Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, members of the committee and fellow witnesses. First and foremost, I'd like to thank you for inviting me. I'm on campus today, as you can tell. I'm joining you from St. John's, and I'm on campus at Memorial University, speaking to students about our most recent national campaign for free education.
I'll start with an anecdote. While on campus talking about barriers to accessing post-secondary, I've heard time and again from the students I've had conversations with not only here but on campuses across this country as we promote this national campaign the importance of understanding the pervasive nature of sexual and gender-based violence on our campuses as being just as much of a barrier to accessing post-secondary.
With that, I'm going to start my address this afternoon with some facts.
We know that today, young women between the ages of 15 and 24 experience higher instances of sexual violence in Canada. A survey recently conducted by Statistics Canada found that the police report that the rate of violent crime against women in this age range was 42% higher than the rate for women age 25 to 34 and almost double the rate for women between the ages of 35 and 44.
It is important to know within these statistics that women from marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by sexual and gender-based violence and according to 2014 statistics from Statistics Canada, we also note the rates for sexual assault experienced by aboriginal women are more than double those for non-aboriginal women. This survey also found that queer people, trans people, people with disabilities, racialized people, and immigrants experience much higher rates of violent victimization, including sexual violence.
Because our campuses are part of a society that makes up these statistics, it's evident to us that sexual violence is prevalent on colleges and university campuses. When surveyed, we know that four out of five undergraduate students at Canadian universities report experiencing dating violence and 29% report an experience of sexual assault.
We also know that women are at a higher risk of experiencing sexual assault within the first eight weeks of classes. In terms of statistics, this number largely underestimates the prevalence of sexual violence and highlights the issue of under-reporting. Some of these barriers to reporting include issues such as revictimization, the prevalence of victim blaming, and the justice system. The personal financial risks of litigation and the emotional strain of a trial keep many survivors from reporting.
Because of this reality, since 1981, the Canadian Federation of Students, which unites more than half a million students across this country, has worked with its members from coast to coast to raise awareness and develop best practices to respond to and combat sexual violence. The federation draws on over 30 years of experience to propose the following recommendations on how the federal government can best address sexual violence on Canadian campuses.
Our first recommendation is to introduce legislation that mandates all post-secondary institutions to have stand-alone sexual violence policies. These policies must be survivor-centred and must be developed through a student-serving process. We draw on examples such as Bill 132 in Ontario, which mandates all post-secondary institutions to establish a stand-alone sexual assault policy that is essential to ensuring that all institutions have clear processes to respond to and address incidents of sexual violence. This legislation must provide students with recourse if their university or college does not have or has not properly followed a sexual violence or a gender-based violence policy.
To ensure the effectiveness and legitimacy of the policy, institutions should be mandated to first, identify and include key stakeholders, particularly students, student groups, and providers of victim support services, including local rape crisis centres. Second, it must also review the policy at least once every two years and/or as issues arise. To support the development and implementation of these policies, the federation recommends that the federal government work with all provincial and territorial governments to establish post-secondary sexual violence support divisions. These provincial and territorial divisions would be mandated to allocate funding for sexual violence prevention work, collect and disseminate data about sexual violence within post-secondary institutions, and hold individual institutions accountable to both their campus communities and the broader public.
The federation also recommends that the federal government establish a permanent standing committee on sexual violence in post-secondary institutions in order to facilitate communication between the provincial and territorial divisions, set standards for data collection on sexual violence, and ensure that there is a clear, national vision to end sexual and gender-based violence in Canada.
Our second recommendation is on the creation of a sexual violence support resource fund. Our federation recommends that the federal government create a sexual violence support resource fund to fund initiatives to combat sexual violence at post-secondary institutions. This would ensure an equitable funding distribution, and the fund would have two envelopes, one for students and campus groups, and another for faculty staff and university and college administrations. This fund would be available to students, campus groups, faculty, staff, and university and college administrations for the purposes of education, training, and to develop and strengthen resources to address and respond to sexual violence. The intention of this fund would not be to alleviate institutional pressure to direct resources towards ending sexual and gender-based violence on campus, but instead, the fund would allow those with limited access to funds, such as students or those who are otherwise unable to pursue these important programs, to help end sexual and gender-based violence on campus.
Our final recommendation is to develop a national public education campaign on sexual and gender-based violence awareness and prevention. While our previous recommendations have focused on addressing sexual violence on campuses, our federation understands that rape culture and the normalization of sexual and gender-based violence need to be challenged more broadly and more directly in order to create campuses and communities in our societies that are free from sexual and gender-based violence. A public education campaign should be created to make information and training about sexual and gender-based violence, consent, and bystander intervention accessible to all. To be effective, information should use accessible language, be communicated through a variety of different mediums, including online. It needs to be intersectional and acknowledge the varying experiences of gender and sexual-based violence, and it must be inclusive. In order to ensure that post-secondary institutions are doing their part, we must ensure that this information is communicated to and understood by those within universities and colleges. Post-secondary institutions should be mandated to hold mandatory consent education programs for all staff, faculty, and students within the first eight weeks of each new academic year.
The effective implementation of these recommendations, supported by Status of Women Canada and this committee, would help to ensure that the universities and colleges from coast to coast are taking meaningful steps to combat sexual and gender-based violence on our campuses.
Thank you.