Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
Thank you for inviting me to speak to you this afternoon.
Sexual assault in Canada is an issue of great concern to me. I hope that our government will take this opportunity to improve the lives of women.
You've received my brief, so I will get directly to the point: what I see as the core problem of responses to sexual violence, both on and off campus, because campus is a mirror of the broader society. I have a few other ideas to share on how these problems might be addressed.
The core problem is acknowledging sexual violence as a social fact. At the core of my research on both sexual and domestic violence—which routinely overlap, even on campuses—sits the disavowal of sexual violence as anything more than a few rotten apples, rather than a cultural phenomenon.
Some may elect to call this “rape culture”. I'm agnostic on this term. We can refer to it as such if that makes sense and if it's helpful, but I also recognize that this term has come to carry a great deal of political weight and has constituted its own battleground, so I am electing to talk about sexual violence as a social fact, with the proviso that what we call it is far less important than recognizing that it exists.
Recognizing sexual violence as a social fact does not mean that all men are rapists. I can't state that emphatically enough. Such a recognition acknowledges instead that we live in society that shames, blames, and dismisses survivors' experiences of sexual violence on one hand, while on the other hand tacitly or explicitly permitting and, in some cases, encouraging sexual violence.
To acknowledge that we live in a culture saturated with sexual violence today is no different from past recognitions of other social ills such as racism and homophobia. Today we can own the fact that both systemic and overt racism and homophobia have been and continue to be unfortunate features of our society, and in that admission, in naming these problems head-on, we have been and continue to be able to take steps legislatively, socially, and systematically to address these problems. However, until we own that the problem exists, there's very little we can do to address it and to meaningfully make things better for the lives of women and girls.
Sexual violence is a reality on campus. It is embedded in frosh week activities, fraternity and varsity initiations, and, sadly, sometimes even in public statements made by university leaders. Survivors of sexual violence on campus, and indeed women in general, feel the brunt of a culture of sexual violence. They have difficulty accessing services, they are disbelieved or dismissed when they speak up, and almost invariably the outcomes of formal reporting mechanisms leave them feeling unprotected and silenced.
Much of this is driven by a strong ethic of institutional risk management on the part of universities. The university, any university, does not benefit from keeping accurate records of incidences of sexual violence, from encouraging survivors to report, or—as I would argue is the most important task at hand—from implementing an aggressive sexual violence prevention strategy. To do any or all of these things is to have the institution admit that sexual violence is a reality on its campus and in its community. University leaders are loath to admit that their campuses are so-called “rape campuses”, and I use this in scare quotes because this is a term that is embraced by the student movement to express the gravity of the problems they are encountering on their campuses. The risk of liability is most easily mitigated when the problem does not exist, so it comes as no surprise that, in our research, universities routinely denied that there was a problem with sexual violence on their campuses, even as students and survivors told us exactly the opposite.
Okay, that's the problem, so what do we do? Let's say that in my perfect world, we're able to admit to sexual violence as a cultural aspect of our society that manifests on campuses. We've named the problem, so what can we do about it? How do we fix it?
Of course there's no magic bullet, but since I have the attention of some of the top decision-makers in this land, at least for the next six minutes or so, let me build on some of the work that this committee has already done and make a few suggestions. I'm particularly interested in this committee's attention to a national action plan focusing on prevention, continuity of care, and safe reporting mechanisms.
Sexual violence, as you are all aware, is not just a criminal issue. It impacts access to education and health, and at its core, it's about human rights. In terms of sexual violence, this means gender equality.
Sexual violence impinges on the human rights of women in Canada. If Canada is to become a truly gender-equal society, we need to act now to address gender-based violence.
The federal government could take leadership and work in coalition with the provinces to develop a national strategy for colleges and universities that would ensure impactful prevention initiatives, largely in the form of ongoing education. This is the key to addressing sexual violence. This is what we did with racism and homophobia. People learned that these things were not okay. Canada is a different, and, I would assert, better country because of it—a world leader, in fact.
After an incident of sexual violence, survivors need care. I know governments and institutions are focused on the numbers and insist on developing frameworks around accurate reporting. I understand that need, but coming from a survivor-centric perspective, survivors often are uninterested in reporting and instead want services. They need health care, academic accommodation, safety on campus, and, most of all, to be believed. Again the federal government could play a pivotal role here, not just in funding but by ensuring that there is a basic standard of care for survivors across the country.
If we want survivors to report, we have to make reporting safe and survivor-friendly. Policing and prosecutorial services routinely deny survivors even the opportunity for adjudication, much less, given the current tests in law, any real chance of securing a conviction. Survivors who do come forward must tell their stories over and over again. Their believability is called into question. They are called liars or sluts. Their characters and previous behaviours are interrogated, including their sexuality, and all to reach the very unattainable goal of securing a finding of guilt. The threshold of reasonable doubt is very difficult to cross in the case of sexual violence, because almost all sexual assaults happen in private, with no witnesses. This is even more difficult in what we now call the “post-Ghomeshi era”, in which you will be hard pressed to find any survivor who is willing to put herself through a criminal process.
The same can also be said for internal university and college reporting processes. These are piecemeal and typically involve gag orders that direct survivors not to discuss their cases with anyone except on the vaguely defined need-to-know basis. This is a clause that many survivors read as a threat against them for seeking support, advice, or counselling, alongside advocacy.
Alongside law reform, which is under the purview of the federal government, a national action strategy could also include bringing the provinces together to ensure they have a uniform reporting and investigatory regime that is supportive of survivors. This does not mean an erasure of due process, but it does mean that we can implement protocols for reporting and investigating that are more friendly for survivors. Gender-based violence should be, needs to be, and must be a top issue for the Minister of Justice, the Attorney General , and the Minister of Health.
Finally, none of this is of any use without oversight and transparency. Circling back to my earlier assertions regarding university risk management, universities and colleges ought to have oversight bodies that are charged with reviewing not only reported cases but also service provision and prevention strategies on campuses. Here again the federal government could take the lead in order to offer a uniform oversight mechanism that would hold universities accountable if they fall short of national standards. I think they could set the bar very high.
The United Nations' safe cities strategy might be a good place start. Could this government implement the spirit of the UN's initiatives but think in terms of safe campuses? It could start with pilot projects on specific campuses that target innovative safety initiatives, such as anonymous reporting and mandatory and ongoing rape culture education. There could be policies that put the onus on the respondents to rearrange their work and study lives in order to make campuses safer for women, instead of on survivors, who, in my research, told how they had to move out of dorms, drop classes, miss out on employment opportunities, and even leave the university altogether in order to ensure their safety.
I realize this is the beginning of what I hope will be a thoughtful and ongoing conversation about how Canada can embody the principles of gender equality by addressing its main barrier, which is gender violence.
Naturally, as an academic, I have many more things to say on the issue, as well as the issue of the policing of domestic violence. I could go on for hours, but, as I said, I think we need to have a conversation. In order to begin that, I will now stop talking and welcome any and all questions.
Thank you all for your attention.