Status of Women Committee on Sept. 21st, 2016

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you, Chair, and my thanks to both the witnesses.

I appreciate the work you're doing and the way you're able to convey it.

Ms. Steeves, I'm going to focus on you, because I'm going to try to go down the path of the justice and criminal system response when things go off the rails. You talked about the importance of equal access to free speech, which I appreciate. I'm interested in knowing what you've been seeing and hearing in your studies. When there are threats of rape online and we get to the point where there is an intervention, what's the response of the justice system? I appreciate what you are saying about parental judgment and the importance of being able to let go of that so that kids, girls, and young women can be protected. Are you optimistic about victims being able to get access to protection?

[Dr. Valerie Steeves]

I'm going to go back to the data. What we hear typically when kids raise these kinds of issues is that they hate the term cyber-bullying. They felt that the term cyber-bullying has really done them a disservice. What they say is, “Call it what it is; it's violence. Call it what it is; it's misogyny and racism.” There's a range of responses, and their concern is that we tend to use a police response all across that range of behaviours.

I'm going to give you a very quick example. Two young women, 13 years of age, are best friends in Toronto. One goes on vacation for March break; one doesn't. They're back at school and they're texting each other and one of them says on a social media platform, “Ha, ha, I'm darker than you”, and they're both sent to the principal's office and accused of racist bullying because they're both Jamaican-Canadian and both happen to be black. They look at that and they say, “That is not cyber-bullying; that's stupid. That was my best friend who got a tan.” Often the school response is tied into bringing in the police officer who works at the school, blah, blah, blah.

They feel there's this whole range of behaviours, with uncivil discourse in the middle, and then serious risks or threats of violence and rape. On the one end they feel we overuse the criminal response, and on the other end they feel we underuse the criminal response. I teach criminal law and I still can't figure out why the police don't think that a rape threat is criminal harassment, because it sure looks like it to me.

It reminds me of years ago when we were trying to respond to domestic violence differently. One of the things we did was to work with police officers and say, “No, actually, you have to respond to that. Nobody gets a free bye with that.” I don't think we've used the tools we have in place very well, and I think we would make progress if we created initiatives that helped us talk with police in particular about how criminal harassment and uttering threats apply to the kinds of trolling comments we see in cyberspace.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Are you seeing both an under-reporting of online violence to young women and girls and also a low rate of police response?

[Dr. Valerie Steeves]

I have no data about police response or a low rate of police response. I can tell you that when they talk about these incidents, typically they tend to blame themselves.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Police do.

[Dr. Valerie Steeves]

No, the girls do.

If there's a situation in a school where someone's really attacked and they're getting threats of physical violence and this type of thing, they may tend to blame themselves and say, “Well, you know, I'm just going to go off-line. I'm going to leave that space, because I didn't perform well and now I'm suffering the consequences”. They tend to internalize it.

I don't even think we've got to the point where there's under-reporting. Kids talk about the issues they need help with, but they don't use the same language we do. When we talk about rape threats, I would look at some of the things they describe and think, “Wow, that's a rape threat” they'll go, “No, no, that's just the kind of discourse that I've...”. That's common, and they don't question it.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

These complaints are not necessarily getting into the hands of police at all, so they can't be dealt with in the same way the criminal justice system would deal with true violence.

[Dr. Valerie Steeves]

Yes. I think part of that is also a lack of trust that, if something does go that route, it will be dealt with in a sensitive way. One of the things kids say to us a lot is, “I don't want to tell a teacher because that means the police will be involved, and if the police are involved, I'm going to lose control over the resolution.” Again, think of that arc. We tend to use heavy hammers for coming in and helping kids deal with these situations where they need a certain amount of control over the resolution itself and the definition of the problem.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Are you seeing regional differences in your research on province to province or rural to urban?

[Dr. Valerie Steeves]

Regionally, I'm drawing on the Young Canadians in a Wired World research project. We tend to go out west, central Canada, and Quebec to get a sense, and then the survey is all across the country. We haven't really found any significant regional differences around cyber-bullying or gender stereotyping and that type of thing, so no.

One of the things we did in eGirls was to work with rural research participants and urban participants because we wanted to get a sense of whether the old saw that nobody has privacy in a small town was true. The biggest difference was that rural girls felt that city girls had different experiences and more freedom and weren't so constrained by stereotypes. When we looked at the data itself, they said the exact same thing, so we didn't find a lot of difference. Again, it goes back to one of the ways that the technology shapes the social problem we're facing; it's homogenized it to a certain extent, because so much of this happens in social media and it's a shared social space for all of them.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

That's your time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Now we're going to go to my colleague, Ms. Tassi.

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

Thank you, ladies, for your presence today and for all the work you're doing in this area. It's so important.

My background is that I have worked as a chaplain in a high school for 20 years, and so I've witnessed first-hand the devastation this causes to young girls. I have to say I'm horrified at the level and the number of occasions and the things that are said. It's shocking.

I would like to ask a couple of questions with respect to the research you have done. I'll start with you, Ms. Steeves.

You talk about creating non-commercialized spaces as an example, and I agree with you on that. One of the things we've done is to take kids on a mission trip to the Dominican Republic where they live and work with the poor with no phones, no technology, nothing. It's amazing what happens with those students in that environment. When your reflections at night are eyeball to eyeball, as opposed to being with someone who is who knows where and is texting on the fly, it's amazing.

Can you give examples in this difficult, complicated world of how you would create those non-commercialized spaces? I'm speaking about educational settings, mostly at the high school level.

[Dr. Valerie Steeves]

I think the reason we need a national strategy for this is precisely because it's going to involve money. We used to create resources that were shared by schools, and those platforms would support communications for education. In other words, schools used to own their own email accounts. Schools used to own their own technology. We've moved away from that model, and we're now privatizing all of that.

There was a big debate in the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, which is where I am, over Gmail accounts for kids. There was never a discussion about why my kids couldn't use their own email accounts that I purchased for them. The school just said, “no, that's it. We've consented for everybody. You're all going to have Gmail accounts. We're going to require that“.

It's similar with things like Turnitin. We're worried about plagiarism, so we're going to make everybody register for Turnitin.

The first time one of my kids was told they had to register for Turnitin, I emailed the school and said, “Have you read their privacy policy? They collect all this data and keep it, and you're associating it with my child's name. I don't consent to this.” I never heard back. That's the platform they are using, and there's no acknowledgement that it's a commercial platform.

To a certain extent, I'd like to turn back that process and stop commercializing the school, because the school is a place where children should be able to gather and learn with privacy in a non-commercialized environment.

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

The other issue I found that was difficult, and you mentioned it with respect to the trust factor, is that students would come to me because I was the chaplain there. I was a counsellor, or a student advocate, and they would tell things to me they knew would be confidential unless their safety was at stake. The bottom line was that they felt comfortable coming to me, but I knew there would be a lot of students who would bear things, some who would end up taking their own lives because it was so devastating they couldn't deal with it themselves.

How do you balance the trust factor in the relationships with parents—which I get, because they don't want the parent overseeing and watching everything they do—with the safety of the young person? Do you have any input or ideas with respect to how to know when young people are suffering this, or mechanisms we could build in to get help for them, so they can get the help before it's too late?

[Dr. Valerie Steeves]

We have years of experience through counselling and teaching, and all these professionals in place who actually have social relationships with these kids. We have parents who are seeking help for kids who are having mental health issues as well. It seems to me that's where your solution is going to be. Again, a technological fix is often very awkward and interferes with those relationships.

I was talking to Rena before we started about Safer Schools Together, a new Canadian company. About 126 school boards across the country have bought services from this company. They give the name of every kid in the school, and then a robot program goes out and grabs anything that this child has posted on the Internet and uses algorithms to find out whether or not they're at risk of mental health.

One of the things they're using in England to determine this is whether they've posted emo rock lyrics on social media, which every 13-year-old does at least 12 times a day. It generates a report for the principal and the police. That can't replace those rich experiences and relationships that you describe. Those are where the solutions are.

Typically, when you look at kids at risk for any form of violence, there have been multiple reports to CAS, and there have been multiple attempts to intervene. We're not failing these children because we don't know who they are; we're failing them because we don't have enough money in mental support for kids. We're failing them because we don't take any of their concerns seriously. We throw them out there on the Internet and expect them to navigate this commercialized space all on their own. It seems to me that the technology to that is irrelevant. It's the relationships that matter.

Often when people say, “What can parents do? What is the most protective thing I can do? You don't want me to spy on my kid, but what should I do? I'm terrified.” Many parents are. Have dinner with your kids. That is the single most important protective factor, having dinner with your family at night, not in the car on the way to soccer, but actually sitting down.

We need to get off the technological wagon and remember that we have all sorts of experience in dealing with these kinds of problems. What we really need to talk about is where we're putting our resources, into building those technologies, so we can innovate and create wealth, or into providing mental health services for kids, so they can grow and thrive.

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

I have a quick question for Ms. Bivens.

In terms of helping change the design, because that's where the problem lies in the software, how do you do that?

[Rena Bivens]

We need to change how people are thinking about design, right, and open up that design process. One thing in the literature is a concept called i-design. You design for yourself almost. If most of the designers are white able-bodied men, for instance, then they're going to design for people like that. If they're adults, they're not designing for children.

I'd echo what Valerie is saying. It's brilliant. Technology isn't just some easy fix. We can't look at it that way; however, a lot of technology is there. We can build it better. We can make it different. Depending on what the specific problem is, then yes, we need more mental health counsellors, maybe even peer-to-peer counselling, more talking with people.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you both very much for coming. That was amazing. If there are things that, based on the questions, you'd like to send to the committee, I'd invite you to send those comments to the clerk.

Thank you again for joining us.

We're going to suspend for two minutes while we get ready for our second panel.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

We're back for our second panel.

We're really pleased to have two, I would say, intelligent witnesses with us today. From Battered Women's Support Services in B.C., we have Angela Marie McDougall, executive director; and Rona Amiri, violence prevention coordinator.

By video conference, we have Dee Dooley, youth programs coordinator at the YWCA Halifax location. She's also a recipient of the 2015 Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case.

Welcome to all of you and thank you for coming.

We're going to start with 10-minute opening statements.

We'll begin with Angela Marie MacDougall.

[Angela MacDougall, Executive Director, Battered Women's Support Services]

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.

[Rona Amiri, Violence Prevention Coordinator, Battered Women's Support Services]

Thank you.

The three areas we think are the most promising in terms of practice are our core training for men to end violence, our community engagement, and our programs for youth to end violence. Our men ending violence core training is basically core training that's been designed for men, specifically to provide men with sufficient knowledge and analysis around gender violence so that they're able to be positive male leaders within the community.

We also critique well-known men who are doing this work. It's important to make sure they're staying on track and they are getting evaluations from women's organizations and women who are doing this work.

Through our community engagement program, basically we engage different communities like the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver and different first nations communities. This is kind of a long-term engagement with a process that includes training, raising awareness, prevention, and intervention.

Lastly, I'd just like to speak to our youth ending violence program, because that is the program that I coordinate. Youth ending violence is basically a violence prevention program. It's peer-led, so youth facilitate workshops for youth on dating violence, gender violence, and cyber-violence. Activities are hands-on. We do group work. They do a lot of learning of definitions and that kind of stuff. This is really important because often, I think it was mentioned earlier, the term bullying is used for gender violence, so it's important to have that gendered analysis.

I speak to teachers when I go into schools, and we know there are very gender-neutral programs right now around dating violence. When we go in there, they thank us because we have some experts who can speak to the topic and it's not just their responsibility. We're looking at gender, which is very important, of course.

I've also had times in workshops when young women have come up to us at the end and said they were experiencing cyber-violence online and they didn't know that wasn't okay or that they could talk to somebody about what was going on. Following that, we were able to provide them with services or connect them with battered women's support services—of course we have a lot of front-line services—as well as connect them with teachers or counsellors in their school so that they were able to know that this is an issue and there are things they can do to stop it or prevent it.

That's been my experience.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you very much. That was wonderful.

We're going to go over to Dee Dooley.

You have 10 minutes, and you can start.

[Dee Dooley, Youth Programs Coordinator, YWCA Halifax]

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair, honourable committee members, and my brilliant colleagues from the Battered Women's Support Services.

Thank you so much for this invitation to address the Standing Committee on the Status of Women and to discuss an issue that's both deeply personal and professionally concerning, that is, cyber-violence against women and girls.

I remember quite clearly the shift to online and social media-based communication and the rise of the Internet. When I was in sixth grade, ICQ and MSN Messenger became the norm in communication with friends and peers. As well, this opened up a whole new world of access. It also became a platform to widely share rumours, gossip, and hateful comments with such a large audience.

When I was in grade 10, LiveJournal rose in popularity. This platform allowed for increased expression through online journaling and blogging and a place to connect with people with similar interests across the globe, but it also opened the door to public bullying, increased judgment, and intimidation. In the first year of my undergraduate degree, Facebook was launched. Facebook offered a space to connect with peers, share photos, and keep in touch with friends in different places around the world, but Facebook continues to lead to increased breaches of privacy and the failure to take reports of harassment and violence seriously.

The Internet and social media present a very complicated landscape for young people to navigate. While advances in technology offer extended opportunities to engage with the world, a whole new realm of tools to perpetuate and cover up violence are at the fingertips of every single one of its users.

Cyber-violence and cyber-misogyny are pervasive issues in the technologically advanced culture we live in, but to be quite clear, the patriarchal surveillance of women and girls took place long before the Internet and social media facilitated its ease. Not only do women, trans people, and other marginalized genders live in fear in their homes, workplaces, public spaces, schools, and the institutions meant to protect them, educate them, heal them and deliver justice, now they—we—live in fear in cyberspace too.

Cyberspace is increasingly where people work, shop, connect with each other, play, and learn, and violence and oppression can and do happen there quite often. Much of the violence that happens online is sexualized and rooted in misogynistic gender norms, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, and colonial violence. Not surprisingly, cyber violence is often directed to and experienced specifically within the spaces that are created by these populations to speak out against and share their experiences of violence and oppression and social justice advocacy.

My understanding of cyber-violence and cyber-misogyny comes from my work as youth programs coordinator at YWCA Halifax and my involvement with YWCA Canada's Project Shift advisory team. Through this role, I manage Safety NET, a provincial strategy to address cyber-violence against young women and girls. We spoke to over 200 young people and 20 service providers across the province to learn directly from them what violence looks like when it happens online, how we can better support survivors of online violence, and how we can contribute to lasting systemic change.

In the aftermath of Saint Mary's University's rape chants going viral, Dalhousie school of dentistry's “Gentlemen's Club”, and the assault and subsequent death of Rehtaeh Parsons, cyber-violence is a particularly pressing issue for us to address in our region.

Although cyber-violence, particularly against women and girls, is a pervasive problem, it is not well understood by the general public, service providers, and policy-makers. I'm so pleased to share what we have learned from our Safety NET project and promising practices that can help prevent and address online gender-based violence as identified primarily by youth.

I will preface this by saying that radical ideas lead to radical change. To truly address online violence and all forms of gender-based violence, we need to work towards cultural shifts that will fundamentally change the way that we see and the value that is placed on women, trans people, and other marginalized genders.

We need a sustained and long-term investment and true engagement from all stakeholders, including a willingness to change systems that aren't working.

I feel so hopeful that we are on the right track with the federal strategy to address gender-based violence that was launched this summer, and through this committee's study on violence in the lives of women and girls.

Four key recommendations came through the Safety NET needs assessment:

The number one thing that was identified in the province was the need for youth-led cyber-violence education and community programming. This means truly valuing the experiences and perspectives of youth, and young women specifically, and centring these voices in community-based grassroots programming, as well as talking explicitly about the systemic issues that drive cyber-violence.

In my opinion, much of cyber-violence education is failing specifically because it does not do these things. Young people need the space to discuss and learn among themselves, and teach each other about staying safe online while still actively engaging in the culture and all it has to offer. Public education, awareness, and research about what cyber-violence is specifically, its prevalence, its impacts, and its consequences were also identified as key needs.

Both youth and community partners spoke of the need to work with key stakeholders, especially in justice and education, to develop trauma-informed systems of responses for survivors of cyber-violence. In particular, victim-blaming responses and reactions that advocate for simply disengaging from technology and social media should be avoided because they cause so much harm.

Last, governments and community organizations should work with social media and media-based outlets to develop guidelines and protocols that offer better protection for users. Sustained advocacy that develops buy-in from these companies is a necessary component to building safer online communities.

Again, many thanks for the invitation to engage in this conversation with you about cyber-violence. I look forward to our discussion, and I very much appreciate that online violence is being recognized in such a formal way as an inhibitor to equity for women and girls.

I will end my comments with the sentiment that while the Internet may be an instrument used to maintain and facilitate oppressive violence, it is also a tool that can help us fight against it and advocate for a safer and more empowering world for women and girls in all of their intersecting identities.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you very much, Ms. Dooley. That was excellent.

We are going to begin our round of questioning with my Liberal friend, Ms. Damoff.