Thank you, Madam Chair. Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you, Madam Chair and the Standing Committee on the Status of Women, for this opportunity to address the question of violence against women and young girls in Canada, in particular in relation to campus violence.
We commend the committee's focus on this timely and critical issue. The current discourse, especially over the past week, speaks to the urgency to act on this matter and the need to counteract the misogynistic and sexist behaviour and attitudes that harm girls and women in their abilities to lead fulfilling and meaningful lives. This is an opportunity that we really cannot miss.
As a bit of context, Canadian Women's Foundation is Canada's national public foundation dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls. We focus on three core areas: stopping violence, ending poverty, and empowering women and girls. We advocate at the national level for strategies and policies that contribute to gender equality across Canada.
For 25 years we've invested in 1,400 communities, helping 250,000 people. These programs focus on violence prevention, healthy relationships among teens, empowerment to women and girls, mentoring, work experience, poverty elimination, and capacity-building.
Our vision is for all women in Canada to live free from violence. We help women in Canada move out of violence by funding emergency shelters and through prevention programs. We also invest in co-educational school-based violence prevention programs that teach girls and boys and all genders to stop the violence. We understand how the ripple effects of investing in such programs improve women's well-being, their economic prospects, and social conditions, while conversely, we understand the personal, social, and economic costs of allowing this to persist, in particular with respect to violence.
Here are just a few facts about violence against women in Canada.
One-half of all women in Canada have experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual violence. Sixty-seven per cent of all Canadians know someone who has experienced physical or sexual violence. Sexual assault is a gender-based crime. Of reported adult victims, 93% are female, and 97% percent of the accused are men. Women aged 18 to 24 experience the highest rates of sexual violence.
The vast majority of sex assault still goes unreported to police. In one poll, the most common reason women gave for not reporting sexual assault was feeling young and powerless. Of the respondents, 40% said they remained silent because of feeling shame, and 29% blamed themselves.
Of survivors who did report sexual assault to police, in the same poll, 71% said the experience was negative. We have noted that sexual assault is the only violent crime in Canada not declining, with women's risk of violent victimization 20% higher than men's as of 2014.
It is instructive to point out where declining rates of police-reported domestic violence have been found, and we can attribute it to some mitigating factors: increasing social equality; financial freedom, enabling women to leave relationships that are abusive in earlier stages; and sustained efforts by women's organizations at the grassroots to end domestic violence.
If we compare sexual violence and domestic violence, we see there are also far more services in response to domestic violence, whether it's in the police and court sector, the coordination of community services, availability of shelters, etc., than there are for sexual violence in Canada.
These indicators demonstrate that we have a far greater need for coordination at the community level to effect change in attitudes, behaviour, and the institutional responses to sexual violence.
We know that patterns of abuse are learned early. Research suggests that the earlier children receive healthy relationships education, the more lasting the outcomes. Over the past 15 years, the foundation has focused resources on co-educational teen healthy relationships programs. Educators see the value in teen healthy relationships programming, preparing 11-, 12-, and 13-year-olds for intimate relationships before they typically start dating.
Through these projects, teens are taught skills, warning signs of unhealthy relationships, foundational behaviours for healthy ones, and where to get help. These are delivered in classroom work as ongoing programs through discussion role-playing and ongoing workbooks that they work at during out-of-school hours, facilitated by teachers, community members, and youth.
The involvement of youth and peers contributes greatly to their success. Research also illustrates that meaningful youth participation in program design contributes to the development of more relevant and effective services and provides youth with the opportunities to gain skills, as well as empowerment and leadership opportunities. It also helps them make healthy connections.
This program is also designed to include boys as leaders and to engage them in conversations and activities that deconstruct power dynamics, such as race, class, gender, and privilege, in general. It does not engage in blaming men and boys for the violence. The participant surveys show that 90% of students said the programs helped let them keep their relationships healthy even years after leaving school, and more than 60% said that the programs influenced their choice of partners and helped them decide how to leave an unhealthy relationship.
We believe that the teen healthy relationships program should be incorporated in high schools across Canada and that it would be instructive in the development of campus prevention programs. Early intervention underscores the importance of talking and learning about healthy, equal relationships before heading to college and university, and it can be a way of preventing campus violence.
Campus violence, as we know, occurs against a backdrop of prevailing myths of victim blaming about sexual assault, cultural normalization of sexist attitudes, institutional behaviours, ignorance about the laws of consent, poor institutional prevention programs, and a lack of mechanisms to respond to sexual assault.
Over the past few years, media attention has highlighted the vacuum in consistent proactive approaches. The foundation, in a cursory scan in 2014 of seven universities across Canada, found a patchwork of procedures for dealing with sexual violence.
We know through some of the work we've done that four out of five university undergraduate students on Canadian campuses have been victims of violence in a dating relationship. There are two stats that are used quite consistently, but they're very worrying: one-fifth of male students agreed that forced sex is acceptable if someone spends money on a date, is stoned or drunk, or has been dating somebody for a long time, and one other survey showed that 60% of Canadian college-aged males indicated they would commit sexual assault if they were certain they couldn't get caught.
We also did polls at Canadian Women's Foundation ourselves. We wanted to see how women who had experienced sexual assault might be seen in the wider community, so we asked questions about whether people believed that victims brought sexual assault on themselves. Our survey showed that 19% of respondents believe that women may provoke or encourage sexual assault when they are drunk, and when you take it down to the age group of 18- to 34-year-olds, it's nearly 25% who believe that same finding.
A more recent survey about consent revealed that although 96% agreed that sexual activity between partners should be consensual, two-thirds of Canadians did not understand that this meant it had to be ongoing, positive, and enthusiastic.
The survey also revealed that many young Canadians have a blurred understanding of consent when technology is involved. Almost one in five, 21%, aged 18 to 34, believe that if a woman sends an explicit sexual text, then it means that she is inviting the recipient to engage in off-line sexual activity.
We know, as both these surveys show us, there is a need to create and integrate campus-based programs targeted at young people to empower them, learn their rights, and above all develop a culture and climate of consent. Therefore, there must be a clear understanding of sexual consent and of sexual violence according to the Criminal Code of Canada.
We know that one way to address sexual assault on campus is to encourage stand-alone sexual assault policies. Out of 100 universities and colleges across Canada, approximately 24 now have stand-alone policies. These recognize that sexual assault is different from other forms of misconduct, and they set out specific procedures for handling complaints.
The passage of Bill 132 in Ontario included a proviso that all publicly assisted colleges, universities, and private career colleges are required to have stand-alone sexual violence policies by January 2017. This act also requires them to review their policies every three years and to do so with student involvement. Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and British Columbia are also looking at this, but policies are not enough.
As my colleague stated previously in her brief, we know that we need much more responsive programs, programs that deal directly with what victims need and provide victim-centred responses, with victims themselves being included in the creation of policies and protocols that come out of the stand-alone protocols, so it's not only the youth—