Status of Women Committee on Oct. 24th, 2016

[Farrah Khan]

As someone who's been in the violence against women movement for a very long time, I think you have to. I think you have to respect the knowledge of people who have been doing this work for decades and decades, and have been asking for it. I would add to that, it's funding. How do we share funding resources, too? If we start funnelling everything into sexual assault on campuses, we forget that for decades there are people who have experienced sexual violence—when they're children, in high school. We have so many students who are coming to our campuses who have been sexually assaulted as children and then are looking for trauma-informed classrooms because they're not dealing with it at 18 years old. They're dealing with it as children.

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

Excellent.

I'll move on to Paloma and Kenya. Thank you very much, ladies. You did an excellent job as well.

You were talking about getting involved with the youth. I heard, however, from Farrah how excellent it was working with the men's sports teams or the female sport teams, and I think that's a great start, for sure. As my minister at church would say, it's like preaching to the choir. I think Pam noted that the people who are interested are the ones who show up.

You mentioned that you're trying to get more people, and I agree with you. Don't give marks for coming. It's just about being a good person. What are some of the ways of getting people involved? Let's forget about the marketing, but what are the actual good proposals that are out there?

[Kenya Rogers]

One of the ways we have tried to do this advocacy work on campuses to actually bring in folks throughout our community is through a campaign that we run called “Let's Get Consensual”. The campaign is slowly moving into a provincial phase, so we have institutions that have signed on from across the province. Basically, “Let's Get Consensual” is about what I was mentioning before. It's a lot about meeting folks where they are, such as parties on campus, big events on campus. We're out there talking about our six steps to consent, signing folks up for workshops if they're into it. We also run a pretty extensive media campaign. It sounds weird to talk about branding and marketing, but I think the reason we've been so successful is it's a really cool campaign and folks recognize it. They see our logo and they know what we're talking about. I think that's been a huge way that we've gotten in. It's little things like every single resident student getting a hanger on their door before they get to school, and it has six steps of consent and six ways you can support a survivor. Their key chains have a little key chain that says, “Let's Get Consensual” on it. Brand recognition that's connected to that culture shift is really important.

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

Awesome.

Farrah noted on this, when we talked about it, that it doesn't start just because you turn 18.

Is there any way that you see that program—it's now just being done provincially—going down into the younger grades and secondary school as well?

[Kenya Rogers]

Yes. Actually we've started that process, but it's hard. Our office has three part-time staff, and Paloma and I work 10 hours a week each. We are really not very well resourced.

That being said, we have started working with a couple of high schools, and Brentwood College has been taking on this work. They have some more or less community leaders—there are about 200 students who we're going to be training in December. That work has started, but I think we need more of a provincial strategy around it for us to have the funding and resources to bring it to the K-12 level.

Also, provincial priorities of bringing it to the K-12 level are really important.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

All right. That's your time.

We'll go now to Ms. Malcolmson for seven minutes.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

I thank all four of you for your vital work and for being such articulate and full-of-heart presenters. It really makes an impact.

I so wish that Jonathan Kay had heard some of your material before he got on The National last night. It was really hard to watch him define rape culture in a way that I've never heard. But I digress.

Can any of the four of you talk about the cost to yourselves and to your work of not having the funding at the ground level? We're hearing from many witnesses throughout this study about what is lost when we don't have federal funding for service delivery.

[Hannah Kurchik]

To see Farrah, I have to book three weeks in advance. When I see Farrah, she is running to her office. The services she provides, at least to me, from what I know are amazing. It's hard for me to watch her provide these services for all of Ryerson, because it's almost concerning to see someone do so much on campus.

[Paloma Ponti]

My job at the Anti-Violence Project is that I'm the volunteer lead. What that means is I'm trying to involve.... At the moment, we're training 15 volunteers. That takes a lot of energy, but that's what we have to do, because we do not have enough staff. We are spending a month training our volunteers three times a week, and all of our energy right now is going to these volunteers. The number of support hours we're able to provide while we're establishing that number of volunteers is significantly decreased. It really hurts us, because we're only able to be open for four hours a day, three times a week for support. That's not enough.

[Kenya Rogers]

Just to add to that, it's really hard because we have the interesting position that we're separate from the institution but are out doing this work. The institution is finally engaging in the processes of developing policy. We want to have a seat at the table, just as we said in our presentation, but we have to talk about how we make those seats at the table actually accessible to folks. When I work 10 hours a week at the sexual assault centre, about five of them go to reviewing documents, doing consultation, and going to meetings. That leaves me five hours to do the front-line, on-the-ground work.

It's also about getting folks to the table and resourcing them to be there and acknowledging that their work is valuable.

[Farrah Khan]

Recently people have been saying that sexual assault is on the rise or that there is an increase in sexual violence. Someone actually said that to me today about university campuses. I don't think it's as much that it's on the rise as that people are finally listening to the voices of survivors and recognizing that this is a really big issue and that it continues to happen in Canada.

I literally am waiting to get my free trip to Hawaii for the amount of work—I and all of the sexual violence workers—because it's as though we have done so much, in the past two years especially. Because of the Ghomeshi case, we saw a high rate of people starting to come forward and of people saying, “Oh yeah, that happened to me in my workplace”, or “that happened to me in Parliament”, or “that happened to me in my rural community.”

Too often, because there's a limitation on these supports, we see people in these positions run ragged in such a way that we're just holding faith. Every night I go to bed wondering what survivor is going to call me the next day and what I am going to miss—because we're missing things. We're missing things all the time because we can't keep up with the amount of work we have. It's unfair to violence-concerned workers, especially because most of us are survivors and most of us are women, that we have to uphold all these issues, when we're not fully funded the way we should be.

I think that's a big issue, and I'm not just talking about on campus. I think the campus is important, but women are sexually assaulted in their workplace everywhere, and children are. When we don't have adequate funding, what we're telling people is that violence doesn't matter, that our bodies don't matter.

Right now, that's consistently how it feels. I know that's because of the past 10 years of our last government, partially—I'm sorry—but I think it's also speaking to provincial mandates and everybody's mandate. People are scared to have this conversation.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you for being so clear. I share your deep concern that we are welcoming people to reopen old wounds and talk about the most terrible, vulnerable thing that has happened to them, but then do not have the system in place to support that process. That's true in the case of domestic violence, of campus violence, of suicide prevention—all of it. We have a huge responsibility.

It's possible for the federal government to fund this work. It used to happen. Twenty years ago it did. It has retracted to being a provincial responsibility, but you have allies who are looking for that federal leadership.

I only have a minute left, but I'm hoping that you—anybody—can say something about the cost to students of uneven access to justice across the country, if it's not the same at each campus.

[Kenya Rogers]

Before we even talk about disparity in terms of policy, we can talk about access in terms of the crisis of student debt that we see right now. I think Farrah really drove home that we have such disparity on our campuses involving folks who are there with $35,000 of debt, and how you engage in these really intense processes and do not have an outline of what it's going to look like, and how we support those folks on campus.

I think we need to start there and look also at that, and then recognize.... I think for me, as a survivor who was sexually assaulted before I ever went to university—so I carried that as a new student.... As we start talking about these things and as we start telling folks that we're going to talk about these things, it is a decision-making.... In my case, when I was applying for school it wasn't talked about at all, definitely.

We are having more conversations. I don't think the violence has changed. I think the conversation has changed. As Paloma said, it has now become something such that, if I were applying for school right now, I would not go to a school at which I knew I wasn't going to be protected, because I know the prevalence of sexualized violence.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Very good. That's all your time.

We will go now to Ms. Ludwig for seven minutes.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you very much for coming here today and sharing and giving us such deep insight into the situation of violence against women.

We've heard from past witnesses, unfortunately, a consistent theme. You mentioned that about 80% of perpetrators are someone you know and that two-thirds of violence and sexual assaults take place in the first eight weeks. We've also heard themes regarding normalization—the blaming and the shaming.

Ms. Khan, my first question is for you. Would you be able to share with us the list of recommendations you were trying to get through in the beginning, through the clerk?

[Farrah Khan]

I'll share them with the clerk. They're like an essay.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

My next question is for all of you. Are there any programs available right now for the caregivers, the people in your positions? There is an expression in caregiving for people who are caring for seniors: who cares for the caregivers?

Farrah, if you're looking after or trying to corral and help out 40,000 students at one time, we can't afford to lose you. You can't get sick. What kind of programs are in place to support you and the work that all of you do? As well, what recommendations would you offer there?

[Farrah Khan]

There's a really great program. If anyone has ever dealt with any kind of trauma, Trauma Stewardship is a great book to read. It's a program that we have among.... I'm part of a network of people who do front-line work on sexual violence in universities across Ontario. Now we have other members in British Columbia and New Brunswick. We meet and talk. I think we need to actually get this kind of assistance in, because we're creating another silo movement of violence against women. We have the violence against women movement and now we have a silo movement in universities. We have to make sure those are working together. The things we're asking that universities have in place are things we need the violence against women movement to have in place. I think that's my worry with this. All of a sudden I've come from a movement of working with an office of 25 people to being one person. We cannot create that isolating piece.

The other thing to really make sure about is that, knowing that so many survivors go into this movement, we also have to pay people properly. Hannah and I have talked about this at length. There is such a push in universities to have people volunteer to work 10 to 15 hours. These are student survivors oftentimes who are asked to policy speak, support a survivor.... They're exhausted.

Hannah can probably speak to this. How many people emailed you in the first week of that video?

[Hannah Kurchik]

I received in total more than 150 emails or messages from survivors. That's just in Canada.

Reaching out, it's almost an obligation to be supportive. Sometimes hearing other folks' disclosure is tough because it can be re-traumatizing. There is that obligation as a survivor advocate to almost speak as if I'm Farrah, who's been in the field for 16 years.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

I have a question, just a follow up to that.

Do you have any idea the rate of graduation for students who are impacted by violence?

When it comes to students who are acting as volunteers and trying to complete their own studies after what they've been through, there must be disproportionate numbers of students who are non-completers of university study.

[Farrah Khan]

We see more students who have been sexually assaulted ask for a leave of absence or drop out of university than we see people do so who have been accused of causing harm. That speaks to a lot of what we see in society: the expectation that the survivor will take it on, that the survivor will take care of everyone.

I don't know, Kenya....

[Kenya Rogers]

One of the things that is hard about trying to know all of the things about these issues is that, because we're really starting to just bring the conversation to platforms like this one, we are lacking in research around those things. As communities of survivors, we know our realities. We know what our communities are dealing with. Some student-based research has recently come out of the University of Victoria through the sexualized violence response team. I would encourage anyone to look up some of that research because there is lots of information about the UVic context.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

I have one question that I'll try to ask very quickly.

Knowing that most often it's in the first eight weeks, statistically, and knowing that universities and colleges do a heck of a lot of work in terms of recruitment, if any one of you could go back and talk to the students, the guidance counsellors, the varsity team captains, your homeroom teachers from high school, what would you share with them that you'd want them to know for preparing for universities and colleges?

[Farrah Khan]

We go in and I talk to parents about sex. How do you talk about sex with your kid beyond condoms and beyond not getting pregnant to actually defining pleasure and how to advocate for your pleasure? A lot of us may feel uncomfortable having that conversation, but I'm more uncomfortable with someone being sexually assaulted. One of the best conversations I've had with parents was, like, “I'm going to have it at the breakfast table. I'm going to talk about it.” Sexual health education is the prevention to sexual violence. That is the key.

[Kenya Rogers]

I would like to add that we've also developed programming that happens in the first eight weeks of school. We host a sexualized violence awareness week in the third week of September. This year Farrah came and gave an amazing keynote presentation at that event.

Some of the recommendations that are coming out of our policy committee are how we can create programming that happens before you actually get to UVic and how we can talk about consent culture as something that we're trying to create within our recruitment packaging and in all of the things we do.