Status of Women Committee on Oct. 24th, 2016

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I call the meeting to order. Welcome.

We have excellent witnesses again today on our study of violence against young girls and women.

In this first panel, we have Farrah Khan, who is the sexual violence support and education coordinator at Ryerson University. With her, we have Hannah Kurchik, who is a student advocate for the healing justice advisory committee.

With the Anti-Violence Project, we are pleased to welcome Kenya Rogers, who is a policy analyst at the University of Victoria Students' Society. With her we have Paloma Ponti, who is a volunteer lead.

We will begin with 10 minutes of comments from Farrah and Hannah.

You may begin, Farrah.

[Farrah Khan, Sexual Violence Support and Education Coordinator, Ryerson University, As an Individual]

Good afternoon, everyone. We're really excited to be here. We're excited to have been invited by the honourable Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

We are excited to talk about sexual violence on university campuses. Both Hannah and I have been working on this issue. I've been working on it for 16 years, and Hannah has just started her activism. I'm super happy that she is here with us.

Every day in Canada people are sexually assaulted, including trans people, gender non-binary people, women of colour, women with disabilities, and queer and trans folks. Too often these issues of sexual violence are seen as not important or not seen as the crises that they are. Too many times we are hearing survivors on our campuses say that this is just the price of being a woman: that they are sexually harassed coming to and from classes, that they feel they can't say anything or, when they do, that they are turned away or victim-blamed by the institutions that are supposed to support them.

We want to state that we are speaking on unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin territory, that indigenous people are detrimentally affected by sexual violence, and that to talk about sexual violence on our campuses we have to talk about sexual violence in terms of indigenous people. We also have to talk about the linkages between consent on the land and consent on the bodies and really ask that the committee look at the work of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network in talking about this.

When we talk about sexual violence on campus, too often it's seen as episodic. It's seen as a one-time event in someone's life, but the survivors who we work with every day have sexual violence happen to them multiple times. They are sexually harassed going to work. They have been sexually assaulted as children. They are coming to universities having experienced sexual violence in a multitude of ways, yet we make it seem as if sexual violence magically only starts happening at the age of 18. We need to really challenge this idea.

When we make it episodic, it actually makes the survivor think that in their narrative and in the way it happened to them, they should be ashamed or blamed for it happening more than once, and we know that's not true. We know that oftentimes when survivors do go and get support and are not seen as being in that thin, tiny framework of what is a victim, they feel they cannot access service. Time and time again, survivors say to me that they don't feel they can tell the police, that they don't feel they can report for a multitude of reasons, including student debt. Students aren't feeling that they have the money to actually go for it, to make a claim and report. They feel that financially they cannot go forward with it.

As staff people, we also see a huge amount of awareness starting to be raised, especially in Ontario with the “It's Never Okay” plan that has happened, which we're really pleased that Premier Wynne has put through. It has increased awareness on our campuses, yet the service delivery has not increased. We need to actually increase service delivery if we're going to do an awareness plan, and as someone who has worked on violence against women for a very long time, I urge you to do this. It is a huge issue.

The other piece that we see too many times is that survivors are being told that the only way they should move forward is to report to the police. We know that less than 10% of people report to the police when they've been sexually assaulted. We need to move away from the fetishization of reporting to actually talk about the different ways in which survivors can access justice.

One of the things I say all the time to the survivors I work with is, “What does justice look like for you?” That's why we asked Hannah to come and speak today and discuss what justice looked like for her when she was sexually assaulted.

[Hannah Kurchik, Student Advocate, Healing Justice Advisory Committee, As an Individual]

Good afternoon, honourable members of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

My name is Hannah Kurchik. I'm currently in my third year of a social work degree at Ryerson University. I am a white cis female, here to speak about my experiences around reporting my sexual assault. I want to tell you my story to illustrate how the impact of sexual violence is not only about the violent act but also about the ways in which our current systems fail survivors.

I was 18 years old when I was assaulted. It was within the first eight weeks of university by a fellow student who I was friends with. On university campuses, 80% of sexual assaults are by someone the person knows. Two-thirds are within the first eight weeks of school.

I chose to report this all to the police, because I believed the system was there to support me. Initially I was provided a lot of care and support by the detective on my case. I felt heard. I was assured that justice would be won. This changed not long after I had a meeting with a crown attorney and attending detective. My experience was like night and day. The one supportive detective said, “I've seen a lot of creeps in my day, and your offender isn't a creep.” All of a sudden, it was as if he who had harmed me was in need of more protection than me. The detective remarked that he was crying when he came in with his father.

I was told that if my offender were found innocent, I would get written down as a liar, and if I were assaulted again, it would be on record that I'm a liar. Not only was this incredibly intimidating, and made me question moving forward with the court process, but it also made me feel very unsafe. I felt that if no one was going to protect me this time, and my offender was found innocent, I most definitely would not be protected if it happened again.

Through trauma-informed gender-based violence ongoing training, for anyone who hears reports of sexual violence, be it police officers or Canadian border service officers, subjective comments should not be allowed regarding the offender to ensure to not upset or influence any decisions made by the survivor.

I was told I would be contacted with the outcome of legal proceedings with my offender. Months passed. I was not contacted by anyone. I attempted calling my detective on numerous occasions. I was still left with nothing. When my detective finally answered one of my calls, he informed me that the crown attorney had dropped my case months ago, and with that my restraining order. When reaching out to my victim witness worker months after my case was dropped with no notification, she explained that she had left one phone message. However, she had no paper trail of this.

I was navigating a system, touted as being there to protect me, that in fact turned out to further harm me. I was not told my rights or given guidance or even notifications of the decisions being made in my case. Survivors need to be informed of the processes, possible outcomes, and options in moving forward when reporting sexual assaults to ensure the safety of survivors and to ensure that informed decisions can be made. Having an advocate present at all times would have been extremely helpful, as I really did not know what I was doing.

When reporting my assault to the university, Ryerson security did change some of my offender's classes that were in close proximity to my classes due to the bail conditions. When attempting to access counselling or supports on campus, I was informed there was a six-week waiting list for counselling, and that the counsellor I would be seeing would be the same one my friend was seeing for a completely different need.

When communicating with my peers, I found that there were also no resources specifically for racialized survivors or LGBTQQ12-S.

While in the midst of attempting to navigate the justice system and still attending the same institution as my offender, I needed on-campus supports. Without these resources, I felt for quite a long time that campus was not a safe place for me. It is critical to make services known on campus through a variety of media and to also have these resources specialized for folks who have been subjected to sexual violence.

On a number of instances in which sexual violence would come up in my classes, as I am in social work, I was made to feel uncomfortable and distraught over comments made by the professor and students about victims who lie. Having trauma-informed classrooms is important not just in social work classrooms but all classrooms, because survivors are in all programs and in all teaching settings. This can come from training for faculty that brings awareness of language and micro-aggressions that surround the shaming of survivors.

Since my initial experience, Ryerson has employed Farrah Khan, who has been instrumental in my healing. Every university needs a Farrah Khan and a team of people doing this work.

On March 24, 2016, I chose to tell my story in a Globe and Mail video explaining my experiences in reporting sexual assault. It was important to me to bring awareness to the fact that the institutional betrayal I faced was not an isolated incident.

My story is not just a mess-up or an accident. My story is an example of systemic issues that will have an impact on a survivor's life forever. My story is one that resonates with too many survivors, as the video went viral and reached over five million views.

I am not the first survivor who has faced the devastating failure of institutions, including the supposed justice system, to address sexual violence, and I will definitely not be the last if drastic changes are not made now.

[Farrah Khan]

On the the changes that we'd like to see, we'll do this really quickly because there are a lot. We'd like to see a human rights intersectional approach recognizing that not all survivors are the same and a one-size-fits-all model doesn't work. We'd like to see things like recognizing rural and northern communities in Canada have unique challenges, and also that trans and gender non-binary folks are experiencing high levels of sexual violence, yet even when they go to the hospital the gender binaries are imprinted even within the sexual assault evidence kits, which are made to be for male and female bodies.

We also see in access to justice that things like what we have in Ontario, which is the access to four hours of free legal services for sexual assault survivors, should be across Canada. We also want to make sure that the institutional adjudication of sexual violence on our university campuses isn't mimicking the failed criminal justice—I wouldn't even call it a justice system—programs for survivors.

We also want to see things like access without fear, a policy to actually not criminalize people of precarious status who are facing violence and making sure they can actually access safety.

We want programs. If you're going to do a program about awareness raising about sexual violence, please make it something about accountability also. It cannot just be about people knowing sexual violence exists, but must also be about being accountable for the sexual violence they perpetrate.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I'm sorry, that's your time.

We'll go to Kenya Rogers. You can begin your 10 minutes.

[Kenya Rogers, Policy Analyst, University of Victoria Students' Society, Anti-Violence Project]

Thank you, honourable members, for having us here today. Paloma and I are going to share this 10 minutes, so we'll be going back and forth.

I would like to acknowledge the host communities and nations on whose territories we're working, and learning, and unlearning here today. Those are the territories of the Algonquin people. I want to acknowledge this because we at the Anti-Violence Project understand that our work here in addressing gender-based and sexualized violence is inherently connected to our own Canadian history. As we review the TRC's calls to action and continue to decolonize our work, we have to understand this connection. We must remain mindful of these histories, and approach this work with an open heart and an open mind.

[Paloma Ponti, Volunteer Lead, Anti-Violence Project]

Finally, we want to acknowledge that the process of creating culture shifts in our communities is messy and often uncomfortable, but it is through sitting in that discomfort that we are able to engage in processes of change.

[Kenya Rogers]

My name is Kenya Rogers, and I am a policy adviser at the Anti-Violence Project. I'm a fourth year political science student at UVic.

[Paloma Ponti]

My name is Paloma Ponti. I am the volunteer lead at the Anti-Violence Project. I am a second year gender studies major.

[Kenya Rogers]

The Anti-Violence Project is the on-campus sexual assault centre at the University of Victoria. We were officially founded in 1998, based on a student referendum. I think it's really important for us to note that we are solely funded by students. In terms of our services, while they're open to the whole community, we're accountable to our student community in a very big way. We're separate from the institution, but a lot of our work is around building relationships with the institution, and hopefully, guiding their work. Some of this has come in the form of sexualized violence awareness weeks, campaigns, that we run. We run free, confidential, non-clinical support for survivors as well as for folks who've caused harm on campus. Currently we're doing a lot of work with our policy process at the University of Victoria.

[Paloma Ponti]

Today we're going to be talking about some of our frameworks, as well as sharing some definitions and discussing recent advocacy efforts on campuses across B.C. We're also going to present some of our recommendations for creating communities of consent, care, and respect on post-secondary campuses across the country.

[Kenya Rogers]

At the AVP we aim to offer our space to our community by coming from an anti-oppressive intersectional feminist framework. This means that we're always challenging and engaging in a process of opening up our spaces, our dialogues, and our work to include the voices and experiences of everyone. This means recognizing that issues affect different communities in different ways. It also means the act of unlearning of values, beliefs, and behaviours that have caused harm to indigenous peoples and the land.

[Paloma Ponti]

We need to think about who falls through the cracks when talking about violence against women and girls. Not everyone fits into those categories of women and men, and statistics show that women of colour, indigenous women, trans women, trans women of colour, and women with disabilities are disproportionately affected by sexualized violence.

[Kenya Rogers]

This violence has continued to exist despite our individual responses to it. This is because those institutional responses so often haven't navigated the systemic roots of the violence in the first place. This is what we call “rape culture”. It's important for us to root ourselves in understandings of the language that we're using. Definitions are really important, because a lot of spaces don't actively talk about these things. We're going to define some of the really important words that we think we need to talk about.

[Paloma Ponti]

We define “rape culture” as the culture in which we live in that normalizes and glorifies sexualized violence, thereby creating a sense of entitlement to other people's physical, emotional, and sexual beings without consent. This culture is upheld by many different things.

[Kenya Rogers]

In the handout you folks have, you will see one of our models that we use in a lot of our education and programming. It is a triangle, and we call this the rape culture triangle. I have used this tool because it's a visual way of looking at the ways in which sexualized violence is upheld in our society. The top of that triangle says “SA“, which stands for “sexual assault”. Everything else floating through the triangle are the things that uphold spaces where sexualized violence can happen. In the middle of the triangle, we're representing some of those systemic and root causes we're talking about. This can be gender expectations, race, class, and sexism. At the bottom are those everyday acts that uphold rape culture, such as catcalling, sexist remarks, rape jokes, and myths.

[Paloma Ponti]

Myths are dominant ideas about sexualized and gender-based violence that permeate our society and uphold this triangle. These myths include things like the concept that people are most commonly assaulted by a stranger, when in actuality 80% of sexual assaults happen with someone you know.

[Kenya Rogers]

Another really dominant myth is the idea that the most common places that assaults happen are in bars or in the park, when in actuality we know that most assaults happen in your own home.

[Paloma Ponti]

The rape culture pyramid allows us to conceptualize the need to re-evaluate our response models. Imagine if we put time and resources into intervention and education, and addressing the everyday ways that rape culture exists in our society.

[Kenya Rogers]

We want to define consent. At AVP, we define consent as the mutual, emotional, physical, and psychological understanding between people without the use of force of any kind. You will also see in the package that you have one of the tools we use when we do our consent workshops and when we go out and speak to students. It defines one model of consent. There are multiple ways we can engage in consult, but the six steps are outlined in the handout.

[Paloma Ponti]

When we're talking about consent, and a need to focus on consent, we're talking about a need for consent culture. That's a culture in which asking for consent is normalized and expected in all aspects of life, including interpersonal and institutional. It's a culture in which supporting and believing survivors when they tell us they've experienced violence is normalized. It's moving to a culture where the occurrence of violence is exponentially decreased.

[Kenya Rogers]

We also have a handout with a glossary, if you folks would like to look over some of our terms more in depth.

With these definitions in mind, we would like to talk a bit about the work that has happened in B.C., where we're from, and why legislation around campus sexualized violence is so important. This work has been happening for decades. Folks have been asking for a lot of the same things for a really long time. Last year, students and advocates dedicated themselves to pressuring the provincial government and calling out their institutions which continually were failing them around issues of sexualized violence, and asking B.C. to be accountable to ensuring that students had a policy that would centre their experiences. This advocacy was instrumental in the development of Bill 23, which is the post-secondary sexual assault and misconduct bill.

[Paloma Ponti]

Students fighting for this work are faced by institutional barriers and push-back from legislators every day. Three provinces, Ontario, B.C., and Manitoba, have now taken a stand against sexualized violence, but there is so much farther to go. Students shouldn't have to think about whether they will be protected by a sexual assault policy when choosing which university to apply to, but as it stands right now, there is a severe disparity across the country.

[Kenya Rogers]

With all this in mind, why is there a need for federal leadership on these issues? We need federal leadership because we need the campaigns, the resources, and the dialogues to really be across the country. While post-secondary education currently rests in the hands of the provinces, we're not just talking about legislation and policy. We're talking about a culture in which navigating policy and creating policy is commonplace and common sense.

[Paloma Ponti]

With all this in mind, how do we create good processes on campus? How do we ensure that our policies and practices are rooted in the complexities of our communities?

The first way that we believe we can do this is by having a survivor-centred approach. Many of the folks who take up this work on our campuses also hold the complexity of being survivors, and we aren't just fighting for a policy, we are also fighting for a seat at the table.

We also have to talk about the many different communities that are affected by sexualized violence and about the fact that survivorship looks different for different blocks of folks. We need to bring those voices into our processes.