That's fine.
Well, the main thing—actually, I guess the cartoons are in French and English—is that somebody referred to Donald Trump. As a native Nova Scotian, I have to sing the praises of Mr. MacKinnon. What a great cartoonist he is. When you do get this, it says “make America 'ape' again” in terms of the Donald Trump effect. With it is an article about the impact that kind of thing has on issues around sexual assault on university campuses. I sat in on some of your previous witnesses' testimony on the whole question of culture, rape culture, and those kinds of things. It's part of that.
Maybe I should very quickly tell you a little bit about my involvement in this issue. I'm primarily a constitutional law and human rights law teacher. That's what I've done for most of my career. In recent times, however, I did chair the Nova Scotia task force on cyber-bullying and did a report on that. That got me immersed in that difficult and complicated area. It has sort of taken over my life, along with this one, even though I did a lot of things before that. Also, I did chair the Saint Mary's so-called rape chant council and advised the president and the university on that. That has partly, other than my legal training, gotten me involved in issues around sexual assault.
These are huge areas. I assume, based on your questions, you'd prefer more of a focus, if not an exclusive focus, on sexual assault, although the earlier part of the committee did deal with questions of cyber-bullying. One of the important points, I think, is that there is a continuum, as I'm sure this committee would recognize, of violence against women all the way from sexual harassment to sexting to sexual assault. It's a continuum, not a single entry point.
I did have translated, and I hope the committee has available, three items that I want to comment on very briefly. One is a PowerPoint presentation I did for the International Society for the Reform of Criminal Law dealing with the Ghomeshi trial and issues around sexual assault. Another one was for that same organization on so-called revenge porn. Perhaps most relevant for this, in some ways, is the third document, which deals with the issue of what kinds of things should go into policies dealing with issues of sexual assault on university campuses. It's the Association of Atlantic Universities presentation that my excellent research student Maxime pulled together and that we both worked on and presented.
Those are the three pieces. I recognize that time is very short, so I'll make a very few comments on that and try to be responsive to your questions.
First, for those who like to refer to things, I'll refer to the Ghomeshi document and the PowerPoint on that, it certainly brought to light the difficulties victims face in dealing with our criminal system. We knew that before, but it certainly played out on a very large and significant stage.
One part of the presentation, which I won't review but you can look at later, goes back and actually looks at the evolution of the Criminal Code. It's quite interesting to see that from the 1890s the punishment for rape—not to say that this is the answer—was either life imprisonment or death, and even attempted rape was a seven-year sentence. They added to that in the 1920s by adding whipping to both categories. Again, I'm not advocating that we need to bring that back, but it's an interesting contrast to the kinds of penalties handed out today in relation to issues of sexual assault. That's one part of that evolution.
Another part that certainly the Ghomeshi trial and other things have brought out is that the change in 1982, a very important reform of the sexual assault laws—from talking about rape as penetration, a much narrower definition, to a much broader range of things in terms of sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault, and those kinds of things—was mostly positive, obviously. It included husbands for the first time. It's pretty amazing when you think about that, but it is true. It's only since 1982.
On the other side of that, as the Ghomeshi trial brought out, and maybe this goes to the “just locker-room talk” kind of thing, “sexual assault” doesn't seem to have the gravitas that “rape” does as a term. As a society it's been kind of normalized in some way, so there has emerged a bit of a downside to that. Again, that's not to suggest that it has to be redefined.
That's mostly what I would say on it, but the only other thing that I'd comment on quickly is in terms of looking at the role of law in all of this, which I guess is quite important. What is the role of law and policy in these things? Education and prevention obviously are extremely important, and in some ways more important than law, but as I point out in both of those presentations, I think the law has an important moral message to send in terms of stating what our core values are, what the values should be in terms of how seriously we take things like sexual assault and sexual assault on university campuses, and how we respond to that. I think that's quite important.
Also, we shouldn't just think about—and this will lead me a little bit into the university context—the criminal response. Having worked with various universities.... Actually, one other hat I wore was as president of Mount Allison for a term as well, so I've been on the other side of the desk on these kinds of things. I think one of the important issues is that you do not simply refer it to police. Obviously you should do that in the appropriate cases—which is a lot of the cases—but that does not absolve you as an institution of all responsibility to respond.
In my work in this area, I find that's a very frequent answer: “We've done what we're supposed to do. We're not qualified to do this; we've sent it to the police, and that's it.” I think one really important thing that might come from this committee is reinforcing that there still should be discipline processes and internal university processes to respond simultaneously, perhaps, with a criminal investigation, because of many of the shortcomings in the Ghomeshi example, and because it takes a long time.
On the revenge porn point, I wouldn't say much about that other than to say there is an important continuum on campus between other forms of sexual violence against women. There's a bit of a dilemma. One of the moves is to say that universities should have stand-alone sexual assault policies, and I think that's true. You do need stand-alone sexual assault policies, given how important it is and how those have to be done, but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't pay a lot of attention to the other forms of sexualized violence.
In my immersion in issues of cyber-bullying and these kinds of things, the world of the Net is particularly difficult for women. Women have this fine line between what they call the slut/prude dichotomy. Jane Bailey and others have talked about that. You have to be sufficiently sexual to not be a prude or to not be seen by your friends as a prude, but if you go over the line, then you're a slut and all that.
In terms of a huge amount of the cyber-bullying, which does happen at universities and has received very little attention in terms of the sexualized and other forms of cyber-bullying at universities, you don't necessarily see very much of it that is not sexualized in relation to women, which is partly a human rights component. Think about high-profile cases like those of Rehtaeh Parsons, from my province, or Amanda Todd, on the other coast, both of them, of course, with a significant sexual violence: sexual alleged rape in the case of Rehtaeh Parsons and sexualized cyber-bullying in the case of Amanda Todd. They're very typical.
I think that one of the other areas to think about with universities is, do they have policies? Are they doing some kind of surveys or analysis to try to find out whether or not this is a problem on their campuses? As I say, not necessarily in the same policy as sexual assaults, but it's something else to be addressed in a big way. Revenge porn or non-consensual distribution of intimate images is definitely an issue that's around on campuses. One of the statistics in that particular one is that something like 60% of children between the ages of 9 and 12 engage in sexting, which is pretty phenomenal.
Anyway, that's it. In the little bit of time left, although I think it's pretty clear, most recently I've worked with the Association of Atlantic Universities a bit on trying to develop some policies dealing with issues of sexual assault on campus. What we attempted to do in the first round was identify some key issues. They are set out in the document, which I understand you have as well.
We went through the methodology there, the first one being definitions. It's obviously critical to have common definitions about what is a sexual assault. If we're going to start, as we should, counting sexual assault, like the United States, then universities are very concerned that they count the same thing. That's not the case at the moment, and that's a very difficult question. That's one.
Accessibility of the policies is critical. You have to be able to get at them and understand them in a difficult time. Also, you need to have a process that's fair to and balanced for the alleged perpetrator and the victim. You need a culture of change, and I've cited some documents at the end of this.
I know that I'm just about out of time—