Status of Women Committee on Oct. 5th, 2016

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I'm sorry, but that's your time for that question.

We go to Ms. Vecchio for seven minutes.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Thank you very much.

It's really quite neat that you're here today, especially when you talked about politics and why women don't get into politics.

The reason I say this is that on my way here on the bus, we received a tweet. It was to Rona Ambrose; Rachel Harder, who's sitting beside me; and Karen Vecchio—myself. It's Diviya Lives Here, and it was this great program where there was a young girl in grade 10 who came to visit Parliament yesterday. This is the tweet from this really stellar fellow: “Haven't we had enough of girls running the gov already? I have.”

Now, the first thing is I wanted to do was to write back and say, “Hey, I'm studying about people like you,” because that's the way I would deal with it, but I recognize other people might be offended by it. Here in politics I think many of us learn to grow a thick skin.

What would you recommend as some of the key components to educate girls on how to spot misogyny in the media and take action against it? I know my approach is to go back with humour and say, “Hey, whatever, get lost”, and mute him. I muted him and I had to un-mute him so I could read this.

What are some of the things that you would say?

[Soraya Chemaly]

I think there are a few things. I am interested in educating boys about this issue. There is a gigantic gap. In the United States recently there was a survey that showed that more than 50% of American men think that sexism is dead and gone. The largest gap is among the youngest people. That's a problem because they are the most likely to be using these media, and also young women are the most likely to be targeted.

The way we all develop a way of determining on the street what is safe and unsafe is the way we do the same thing online. In an instance like that, you probably felt like you could respond to him without an army of people coming after you. That is one legitimate response.

Another response that I think is useful is to flip the switch on a network of support so that you are not in the line of fire. That's very important. For those of us who are public, and who are engaging in these spaces, I know that I could not do it without a network of support. Sometimes I realize that if I do that right now, then it will literally derail my week. I can turn to proxies and allies and say, “This is going on, I need your help”. That seems to help a lot.

I think that is the mildest form we're talking about. I recently read an article about women politicians, and I will be honest that what I'm deeply disturbed about is the degree to which women politicians are turned into pornography in massive numbers, and when they have daughters, it happens to their daughters, too. That is a serious issue that we're not dealing with socially.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

That's the thing. When I think sometimes about my own level of maturity, I deal with things differently. I am concerned about some of the younger women dealing with this who have not had any experience.

Continuing on this theme, I do see a lot of different people in the room. We do want to bring more young women onto boards. We want to bring more women into politics and into those levels of government or within business.

It's nice that Ms. Moore is here, too, and I'm looking at the military. We want women to be there. What is it that we can do to make sure women can benefit and to make sure they can get over these hurdles, such as this discrimination online, or cyber-bullying, or things of that sort?

[Soraya Chemaly]

I think it's very important. I speak a lot at high schools and colleges. It's extremely important to set expectations. My job is to encourage girls and women to participate in media, or politics, or whatever forum it may be, where we want a more pluralistic and dynamic engagement. To do that, we have to prepare people for what they might encounter. In so doing, it's important to introduce them to networks of support that already exist. That's just essential, and if they don't exist, then they can be created.

I do know for example that online, there are so many good places where.... I'm particularly interested in teenage girls and young girls, because they're on the cusp of doing these things, and they're watching very carefully what happens to someone like you. They're deciding and they're making decisions. They're also engaging in their schools, and this is why I think this is so important.

There is a great deal of resistance to talking openly about sexism and intersectionality. We need to address that head-on in schools, because girls don't have the language or the framework. They don't go to school where feminism is taught pervasively in their classes. They get to the point where they are hit hard by double standards, and it's cognitively dissonant for them because we've been saying that you can do anything, you can go anywhere you want, you can be anything you want to be in deliberative bodies. We have sold them a bill of goods. Until we can sit down and say, “Hey, this is the situation. It's not a victim mentality. We're teaching you how to deal in the real world”, even with things like speech dominance in deliberative bodies. We know it's real, so let's talk about what that means and what you do about it.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

This might be done differently because you are in the United States, but what can be done legally if a person detects sexism in the media? What is it that is done in the United States? What are things you may know that are being done in Canada? What are things we can do?

[Soraya Chemaly]

There's virtually nothing we can do about sexism in the media. One of the structural issues that I think we have is that the media continue to be dominated by elite white men. They may personally be lovely people, but in the aggregate they end up creating norms that are fairly distilled and don't serve a pluralistic society. For example, even in the coverage of things like sexual assault, we're still having debates about whether to write the word “rape” or the word “sex”. This is something that should have been finished 35 or 40 years ago.

When I think about sexism in the media, I think of it vertically. I think about everything from who is writing the tweet to who is writing the headline, to who is assigning stories, and to who is making editorial decisions. At every one of those stages, we can develop strategies, but no one strategy by itself is going to suffice. As far as I know, there are no laws for it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

That's your time on that one.

Ms. Moore, we are ready for your question.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

My questions pertain to educational tools for adolescents.

It is not always easy to find the right way to talk to them. Governments try to create educational tools, but once they become available, adolescents sometimes make fun of them. There have been some very good educational tools, but there have also been educational campaigns that were a flop.

Can you give specific examples of tools that were not very effective and some that work well? I would also like to hear your views about adolescents' tendency to develop their own tools. For example, we can launch a campaign or contest or ask people to send their tools or parts of their education campaign. We can select finalists and people can then vote for a specific tool.

Does that kind of campaign work well to educate young people ultimately? I would like to hear you opinion on that.

[Soraya Chemaly]

I think some of them work. What I find with young people is that they are genuinely interested and curious. They want the information. They are talking about some very complex ideas. They don't like to be talked down to. They don't like things to be dumbed down. They are immersed in these systems. These systems are extensions of their brains; they're more like prosthetics to teenagers. And so when adults step in and are condescending, or panic-stricken, I don't really think it does any good.

I believe that asking children to be honest, but also being honest back in a respectful way, is the most effective thing to do. For example, whether children seek it out or not, they are being exposed to pornography, but no one is talking to them about pornography. And that is a big deal because the thing about those images is that they are consumed and they, then, affect the way people think.

The interesting thing to me is this. I honed in on pornography, because it is the elephant in the room in a lot of these conversations about consent, representation, and sexual exploitation. It kind of exists at a nexus of those things. I'm going to make a leap here, because we haven't talked about this. The pervasiveness of pornography online is now being incorporated into the way algorithms are assessing language, and that's important, because it's contributing to the normalization of language that we know shames teenagers, especially teenage girls.

So the most gendered slurs you can think about, which teenagers use in their daily life, aren't even considered harassing in most cases. But that's the kind of thing kids need to talk about, and sometimes the media is created by them very effectively. I think there are lots of people on YouTube who are quite young and they do that well, but sometimes it does require that adults openly discuss very difficult subjects, and I find that's the greatest impediment. Time and time again, what I find is not resistance among children, but resistance among adults.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

As to a conversation with an adult, would it be easier for someone who is close to the teenager like a parent, or someone who is not as close, such as a teacher, nurse or professional? Do young people have a preference?

[Soraya Chemaly]

We'll need options. We have children, who are in households where they can speak to a parent or two parents. They can speak to grandparents, they can talk to neighbours. But then we have children who are really isolated. I would say especially children who are part of the LGBTQ community, who maybe are in households where they will be actively penalized for their sexuality, they really need structural options and places to go. I don't think that there's any one-size-fits-all solution here. I just think that enabling children, particularly vulnerable children, to understand that they have a place to go is the most important thing.

Does that answer your question?

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Yes.

Should there be tools for adults, for parents for instance, to help them understand the phenomena to which young people are exposed? Do adults know that young people have a great deal of exposure to a lot of things? Adults might not even know that such things exist.

[Soraya Chemaly]

Yes. I think parents are remarkably unaware. We know this from studies. There's an organization in the United States called Common Sense Media that has conducted a lot of studies into this area. What they find is that parents routinely underestimate their children's social media use and exposure to content that they would never allow.

That's a problem. There is this gigantic gap between what is happening in children's lives and what parents think is happening in their lives, which speaks to deeper issues maybe. But in terms of social media by itself, generally speaking, parents are not using these media and don't necessarily understand how their children are using them.

So, what I say to teenagers and even younger children is that we kind of think about mentoring as older, experienced people teaching younger people, and I think it has to be inverted. I really think that young children, as young as 10, 11, and 12, should be mentoring adults. They should be saying, “Hey, let me show you this”, because once you can have that conversation it becomes a much more routine and intimate way of talking about things. It doesn't become something you only talk about when it's a problem.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Ms. Moore, you have 30 seconds left.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Okay.

I would like to know more about cases of violence on the Internet. If the victim is successful, so to speak, in cutting ties with someone, does the violence often move on to family members, such as a daughter, sister or other people that the former spouse knows?

[Soraya Chemaly]

Do you mean in the targeting of that violence?

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Yes.

If the former spouse no longer wants to be violent with his former wife, he might be violent with her sister, her children or her mother. He might decide to harass them, for instance.

[Soraya Chemaly]

Do you mean how often does that happen?

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Yes.

[Soraya Chemaly]

There's no measurement for how often that happens.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I'm sorry, we'll have to go to my colleague Ms. Ludwig, for five and a half minutes.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you very much for an absolutely fascinating presentation. I have about 5,000 questions for you. I'll start with some general ones.

The big one I would like to start with would be about your website itself. You've put some amazing statistics on your website, such as that 88% of video games are developed by males. I want to focus on that from the beginning and then go into some of the questions that my other colleagues have asked in terms of young children.

We're flying back and forth from Ottawa to our homes, and we see young children on the airplanes or in the airports or even at restaurants, some as young as a year and a half, using an iPad and watching video games. So before children can even articulate feelings and reactions, they're certainly being socialized by the video games or any kind of games that they're playing with online.

Marshall McLuhan coined a famous expression “the medium is the message”. How would you help us, using Marshall McLuhan's expression, relate that to your topic today?

[Soraya Chemaly]

I want to go up to the 100-mile mark. What's happening in games right now in terms of representation is fundamentally no different from what happens on television or in books. We know that these gender and racial imbalances already exist. The majority of children's books feature young white boys as protagonists. The same thing happens with television programming. The same thing is happening in gaming.

One study of television, for example, which can logically be extended into this realm, shows that when children watch television programming or when they watch any screen programming, all children with the exception of young white boys, leave feeling drops in their self-esteem, whereas young white boys feel empowered by this media that they're encountering.

I think that's important, because it doesn't matter, honestly, whether a child is reading a book, being read to, looking at a movie from Disney, or playing a game. I think this is why representation is so important.

In the absence of representation, though, the next most vital thing to do is give children media literacy. Teach them that what they're consuming should be healthy or how they should be thinking about themselves and their relationship to the world.

While gaming is vitally important as an entry point into STEM in general, from the perspective of the messages that they get about themselves I think it's just a new version of an old problem.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you.

On that as well, you were talking about feminism. We even heard our Minister of Status of Women talk about how perhaps sometimes it's the concept of feminist behaviour that is singled out, not only the male-female relationship. Behaviour that's determined or deemed to be more feminine seems to be singled out. We often hear in our media slighting comments even about our Prime Minister, about his hair, or how he looks, or his dress; it isn't always so much about what he said. It's demeaning in the same way it would demean a woman.