Thank you very much for the introduction, and good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you so much to the committee for this opportunity to speak with you this afternoon. It is truly an honour to be here in the beautiful Algonquin territory. We have travelled from Coast Salish territory, where it's just as sunny as here, and we're so glad to be joining you today.
We're really glad to be having this conversation around violence against young women and girls, and talking about cyber-violence against women. We are very interested in this conversation and this work, in part because as an organization we have committed to the work on any violence against women.
I took a moment to revisit the Royal Commission on the Status of Women of Canada, and to think of where we are in 2016, and think about where cyber-violence against women fits into the effort toward addressing women's equality in Canada.
In thinking about cyber-violence against women and girls we, of course, want to recognize and understand the relationship of violence against women generally, how it is ubiquitous, and an epidemic, and endemic, and enshrined, we think, in the very making of Canada as a nation. In unravelling the matter of cyber-violence against women and the implications and manifestations for young women and girls, we then think about it in terms of one thread of multiple threads, that are woven together, and that speak, in a very real way, to the extent to which girls and women can have equality in Canada.
As we heard earlier today, but also in other sessions that the committee has had, we are talking about the Internet. I like to think about the Internet as yet another environment, a new frontier if you will, in which we are certainly experiencing tremendous opportunities for awareness-raising, for connection, for information, for engagement, for community, and for expression. It is also a place where certain problematic aspects of human behaviour are flourishing. It's a challenge for us when we are thinking about how to address cyber-violence against women, recognizing that we are still in a big way wanting to address violence against women in the broader sense. It's always a caution to separate out this thread without looking at the context, and to hold that context.
We have spent some time, certainly at Battered Women's Support Services, looking at media literacy and recognizing the role of media literacy, in terms of advertising and print and news, and the relationship to media, and we want to support young people in having some critical analysis. Through some work we were doing around media literacy work, we ended up speaking with many women, young women, who wanted to talk about their experiences of cyber-violence. We ended up doing some research with women who were accessing our services around cyber-violence against women, and the ways in which they were experiencing violence online, and then also the way that abusive partners were using the online environment to perpetrate more harassment and to inhibit their sense of themselves.
In Vancouver, unfortunately, we've had a rash of sexual assaults by strangers, a number of random sexual assaults that have happened. It has created this level of fear in women throughout the city, and it gives us some very good information about how violence against women and the very nature of it subjugate women as a gender, and create the sense of not being safe in the public environment. That is certainly a piece that we cannot discount in terms of the online environment. When we are seeking to address violence against women, a critical component is recognizing that this is an environment in which these behaviours are flourishing.
There is always an effort, of course, to look at the rule of law and law enforcement when we're talking about these kinds of behaviours. We like to think more broadly in terms of addressing some of these problems, and we don't think we should be focusing all of our efforts on the law. We should be very careful about how much we put on the line to look for community-based responses.
We have some very important and, I think, promising practices that are looking at how to support young people regarding how to navigate this environment, how to bring an element of respect to relationships, how to provide support for survivors, and also how to teach boys and men their responsibility to moderate not only their own behaviour but the behaviour of their peers.
I'd like to turn it over now to my colleague Rona Amiri, who will talk about some of that work.