Status of Women Committee on Oct. 24th, 2016

[Kenya Rogers]

Often the decision-makers on institutional policy are actually those farthest away from the violence that we're talking about, but through bringing in students, front-line service providers, and survivors, not only will our work be better but we can be more accountable and transparent with the work that we produce.

[Paloma Ponti]

Similarly, we need policy that addresses ways to work with folks who have caused harm, within processes of accountability. We all hurt people, yet some things in our world are easier to be accountable for than others. If you get into a car accident with someone else's car, you are accountable to them. You get it fixed, pay the money, and you deal with the insurance. You didn't mean to crash the car, but you did. Regardless of our intentions, we have to own the impact of our actions without getting stuck in guilt and shame.

[Kenya Rogers]

Our world doesn't actively teach us how to care for each other, and we're always told that we cannot make mistakes. The reason we can sit here is that we were given opportunities to unlearn harmful behaviours, and we need to recognize that and develop it into policy processes.

We want to end by thanking you again for having us here today and for carving out this space to have a conversation about violence that often becomes silenced. This work is complex, and none of us has all the answers, but we can create spaces to collectively work through our questions.

[Paloma Ponti]

Allan Wade has said that alongside each—

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I'm sorry, that's your time. This is the hardest part of the job, especially when you want to hear the answers.

We're going to start our first round of questioning with Ms. Damoff.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I'll start by just letting you finish.

[Paloma Ponti]

Our last point was that Allan Wade has said, “alongside each history of violence and oppression, there runs a parallel history of prudent, creative, and determined resistance.” When decision-makers and front-line workers come together and have platforms to share our experiences of resistance, we believe our response to violence can be stronger and more inclusive.

That was it. Thank you.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

You're welcome.

First, I'd like to thank you all for coming.

Hannah, I want to applaud you for coming here and speaking out. I can't imagine what it's like to walk in your shoes, but you're an incredible young lady. It's wonderful of you to be here. It really is.

As someone who has had to go through the system and face all the challenges that you faced, if you were to give us one recommendation that we could undertake as the federal government to make it different for the next person who goes to the police, is there one thing that you can think of?

[Hannah Kurchik]

I think the one recommendation is that there is not one recommendation.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

That's a good answer.

[Hannah Kurchik]

Unfortunately, the issue lies within the systemic build of the justice system. The violence is through the language and the phone calls and the opinions. I think that one recommendation I would have is to fund real services and treat this as work, because it is work. We can't just rely on a volunteer basis. We need to fund so that we have more Farrah Khans and teams that support Farrah, so that she's not just doing this alone. Having the funding and addressing the real issues, that would be my recommendation.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I think it's getting best practices, too, that can be shared among other universities. You're running an amazing program there, but all the universities.... We have the federal-provincial thing going on here, but if there can be some research around best practices and sharing of best practices among universities and colleges....

You're all shaking your heads. Is that a yes?

[Farrah Khan]

I think one of the things that is a little bit scary right now is that we're looking to the United States all the time for its best practices, but we're not the United States. We're Canada. One of the things we've been seeing is that there has already been adjudication on university campuses of sexual violence. What I mean by adjudication is that if you report internally, there is a process. We need evidence-based research of what the best processes are that can be put in place so we're not mimicking a built-broken criminal justice system that has not worked for survivors.

The fear is that survivors will be told they can go through the criminal justice process or they can go through the internal process, but both systems have really harmed survivors. We need better systems in place. We also need sustainable funding for the violence against women movement in general. Right now, you can ask violence against women advocates across this nation and I think they would say that, time and time again, so many of them do this off the sides of their desks with very little funding. If this were an epidemic like Ebola or cancer, I think we'd have a different conversation about funding.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I've never seen anybody tag-team quite as well as you two did, so congratulations.

You mentioned that you did consent workshops. I attended an event at Sheridan College in Oakville a couple of weeks ago, and Leah Parsons spoke. It was an amazing event. They put together a great program on campus, because they were running into sexual assaults on campus, but as I looked around the room I saw it was 95% women who were there. I know one of the things Leah Parsons said is that she educated her daughter but the parents hadn't educated the four boys.

When you do those consent workshops, who are they for and who's coming out?

[Kenya Rogers]

Yes, one of the things I will say is that we definitely have recognized that in our own work as well. We run monthly consent workshops, but we also run programs that are specifically looking at building communities of consent with men on campus and folks who identify as men on campus. We also run a program called the UVic men's circle, which is a group that meets bi-weekly to have conversations about consent, about being better allies, and about engaging in accountability processes. A lot of folks who engage in that program will come through our consent program as well.

We've also done work where we have actually teamed up with different classrooms, and they've been told that, if they come and write a paper, they will get—they have to write a paper.... You know, I have lots of feelings about the whole extra marks thing, but we do have some ways whereby we try to make a more diverse group in the room. I think it's also about actually going out to spaces where folks are, meeting people where they are, and being on the ground and talking about these things. That's how we bring folks into the movement.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

It's hard because a lot of times the ones who are going to those kinds of workshops aren't the ones who need to be there, right?

[Kenya Rogers]

May I say one more thing on that?

One thing that we have done is build relationships with our judicial affairs office. That's where a lot of this work started happening at UVic, recognizing folks who had caused harm and judicial affairs wanting to access transformative processes of accountability. We often actually worked with the folks who have caused harm on campus.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I only have 30 seconds left, so do either of you want to add anything in 30 seconds?

[Farrah Khan]

One thing that has been amazing at our campus is that it has been mandatory for every varsity team to take a consent workshop, and that results in the most beautiful conversations that I've ever had with young men. Last Friday I was there until 9:00 with 30 young men on a baseball team, talking about how to hit on a woman and not be a creep, or how to step in and tell your friend that what he's doing is really not okay.

It's also about fostering those conversations.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

All right.

We'll go to my colleague Ms. Vecchio for seven minutes.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Those were all wonderful presentations.

Hannah, I'd like to start with you, because you do have a very compelling story, as Pam has noted. You went to the police. On campus, was there anything available for you to report to at the time? Are there any of those services available for you to go directly to them and report at that level, to start off at the university?

[Hannah Kurchik]

At the time, the only resource I had was Ryerson security, and they gave me a number to call if I ran into my offender.

In terms of counselling, as I said, there was a six-week waiting list and I was going to see the same counsellor that my friend was seeing for a completely different need. It was a really unsafe time for me on campus, not only because my offender was still attending but also because I really didn't know what to do. I really had no support in the classroom, no support in what to do if I did see my offender, and even legally what to do if I saw my offender. They really had no resources, and then Farrah came and pushed things along.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Farrah, could you add to Hannah's statement? I think that sometimes there is that gap and you're not sure which way to go. What services could Hannah today be able to access at Ryerson? What services are available for any victim at this time?

[Farrah Khan]

This was an off-campus sexual assault that was to a Ryerson student. I just want to be clear about that.

On campus now, we have my office, but I'm one person for 40,000 students, and that's what we're expecting. We can look at rural communities, and people who are from rural communities know this. I have survivors who are from northern and rural communities who have to travel for two days to get our sexual assault evidence kit administered. That means you can't change your clothes, and you can't have a shower. I want people to think about the reality here. In terms of our campus, people can come to my office, but we've now also done really extensive training with people who are on the front line—so security people, professors, or people in administration—about what to say when people disclose. We need to move beyond just talking about, “This is what sexual assault is”, to “Here's what to do when someone discloses. Here are five things to say to someone.” Here's a reminder that they have options, and their options don't always have to include the police. I think Hannah was given the police as the only option, and there are other options as well. We're not dissuading people from speaking to the police.

Also, it's naming for students, too, so that they can do an internal process and an external process. That means if they do an internal process, they can report it internally and the university has to go through an adjudication process and do an investigation, or they can report it to the police.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

One thing that we heard last week was regarding the decision by the Province of Ontario—and you mentioned, also, Premier Wynne here—when they were setting up the programs for the university and colleges, it was being looked at specifically, to that group itself, and not looking at any of the outside resources that deal with it all the time as well.

Do you believe there's a way we can start connecting outside community organizations with the violence against women organizations that exist on campuses? Is that something we should be doing or do you think the separation is necessary?