Status of Women Committee on Oct. 17th, 2016

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Julie Lalonde]

People always think it's a reference to Gwen Stefani. It's not—no disrespect to Gwen Stefani.

We were launched around 2005 in New York. If you remember, back then cellphone cameras were a brand new technology. It was very exciting. It was terrible and pixilated, but very exciting.

A young woman on a subway in New York was on her way to work when someone started publicly masturbating in front of her. This had happened to her before, but she realized that in her pocket she had this brand new phone with a camera. She thought that if she took the guy's picture, she then would have evidence and the police might actually do something about it. She took a picture of him. He posed for the photo; that's how flagrant he was in what he did. It clearly was not his first time. She brought the photo to the NYPD and asked them to please try to get the guy. They said that millions of people live in New York and asked how they were supposed to find this guy.

This was prior to social media in the way that we currently understand it. She posted it to Flickr, which is—as hopefully you know—a sort of photo-sharing site, one of the first social media sites, and it went viral. It ended up on the cover of the New York Daily News. He was eventually apprehended. Interestingly enough, he was released and has been apprehended just recently, in the past year, for doing it again to someone else.

What was important about this story is that when a young woman used what she had at her disposal to start a conversation, it sparked a massive conversation within the city of New York, where you had men saying, “As if this happens to women...”, and you had women saying, “As if you didn't know this is the reality of what it means to walk down the street in New York and to take public transit.”

A group of women and men in New York thought that maybe this new mobile technology stuff was the answer, because you had a way of capturing this problem in the moment. Initially, the site was started just for people in the city of New York to capture this in real time, but that quickly morphed. They heard from people around the world who were saying that this was not a problem unique to New York and that they had it in India, Europe, and Latin America. It was happening all over the place, and they asked if they could participate as well.

Now our current format is that anybody around the world can start a chapter. We are now in 60 cities on five continents around the world—I just counted them this morning—powered by over 300 activists, overwhelmingly through unpaid volunteer labour. Over half of the people who run a Hollaback! site are considered youths, so they're under the age of 30 or 25. Young people are running this movement.

As for how it works, we have an app that you can download for free. We have a chapter here in Ottawa. You can submit your story, such as how you were walking down Rideau Street and a guy drove by and yelled at you from his car or a guy followed you for three blocks asking you for your number and it really pissed you off. You submit your story to us, we approve it, and not only does it get put on the site, but a little dot goes onto a map, and we can actually start tracking where street harassment happens in the city. This is giving us real data in real time about what's going on in our community.

That has given us data to take to places. For example, when we had our municipal election a few years ago, we went to them with the kinds of things that we were seeing and experiencing. We were able to contact everyone running for council to say that this was what was going on in their ward and to ask them what they were going to do about it.

Here's what's important for me. When we first launched, people asked us about being afraid that we were going to get sued by the guy whose picture we took for being a creep. That was their assumption. It was around libel. Also, they asked what the power was of telling someone's story. They said, “A girl just vented on your website, but what difference does that make?” Well, by creating a space for people to tell their stories, we're getting data that we've never had before.

We were around for about two years and then decided to look at the themes we saw coming up over and over again in Ottawa. What we saw overwhelmingly was about public transit. That's what I want to talk about with you very briefly, because most people, most students, are taking public transit. We live in a city where you have a U-Pass. This is common on campuses across the country; there's an assumption that you're going to take transit.

Transit in Ottawa, I can say, remains very unsafe for women and young folks, queer folks, people with disabilities, and elders. Specifically, what we found was that the overwhelming number of stories we got were about being harassed on the bus, while waiting for the bus, or on the way off the bus and heading home.

We took that information and approached OC Transpo, which is the public transit authority here in Ottawa, and they were more than a little dismissive. They were actually outraged that we dared to say on our website that there were high levels of harassment on transit, because they were not getting reports. In their defence, here you have a crop of privileged people who don't take transit. Most of them were men who were, like, “We don't get reports of this stuff, so how do we know you're not just making this up?”

We held a town hall. We got people to start sharing their stories. It just exploded in the city. Women were coming forward and saying that they didn't know of a single woman who didn't have at least one story of a guy who was leering at them for the whole 40 minutes they were on the bus—minimum.

We continued to push them, both by using the media and by meeting with them monthly. What we wanted was a bystander intervention campaign. We wanted ads telling people that if they saw somebody harassing someone, they had a role to play. We had to concede to a campaign.... For those of you who know transit at all, you might have seen ads that say “if you feel harassed” or “if you feel threatened”. That's a result of the work that we did with them for three years, pushing them to talk about the fact that if they would acknowledge that this happens, people would talk about it.

We also wanted an anonymous reporting mechanism. We knew that the vast majority of people did not report because they were concerned about stigma, about victim blaming, about all the stuff that my colleagues have mentioned already. In fact, we were correct. Ottawa has the first anonymous reporting mechanism in the country. Apparently, it might be the first for all of North America, which is very exciting. Lo and behold, most of the things that are getting reported to them are things that they had never had reported previously, including high levels of people being leered at and of people being groped.

It actually led to the apprehension of a serial sexual assault predator who had been going up to women and kissing young girls waiting for the bus for school. Multiple women reported it through the anonymous reporting mechanism. They went to the cameras and, sure enough, they caught him and he was apprehended.

Once again, you create a space for people to tell their stories, and young women want to tell their stories, but we need to do something with that information.

I want to leave you with some stats as well. Hollaback! HQ is in New York. They got some funding. It's the only chapter in the world that is actually funded to do its work. They worked with Cornell University to gather global statistics on street harassment, which was really important.

What they found was that 88% of Canadians had been harassed before the age of 18, which means that 88% of women in Canada had been harassed at least once before they were even legally an adult. Fifty per cent of the respondents had been groped or fondled at least once in the past year, which is pretty tremendous. Forty per cent said that a result of street harassment was that it made them late to school. It made them late for class because they either had to do a detour or they had to collect themselves before they could go to their lecture or classroom.

Locally, we had our own research, which was not funded by the wonderful folks at Cornell but was still pretty sound. What we found, which was important and builds off what Maïra said, was that only 6% of people who had been harassed had someone intervene on their behalf. That's really important when you consider that the nature of street harassment is being in a public space. If you're on a bus, there's at least you, the perpetrator, and the driver. If you're waiting for a bus, there's probably someone else around.

We have very low levels of intervention because people are not recognizing it as a form of violence. They don't get that street harassment is on a continuum. They're afraid of escalation. They think that only crazy people harass women at the bus stop and that if they intervene, the crazy person is going to come after them. It's a sort of self-preservation.

We also found that people just don't know what to do, so we have a program, and our response is not criminalization. We're actually opposed to the criminalization of street harassment, because most of the things we're experiencing are already against the law, so that's not the issue. The issue is getting people to intervene, whether that involves reporting or whatnot.

I want to end by telling you about our program. It's called “I've Got Your Back”. We teach the four Ds of intervention: direct, delegate, distract, and delay.

To give you an example, if I see Maïra being harassed and it's considered fairly low level—if he's just chatting with her and I feel safe enough—I can go up to him and say, “She doesn't know you. She's not interested, so let it go”, or I can go up to her and say, “Do you know him or do you need me to call somebody?” I can intervene directly if it's safe.

You can delegate if it's not safe. Maybe you're tiny and not a tall person like I am, whose job it is to yell at people about the patriarchy—

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Julie Lalonde]

—so maybe you're not as comfortable about intervening. You can delegate. You can tell the driver; you can very discreetly go up to the front and say that a woman looks really uncomfortable and you think something's happening. Or if you're on a construction site, we encourage you to find the guy with the white hat and say that his staff is harassing someone. If you're at the mall, tell mall security. You can delegate.

You can create a distraction, which is also very non-confrontational. Let's say that I see Maïra being harassed. I go up to her and say, “Hey, I have to get off at the Rideau stop, so do you know where to go?” You're creating a distraction and also letting that person know that there's a witness to what's happening.

Or you can delay, which is also really important. It sounds like it's not effective, but you can wait until the moment has passed, then go up to the person and say that you saw what just happened to them. You can ask them if they're okay, say that it was really gross, and ask them if they need you to call someone for them or need you to walk them to where they need to go.

That's what we do. That's what we teach. We teach bystander intervention, but we need access to those avenues to go into those spaces. That's what campuses want us to do, and that's what we're doing with youth.

Once again, thank you so much for having street harassment on your radar. It's so very important to us.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Awesome. Thank you so much.

We'll begin our first round of questioning. We'll start with you, Mr. Fraser, for seven minutes.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Thank you for your compelling and interesting presentation.

Ms. Martin, if you don't mind, I will ask my questions in English.

Perfect.

This is awesome. I found it almost empowering to sit here and listen to you guys. One thing I can draw on from my own experience comes from the educational side. I too am not too far removed from a university campus. I was a student leader who helped organize education seminars on sexual violence, among other things. At the time, I found we did have a focus of almost telling young men and boys in particular not to be an assailant and what consent means. That was important, but I very much felt that the people who bought into the message probably knew already what the message would be. The people who needed to hear it didn't show up, even though it was supposed to be mandatory.

How can we engage people who need to hear this message? Is it by focusing on the fact that we need to be educating people to become intervenors?

[Maïra Martin]

I will answer in French.

In fact, the best way is to speak to people, both men and women, who are bystanders, meaning friends and family who are witnesses. This way, the men feel less confronted. For example, I don't know if you are familiar with the awareness campaign that uses the message “Don't be that guy”. It's a campaign that ran in Alberta. Personally, I showed it to several of my friends and to my husband, and they all said that they already weren't that kind of guy. They didn't think it really spoke to them because they didn't considered themselves attackers.

This type of campaign shows little. These are a few examples of sexual assault. It actually does not show the full spectrum. This also needs to be shown because some people don't know how to recognize a sexual assault. So the first thing is to explain to them what a sexual assault is. Then, they need to be told that it isn't normal, that we need to do something so that everyone can feel safe on the street, on campus and elsewhere. We need to show people that they can be agents of change, that they can intervene and change things.

The best way to do this is to equip people. As I said, sometimes this involves simple advice. These are not necessarily very complicated things. Exactly as Julie explained, we can simply go and see the person to stop these actions, to create a distraction.

Does that answer your question?

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Yes. Thank you very much, Ms. Martin.

Perhaps I can address a follow-up question to both you and Ms. Ross-Marquette.

Ms. Ross-Marquette, you discussed the need to have inclusive strategies on university campuses that bring into the fold everybody who actually knows the campus community. How can we, as a federal government, help build in this kind of strategy that Ms. Martin discussed to help empower people to intervene when they see sexual harassment taking place in the campus context?

[Gabrielle Ross-Marquette]

I'm not sure what the federal government's jurisdiction is, but I think it comes when we work with communities. It starts from the local level and then it fans out. Students and activists and also community groups are already doing some of that work. How can the work that is happening be supported by the federal government? Sometimes that's just investing more money into those strategies so that there can be more staff hired to continue those initiatives.

I think conversations need to be brought into classrooms more. That's a hurdle we've heard students talk about. Incorporating some of this subject matter in curriculum is something that's proving to be a bit difficult. It has to pass through a lot of different bodies, like a senate, to make sure it happens. That's something worth looking into.

It would also be creating those discussions at the classroom level, where students are. Oftentimes we see in the greater Toronto area, for instance, campuses that are commuter campuses. Students come in for their classes, and then they leave. They don't get engaged or involved in the process. It would be about having those dual strategies of having the conversations with everyone—having community actors present on campus and doing that type of work, but also having the conversations in classrooms. That would be a good place to start.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

With the very different perspectives—from a commuter campus to what we mostly have out on the east coast, where students live within two blocks of the campus community at all times for four years—do you think it's more important to defer the local, specific decision-making on the programming to community organizations or to the campus community by saying, “Look, we'll perhaps fund what you're going to do, but you do what works on the ground rather than take our advice from the centre”?

[Gabrielle Ross-Marquette]

That's what I would suggest. As Maïra and Julie have said, there are experts. There are people who have been doing this violence against women work for many years. They are wells of knowledge that need to be supported, that need to be funded, and they want to do that work with the students and the campuses.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Excellent.

Ms. Lalonde, I want to get to you before I wrap up. I probably have about a minute or so left by my account.

What you're doing is amazing. What can the federal government do? What's your best advice to this committee? What can we recommend to the government to expand the kind of work that you're doing in the different communities across Canada? How can we better give access to these public spaces that you referred to?

[Julie Lalonde]

That's a great question that I will answer very quickly for you.

First, having street harassment on your radar sounds hokey, but it's so important. It's on the continuum of sexual violence. In Ontario, there's a lot of conversation on sexual harassment and sexual violence. When you list forms of violence in terms of a call for proposals, for example, or as a focus, mentioning street harassment is really important. It is also important to find ways to fund the groups that are doing this work, knowing that a lot of those groups can't apply for federal funding because they don't have non-profit status. I think this feels like a separate conversation, but it's actually closely related, because groups like ours can't afford the money that we need to apply for funding.

Here we are doing this incredible work—we're challenging local transit authorities; we've developed this app; we've developed this mechanism that is nowhere else in North America—all off the side of our desks, so I think there's a gap. In my case, I do draw the line at work.

If you want to have access to the folks doing that work, you have to find a way to fund groups like Hollaback!. Continuously talking about street harassment as something that's on the government's radar will then incite other violence against women organizations to include it as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Excellent.

Now we're going to go to Ms. Harder, who is splitting her time with Mr. Genuis.

You have seven minutes.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

All right. Thank you so much, and thank you to each and every one of you for being here today and sharing your expertise with us. We certainly appreciate it.

My first question today will go to Gabrielle. I'm just wondering if you could comment on the campaign called “We Believe You”. Are you familiar with that campaign?

[Gabrielle Ross-Marquette]

I am familiar, but it's not led by METRAC.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Right, okay. Could you comment on its effectiveness at all?

[Gabrielle Ross-Marquette]

From what we've been able to see on campuses, especially around the time of the Jian Ghomeshi trial, which was when that campaign picked up, it is very important because it is very survivor-centric and survivor-driven.

It is a group of people who have experienced sexual violence standing up for their fellow women or people who have experienced sexual violence who may not feel comfortable coming forward, or those who have been living with that secret for a long time. They are creating a community to ensure that everybody has a place and a voice.

I would say that it is very effective because it is led by survivors of sexual violence, and it centres on a very important concept that is not victim blaming. It's the opposite. It's believing them and being there for them.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Okay. Thank you.

My next question will go to Ms. Lalonde.

I guess I'm going on the premise of the “We Believe You” campaign. Clearly it has helped generate support from the general public through different initiatives on campus, and in society as a whole in terms of taking a person's story at face value and giving it merit and giving it weight.

Around this table we have people who are passionate about the topic of violence against women and who want to make a difference. What can we as legislators do that would mimic, let's say, this “We Believe You” campaign? In other words, what could we do in order to make sure that our police forces, our legislative system, and our judges also believe the stories that come before them?

[Julie Lalonde]

That's a great question. Thank you. I love that question. It gets me so excited.

This sounds sort of silly, but as a public educator, I could do a two-hour workshop, and especially men will write in the evaluation form that what they took away the most was me reminding them that people are as likely to set their house on fire for insurance purposes as they are to make false claims of sexual assault, but you wouldn't know that from watching the news.

People need to know that statistically the rates of people making up false claims are the same as or lower than they are other crimes. That narrative is not out there. People think I have some sort of ulterior motive and say that it benefits me to make that statement, but that's the reality.

If you have a police force...in Ottawa, where we had very high rates of sexual assaults that were being dismissed, that became its own news story. We all knew that was in no way accurate.

I think when you are making legislation, when you're having conversations about the law and sexual assault, which sounds like that's really the question, it's around reminding people that we don't treat other crimes with the same level of doubt as we do with sexual assault. That's not a coincidence; that's purposeful.

Those who benefit from lies around sexual violence are perpetrators, and most perpetrators are repeat offenders. Why? It's because women don't come forward. Why? It's because we blame them. However, it starts from the premise of why we treat it as though everyone who comes forward around sexual assault is lying, when the statistics are the same as, or lower than, they are for other crimes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you.

Mr. Genuis is next.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you all very much.

Are you active in other Canadian cities, and do you have insights to share from other Canadian cities? Obviously, there is the use of transit or not, and the dynamics may be different in other places.

[Julie Lalonde]

We were the first chapter in Canada. The folks in Halifax, Peterborough, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Alberta are the other chapters. Some are more active than others, because we're all volunteer-based, but what is great about the model for Hollaback! is that people can work with the biggest problem in their community, the biggest need.

In our community, it was transit. For anyone who's been following the news, Vancouver transit is a serious issue as well, with all that's been happening with the SkyTrain. We're seeing that transit is a major issue. Even in communities like Peterborough, they found that a lot of the stories submitted are around transit. Some communities have more of a campus problem, so they focus more on that, but I would say that transit is an issue across the board. I'm from Sudbury, which is getting its Hollaback! chapter, and the transit there is horrible. The service is horrible, but even there they have issues with harassment. I don't know of a community in Canada that's not struggling with that problem.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you.

You talked about working with OC Transpo and you also talked about the issue of criminalization.

Are you able to work collaboratively with the police in terms of enforcement? I understand the point that there is a lot more work that needs to be done rather than just looking at it through a criminal justice lens, but obviously that's a part of the picture as well, right? What kind of co-operation have you had from police?

[Julie Lalonde]

We couldn't develop our anonymous supporting mechanism without Ottawa police support, because there is a lot of stuff around privacy legislation, for example. Now there is an MOU between the police and OC Transpo security. They have to share information that they get with each other, and share intelligence on anything related to transit, which is a big win.

For those who have lived in Ottawa for a while, last year or the year before, we had a serial perpetrator who was on the loose for 18 months who sexually assaulted a number of women. The Ottawa police's response was very much the archaic stuff that Maïra talked about: travel in pairs, don't go outside at night.

We, as an organization that doesn't get funding, could speak politically. We came out very strongly and said, “You're telling Canadian women that they need a curfew and a chaperone, and that's not appropriate.” They, in turn, had a meeting with us and changed the way in which they report on sexual violence, the way they issue press releases, and the way they communicate. They did what we told them, which was that if they got his description out there, they were more likely to find him, and in fact that's what happened.

That was based on a relationship that we've had and continue to maintain with Ottawa police, OC Transpo, and us, as three organizations.