Status of Women Committee on Oct. 5th, 2016

[Soraya Chemaly]

Yes.

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

You talked as well about power and control. In any work that I've looked at in this area, certainly that is a significant part of it. Have you looked at the demographics of those who are perpetrators?

[Soraya Chemaly]

Yes, I have looked at the demographics of those who are perpetrators. I'll focus just on crime and what's already considered a crime. This varies in multiple jurisdictions all over the world, but we're increasingly recognizing the effects of non-consensual sexualization in pornography. There are laws being passed for that. Over 90% of the people targeted are women, and the vast majority of perpetrators of that crime are men. Similarly with stalking, in the U.S., one in six women will be stalked and almost 75% of perpetrators are men.

Breaking down all of these categories—we can already do that among those tactics that are crimes—I think it is very consistent that there's a gendered pattern of perpetration. This doesn't mean that women are not doing these things, because they clearly are, but overall the perpetration, in some cases the vast majority, is by men.

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

You may not have a quick answer to this question. One of the blogs on your website talks about Yazidi women and girls and maybe changing the language from talking about “sex slaves” and “rape” to help them feel more empowered. What would you suggest as some of the other options?

[Soraya Chemaly]

For trafficked girls?

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

Yes.

[Soraya Chemaly]

Well, that's not a quick or easy question. I actually would need to think about that. I don't have a quick solution. I think it's very important to listen to the girls themselves.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

If you do have an answer to that question, perhaps you could submit it to the clerk. We would love to hear that.

[Soraya Chemaly]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

We'll go now to Ms. Harder for five minutes.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you so much.

My question is with regard to the statement you made on the correlation with pornography. I found your statement to be very intriguing. You called pornography the “elephant in the room”, which basically implies that it's perhaps something that we're not approaching in the way that maybe we to and that we need to just come straight and do so. So I'll do that right now: can you talk a little bit about the correlation between access to pornography and the increase in cyberviolence that we're witnessing?

[Soraya Chemaly]

There are a couple of things.

One is that for the last two years I have immersed myself, for good or bad, in studying the effects of pornography, particularly on children and teenagers. As far as I can tell, and I think it's safe to say—I've probably read over 300 studies in the last year—there is nothing conclusive about that.

What I find the most interesting, though, is that the effects of looking at sexually objectified women—whether it is in pornography or sitting on the bus on the way to work—are generally the same. That's what I'm most concerned about in terms of freedom of expression and civic participation. The effects are that pornified women are considered less moral, less ethical, less competent, less intelligent, baser overall, and are dehumanized.

When men are sexually objectified, people do not respond in the same way. There's no equivalence. We can dismiss any equivalence that people have when they say, “Oh, but there are objectified men on my bus too.” We know that's not the effect that is happening. The question to me is that if we really are concerned about women's status in society, we need to think overall about sexual objectification in general. Whether it's violent is a whole other issue.

The problem with a lot of pornography is that it's eroticizing male dominance, and very violently. The issue is how we talk to boys and girls about their relationships and about sex, because pornography is not going to go away any time soon as far as I can tell.

When boys are consuming this content, which they tend to do in much greater numbers because it's calibrated to appeal to them—we also know from other studies that when porn appeals to girls, they're just as happy to watch it—what do we say to them? How do parents talk about that? That contributes to whether or not you send a picture of your girlfriend to your friend.

I had a 19-year-old college boy in a room of 50 people say to me with a straight face, “Well what's the difference if I send a picture of my toaster to a friend or a picture of my girlfriend?” He really meant it too. He actually meant, “I have the picture and she gave it to me, so it's mine.” I think it's meaningful that by that age, the level of dehumanization and objectification we are tolerating in this society is resulting in this violence.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Can you talk a bit more about the phrase you used, of it “eroticizing male dominance”? I find that phrase really interesting. I'd like you to expand on that further.

In addition to that, I wouldn't mind having your reflections on the following. As legislators, we're talking about putting legislation in place with regard to protecting women against violence, which, of course, we in this room are very committed to doing, but I'm also wondering if there's potential for legislation with regard to access to pornography.

[Soraya Chemaly]

There are a couple of things.

When I refer to the eroticization of male violence, I think very specifically about the way that pornography is used to silence women who espouse feminist perspectives and progressive politics. There is the content of the pornography itself, which very often does exactly that, right? You see images of women who were brutalized and violently gang raped, and that's entertainment and it's erotic. That's what's happening.

I'm more interested in why it is that women who speak in public are then artificially turned into porn. They're photoshopped into images where men are doing that to them and are sent these images. That's a clear statement of power.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I'm sorry, that's the time for that question.

We're going to have to switch to our final five minutes. This is so hard to interrupt because your testimony is wonderful.

We'll go to Ms. Vandenbeld for five minutes.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Actually, if you want to continue with answering that question, I think most of us would like to hear that.

[Soraya Chemaly]

We get a lot of people asking us what to do about it and how to deal with the problem. Whether you're a politician, a writer, a scientist, or an economist, when a man wants to shut you down, very often he will send pornography and he will send pornography that is explicit and violent. We need to be paying attention to that.

Pornography is never really created for children. It's supposed to be adult content. I find it highly problematic that we will regulate our children's diets and think about their nutrition, but are not openly having a discussion about this particular problem and what it means to throw people into this petri dish.

To me, that is almost different from the explicit use of pornography as a political weapon. If you look in the United States at Condoleezza Rice, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, or Michelle Obama, when you Google their names in porn, you get pages and pages of porn. When you Google their male partners, contemporaries, or peers you get pages and pages of their thoughts about porn. That's a radically different thing. When that many people are producing these images and they're being proliferated in the culture, and we don't think of it as a male supremacist political act, I think we just don't want to. It's right there in front of us. We can see it happening. That's a problem and I don't actually think it's a problem that can be legislated ultimately. It's a problem that has to be solved by educating children to understand equality, social justice, women's autonomy, and humanity.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Going to where these things are being disseminated, a lot of this is happening on social media, so I'd like to go back to something you said at the very beginning when you talked about regulating some of these private platforms. You mentioned a couple of things. The first was the lack of diversity in the industry, but you also said something about algorithmic unaccountability. I'm not quite sure what you meant by that. Would you mind explaining that?

[Soraya Chemaly]

Algorithms are really already part of the fabric of our lives in ways we don't really think about or appreciate. A lot of people think of them as neutral. Algorithms are machines. They learn. They don't have opinions, but what algorithms actually do is end up reproducing and amplifying biases that we know exist in the systems and that people have. Governments need to establish boards that would investigate the ethical parameters of how algorithms are being developed and used.

I'll give you one specific case. When men and women searched in one study for the same jobs online, men were six times more likely to get open positions that offered $200,000 or more than women. That's interesting to me because I come from an old-school newspaper background. Gender segregated ads were made illegal in the United States in roughly 1968 to 1972, but what is effectively happening under our noses and visibly is the re-segregation of the job market because of these algorithms that build on peoples' preferences. It may just be that more men apply for those jobs, which turns into their seeing more of these jobs, but right now no one is paying attention to the fact that women aren't seeing them at all. That's one thing, and we know this is happening in terms of racist impacts as well.

There are so many dimensions to algorithms and accountability that we could do this for weeks. I will mention one thing, however. Google's Jigsaw branch has been developing a tool called “wiki detox” which is meant to assess whether language on Wikipedia is an attack, or aggressive, or neutral. It's a learning tool. They had people rate language, then the algorithm learned that and can score language. Then if somebody says something very racist, the algorithm can say “That's an absolute attack and we shouldn't let it in our comments in X's newspaper”. When I put in gender slurs, they all came out as neutral, not attacks. If you actually put in a sentence that says, "Excuse me, you're a dick”, it comes out as an attack, but if you put in, “You should be raped”, it's 50/50.

We need to understand how these tools are being fed information, how the assessment is done, who's doing the assessing, and then how they're going to be implemented. There are really no mechanisms for that right now. Pornography plays into that because it's in the language, as it is in Twitter.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Wonderful. I'm sorry. That's like a cliffhanger for our next meeting.

[Soraya Chemaly]

Sorry. I know.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you so much for your testimony today. It was excellent. We appreciate your being with us.

[Soraya Chemaly]

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

There's one thing I need to do for the committee. The Status of Women report was issued, and you got a link. I don't know if everyone has had a chance to look at it or not, but we are supposed to adopt the report.

I need a motion to adopt it. The report was circulated. We just need a motion to adopt it, unless there's an issue.

You haven't seen it?

We don't have to do it today, do we?

To the witness, you don't have to stay for the committee business. Thanks so much.

[Soraya Chemaly]

Okay. I didn't want to just hang up on you. Thank you very much for having me today.