First, I want to thank you for allowing me to come to speak. I appreciate the previous speakers, but I want to say that I want to live in a world where what women say matters, where women are heard and change attitudes and policy. I want to live in a world where 15,000 women turn out to hear women, and 15,000 men turn out to hear women. That's where I want to live, but that's not my point.
The Antigonish Women's Resource Centre provides support services and programs to women, adolescent girls, and youth living in rural and small-town northeastern Nova Scotia. We bring a feminist lens and an understanding of the complexities of living rural to the work we do with young women, indigenous, newcomer, immigrant, and refugee women and girls. Every day we hear stories from young women and girls about their experiences of being subjected to sexualized violence and the impact it has on their lives. That will be my focus today. Conscious of time, I want to start with the recommendations and then proceed with the context so that they're on the table.
Turning to the issue of sexualized violence, we live in a rape culture where the perpetration of misogyny and the devaluing of women is normalized. It permeates our institutions, policies, and program delivery. Any sexualized violence requires all levels of government to work together and with communities, institutions, agencies, and organizations to address the myriad forms of systemic social and economic inequality that women face. It requires addressing women's poverty; creating a universal child care program; implementing a living wage; improving the response of the criminal justice system; supporting sexual assault centres and women's violence prevention and response organizations, and more. The federal government must take a lead in doing this.
We need to address access of children to pornography. Our recommendation is that we negotiate an opt-in, opt-out system with the Canadian Internet service providers that would restrict children's access to Internet pornography along the lines of the U.K. model, so ask me about that.
End the trafficking of women and girls. Look at the Swedish government's approach to ending the trafficking and sexual exploitation of women and girls. Along with enacting laws to reduce the demand for purchasing sex, and rules making it easier to confiscate the proceeds of crime, it funds comprehensive services for trafficked and other women leaving the sex industry. The Canadian Criminal Code governing trafficking is strong, yet convictions are few. Make changes to prioritize the prosecution of traffickers and johns, protect immigrant and refugee women, and provide women with the services and supports they need to escape, heal, and live financially stable lives.
Review and amend immigration policies and legislation to ensure the secure status and protection of non-status refugee and immigrant women in Canada. Ensure services and supports for survivors of violence are made available to all women regardless of immigration status. Amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to guarantee protection to non-citizen survivors of trafficking, including access to services and permanent residence.
Keeping women in situations of insecure status can be deliberately used by abusive partners to maintain control over women. The Immigration and Refugee Board must implement guidelines for gender-based analysis of refugee determination. In particular, the designated country of origin should be ended, as women fleeing gender-based violence are particularly impacted by a system that deems certain countries as safe, while violence of women there may be endemic.
Address the criminal justice system. Until the criminal justice system makes changes, there will be no justice for survivors of sexual assault. As a first step, train police and crowns to work from a trauma-informed approach so they can reduce the re-traumatization of victims, can conduct competent interviews and investigations and increase the rate of successful prosecution, and ensure sentences reflect the seriousness of these crimes as a deterrent, but also to reflect the often lifetime impact of such crimes on their victims and the victims' families.
I'll provide a bit of background.
We live in a small town and in our town is a university, St. Francis Xavier University. Some of you may have heard of it. The population of our town of 5,000 doubles when the university is in session. As a sexual assault centre, we work with a lot of students who have been sexually assaulted.
One in four women is sexually assaulted while at university, many in the first months of their first year. This takes place in a rape culture of normalized sexualized violence, hypersexualization, slut-shaming, and slut-blaming that work together to obscure the act of violence, remove responsibility from the perpetrator, and stigmatize and silence the victim. Women who have been sexually assaulted are blamed and told to blame themselves. Few of these assaults are reported to police or even to campus authorities.
In our hypersexualized society, adult sexuality is imposed upon children and young people before they are capable of dealing with it mentally, emotionally, or physically.
We work with girls, and girls as young as 12 years of age tell us they've been sent unwanted pictures of their classmates' genitals. These are kids. They're pressured to respond with naked pictures of themselves. Embarrassed, confused, and not sure what to do or how to respond, they wonder if it's something about them. Do their peers see them as sluts? They tell us they're asked to perform oral sex on their peers, and to submit to anal sex. You can't get pregnant with anal sex.
Women are slut-shamed and slut-blamed, and slut-shaming is an effective tool of subjugation and used as a justification for perpetrating sexual violence. It removes the focus of responsibility from the perpetrator to the victim. Unfortunately, they have just elected a president in the United States who is a perfect example of it.
Incidents of sexual violence perpetrated against young women, captured on camera and shared through the Internet, are acts of sexualized cyber-violence. Too many girls have taken their own lives after being subjected to sexual assault and sexualized cyber-violence, and we need to take that really seriously.
It's interesting that you asked about pornography. With the advent of wireless Internet tablets and smartphones, children can and do access pornography that contains disturbing, violent, misogynistic images that link sex to violence against women. On average, boys view their first porn as young as 11 to 12 years of age, and this is all as they're developing. They're trying to figure out who they are as sexual beings, so of course there is an excitement to it that immediately gets linked with violence against women.
Scrolling through the Eastlink cable TV channel, children, young people, and adults see listings they may or may not be able to access, but just the listings say things like Red Hot Blowjobs, Teen Girls Next Door, Joanna Angel Filthy Whore, Teens Got a Tight Pussy, and Grandpa's Perversions, and on it goes. This is just on cable TV as you're flipping through the channels.
While many of us grew up in a text-based world, today's children are growing up in an image-based culture, and images impact a part of the brain different from the part affected by text. We will not know for a number of years the full impact that pornography has on the developing brain; however, research is telling us that it is harmful to a young person's healthy development. They're learning that sex is violent and degrading to women. It teaches boys that this is the way they must perform sex, and girls that this is what they must expect and accept. I could tell you story after story after story that we've heard from high school students and university students. In the U.K., legislation was proposed to protect children by limiting child and youth access to these sites. I hope you ask me about that.
I also want you to ask me about luring and trafficking, because we're seeing girls as young as 13 recruited and procured into sexual slavery by predators who profit from exploiting their bodies. This is on craigslist. It's unbelievable and it's, like, everybody's girls. The RCMP estimate that the annual financial gain for every woman and girl trafficked is $280,000 to the trafficker. The younger the woman or girl, the more profitable she is. They're often forced to perform sex acts 365 days a year and are required to hand over all the money to the traffickers.
That's probably it.