Good afternoon. My name is Raine Liliefeldt. I'm honoured to be here with you on the traditional territory of the Algonquin and Anishinabe people.
I'm here to paint you a picture. Stroke.
I had to go to school every day with another girl calling me a snake. I felt that if I didn't block her and just let her and her friends bully me, it won't be as hard as in real life. Stroke.
When I was going through a case when I was being told to kill myself and slit my throat and things, the schools, my family, and police didn't do anything but shrug their shoulders at me, but my friends tried to help me to stop it from happening.
Young women and girls in Canada experience deliberate violence because of their gender. Information and communication technologies and the spread of social media have presented new opportunities and enabled various efforts to address violence against women and girls. When girls and women are driven off the Internet, they lose the ability to be part of the platforms where more and more public debates take place. This is why the YWCA embarked on an initiative to better understand and support young women.
Project Shift, which creates a safer digital world for young women, is a national multi-year project led by YWCA Canada and funded by Status of Women Canada, and even though I'm talking about girls and young women, our work acknowledges and recognizes that cyberviolence also greatly impacts transgender and gender-nonconforming youth.
Let's zoom in. We use the term “cyberviolence” to mean any harmful act carried out through network technology. We've chosen to use this term because it respects the serious harm that these behaviours can do. This includes many of the behaviours often described as cyberbullying, such as spreading rumours about someone, impersonating them online, spreading intimate or embarrassing images, and targeting them with threats or sexist language, as well as stalking or monitoring them and so on. It may be carried out by peers, friends, strangers, or romantic partners. It's important to recognize that this is often connected to off-line violence. Online harassment can easily move off-line when harassers release their targets' personal information or an abusive relationship plays out online.
Cyberviolence impacts the daily lives of young women and girls. Girls are significantly more likely than boys to feel that the Internet is an unsafe space for them. A lot more girls than boys fear they could be hurt if they talk to someone they don't know online. One third of youth who experience violence online have symptoms of depression. Online harassment or abusive relationships can have effects that lasts for years or a lifetime. As well as the emotional impacts, cyberviolence against women also narrows their horizons by forcing them out of spaces where they don't feel safe or welcome.
Project Shift establishes the need for a gender lens to understand violence online. It makes recommendations for a range of public and private sectors, from educational institutions to parents, counsellors, police, and the information communication technology sector, also known as ICT.
As part of our work, YWCA has convened leaders from over a dozen ICT organizations. The round table, as we call it, hopes to move forward on creating systemic change on the issue of cyberviolence against young women and girls. Guided by YWCA's leadership and the connection to the issue, the members of the round table have agreed to share knowledge and resources within the ICT round table and across the sector with students, interns, employees, and colleagues; to cultivate a culture of empathy across the sector; and to provide leadership to advance the sector on accountability.
Here is how you give can support. To create systemic change and to end cyberviolence against girls and young women, we recommend that the government support women-centred training and education for the legal community and law enforcement and work with those who have experienced cyberviolence in a supportive and non-judgmental way; change the legal definition of abuse and harassment under the Criminal Code, and include cyberviolence to better protect young women and girls; continue funding YWCA Canada's work with the ICT sector to create a safer digital world; and fund the first national cross-sectoral conference on online safety, led by YWCA.
Cyberviolence happens to many women and girls who quit social networks after being harassed. We are failing as a democracy if we allow harassment and other forms of cyberviolence to keep girls and women from being able to exercise their full rights. It is the government's responsibility to ensure that girls and women are safe everywhere, online and off-line. Let's paint a different picture together.
Thank you.