Lara Karaian Associate Professor, Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Carleton University, As an Individual
Thank you very much.
This is my first time speaking to a parliamentary committee, and I'm very happy to be here. For the first time in my life going to speak slowly, I hope.
I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you about cyberviolence against young women and girls. Given my limited time, my comments today will centre around one of my areas of expertise, which is the non-consensual redistribution of consensually created and shared sexual images. This is commonly referred to as revenge porn, non-consensual porn, or virtual rape, as some people call it, although none of these terms are accurate descriptors, in my opinion. Given that the language that we use to understand and shape our responses to cybersexual violence is important, I'm happy to speak to why I think these terms are not the most accurate in the question-and-answer period, if you'd like.
Many girls and young women whose sexual images and videos are non-consensually redistributed experience this as a violation of their sexual autonomy and their privacy. Possible consequences include psychological and emotional distress, negative impacts on interpersonal and romantic relationships, and concerns about the inability to secure employment or the potential loss of employment. In addition, we know that the threat of redistribution is being used to intimidate, extort, and harass individuals.
I'm going to leave questions of prevalence to others. I know somebody from MediaSmarts is going to be here, and I think Jane may speak to that in the second panel. Instead I'm going to provide you with a somewhat challenging and potentially alternative perspective on how to reconceptualize the problem and to do no harm in our attempts to address cybersexual violence.
Status of Women in Canada, in its brief called “Sexual Violence Against Women in Canada”, has already acknowledged that intersectionality—which is how the intersections between different aspects of a person's identity and social location can leave some people more vulnerable to experiencing sexual violence than others—ought to inform Status of Women of Canada's research and endeavours.
I, along with other researchers today, have highlighted already how girls and women who experience non-consensual redistribution suffer differently and disproportionately from most, although not all, boys whose images are non-consensually redistributed because of sexual double standards, which importantly are always already raced, classed, ableist, and heteronormative in nature.
I have critiqued child protection, law enforcement, and legislative efforts, which capitalize on sexual double standards in their own efforts by deploying “slut-shaming” when they encourage young women and girls to abstain from digitally representing themselves and their sexuality if they don't want to be victims of non-consensual redistribution.
Today I'd like to urge the committee members to maintain a focus on intersectionality as they move forward with the development of responses to cybersexual violence, and in particular I'd like to ask you to consider how the harms of non-consensual redistribution not only stem from discriminatory attitudes towards girls who break the boundaries of convention by displaying themselves as sexual beings, a.k.a. sluts, but also—and this is the challenging part—how these harms stem from the perception of these girls as porn stars.
I would like to ask us to bring whore-phobia and porn-phobia into our discussion of cybersexual violation.
By “whore-phobia” I'm referring to the stigma faced by sex workers—women in porn, those who are doing street and indoor sex work, and strippers. As some scholars at Carleton, at University of Ottawa, and sex activists have argued, whore-phobia includes conceptions of sex workers as dirty, immoral, hypersexualized vectors of disease.
By “porn-phobia” I'm referring to what I conceive of as moral panics about the so-called pornification of culture and the perspective that even consensually created and distributed porn is at best low-value speech and at worst inherently degrading, objectifying, and a violation of women's sexual autonomy.
I'm a porn studies scholar and cultural criminologist. My research on the legal regulation of public sexuality and sexual expression evidences how the category of “whore” acts as a marker for those who are deemed not worthy of victim status or who are hypervisible as victims in need of saving by the state against their wishes.
Whore-phobia and porn-phobia tacitly inform our understanding of and responses to the non-consensual redistribution of sexual images—that is, when young women and girls subjectively experience the violation of their trust and their privacy as a violation of their body, they do so in part because our prurient society nevertheless maintains discriminatory attitudes toward sex workers and the sex industry. We can see this in the historic and ongoing mistreatment of sex workers by police and the state, as well as in recent campaigns by sex workers aimed at humanizing sex workers, such as the “Prostitutes are people too” campaign, developed by the Halifax-based sex workers' group Stepping Stone.
When we, with the best of intentions, construct the non-consensual redistribution of a girl's sexual images as “the worst thing that can happen to her”, as detrimental to her relationships and career, and even as a life-threatening event, we are relying on whore-phobia and porn-phobia to do this. We are not only harming the girls whose images have been redistributed—because we are giving them the message that they should feel horrible about this redistribution—but we are also unintentionally doing harm to another highly marginalized group of “othered” girls and women, those in the sex industry.
Therefore, given your mandate to understand cybersexual violence's connection to systemic and pre-existing discriminatory relations such as sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia, I am asking you to also consider how sex workers themselves are particularly at risk of violence, sexual or otherwise, when we construct public displays of one's sexuality in these extreme terms and come down on them as hard as we do in legal terms.
In terms of responses, while it is extremely important to educate young people about how their shifting sexual and communication norms intersect with and sometimes contravene legal categories such as assault, sexual assault, harassment, defamation, and the distribution of child porn, equal emphasis—as Shaheen also said—must be placed on educating law enforcement, crown prosecutors, judges, Parliament, ourselves, educators, parents, and teens about discriminatory attitudes toward quasi-public, non-monogamous, and non-normative sexuality and its representations.
As I have argued extensively in my research, charging teenagers who non-consensually redistribute their peers' sexual images with child pornography charges is a grossly disproportionate response to the offence and goes against the intentions of those who first drafted those laws. As an expert witness now for two constitutional challenges to the application of child porn laws in the non-distribution context, I can attest to the fact that these laws are being misused against racialized youth—in one case an indigenous girl and a racialized young man—who had no intention of distributing child pornography, nor even causing harm. The second distribution case was an individual boasting about the attractiveness of his girlfriend.
Moving forward, I would like to encourage committee members to consider how sex-positive feminism is an important theoretical frame to engage with in discussions of online sexual violence. Promoting women's pleasure and their right to cybersexual expression should be a critical part of education about responses to sexual violence, whether online or offline. Indeed Jane Doe, who sued the police for failing to warn women in downtown Toronto of a serial rapist, has argued that our educational responses to rape, offline and online, should include a sex education curriculum from a young age that includes discussions of “pleasure, communication, mutual appreciation and technique”, and these days, digital sexual expression is technique.
The federal government has already made positive steps in this direction with the introduction of updated sex education, including education about respect and consent. I am hopeful that we will continue to move forward with a critical lens on our discussions of cybersexual violence. I look forward to discussing this further in the question-and-answer period.
Thank you.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff
Thank you very much for your presentation.
Because we started late, I am wondering if the committee is okay with cutting the first round from seven minutes each to six minutes each. Is that okay?
We are going to start the first round with Ms. Sahota. You have six minutes.
Liberal
Ruby Sahota Liberal Brampton North, ON
Is it okay if I let Eva take my turn, because she really wants to...?
Liberal
Eva Nassif Liberal Vimy, QC
Thank you for your presentations, Mrs. Shariff and Mrs. Karaian.
My question is to Mrs. Karaian.
Your work, “Selfies, Sexuality and Teens: A Canadian Study”, is about the context surrounding criminal diversion programs, online Internet safety initiatives, and public service announcements, or PSAs. I was wondering if you could comment further on the concept you appear to use, “sexters as objects of thought”.
Associate Professor, Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Carleton University, As an Individual
Sexters as objects of...?
Liberal
Eva Nassif Liberal Vimy, QC
Of thought. We're trying to further understand the phenomenon of hypersexualization of young women and girls and the prevalence of cyberviolence in a time when essentially every child can have access to personal devices with access to the Internet. I think if you could explain this conflict, it might help all of us on this issue.
Associate Professor, Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Carleton University, As an Individual
Yes, thank you.
Part of the idea about constructing sexters as objects of thought is that, for one, my particular project was very interested in understanding sexters as subjects of sexual production creation. In particular, when we think of sexters as objects of thought, partially what we're doing is turning them into objects of study without hearing how they themselves are experts on their own sexualities and their own sexual expression. When we study sexting and sexters as objects without also understanding how young people understand themselves and their sexting practices, we construct them as objects of study and we do not learn from them about their shifting cultural, communication, and sexual norms.
For me it's been extremely important to speak to young people about how they understand sexting, how they understand sexual representation in the digital age and their own sexuality. I think many of us here have found that for young people today, there are lots of panics around hypersexualization and the sexualization of young people, lots of fears about exploitation of young women, that don't take into consideration how sexual expression by young women is in fact an integral part of their self-development, their autonomous self-understanding as individuals with autonomy, who are not only sexual objects but also sexual subjects. This is in fact very important for how we understand how best to respond to sexual violence, because when we create women as passive objects that the state always has to come and rescue, we are doing them a disservice in many respects.
Many of my findings have young women saying that their use of technology to express their sexuality is often not a product of peer pressure; it is not necessarily a direct.... That's not to say that there is no correlation, but it's not necessarily a causation of porn, an emulation of porn, or even a sexualized culture. Instead, they understand themselves in many respects as sexual beings within this culture, and they are able to express themselves as such in ways that they find useful. These expressions obviously come with harms and repercussions, but it is also important to understand their pleasures and their affordances.
Hopefully that answers your question.
Liberal
Eva Nassif Liberal Vimy, QC
I have another question.
Do you find that the will for participation in these acts, even if it's intended to be private, is exacerbating the hypersexuality of women, again specifically young women and girls, in a way we haven't seen before? Is it producing ideas about women different from those that come through other media that may already objectify women, as we see in advertisements or pop culture?
Here is another part of the question. What is, in your opinion, the right path to take when it comes to education of youth on this subject? Do we have to educate from a young age that sexual liberation and curiosity do not condemn a woman to objectivity, or is it about providing comprehensive sexual education to young girls and boys? Is it simply about respecting privacy? Is it all of this?
Associate Professor, Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Carleton University, As an Individual
Could you repeat the first part of the question? I made a half-note on it.
Associate Professor, Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Carleton University, As an Individual
I believe I remember enough.
What I see is that there has always been a panic about the developments of new technologies as they intersect with sexuality and in particular young people's sexuality. We have seen this panic with the telegraph, the phone, and with all sorts of different new developments about making women's sexuality more visible and more accessible, and then also less moored to traditional notions of sexuality.
I do believe this development of technology may have shifted the visibility of young people's sexuality more than some of those previous technologies. I believe that fears of hypersexualization are a bit of a moral panic. That is my position on hypersexualization.
I do believe that part of—
Associate Professor, Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Carleton University, As an Individual
I do believe in education.
Associate Professor, Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Carleton University, As an Individual
I mean education that is not anti-sex and not abstinence.