Evidence of meeting #34 for Status of Women in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was young.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
I just have a really quick question for you, and then I'll move over to White Ribbon.
Have you ever asked the men or the boys you work with where their attitudes came from, or what directs their views of women? If you have, what do they say? What do they report as being the deciding factor?
Project Coordinator, Male Ally Network, SAVIS of Halton
Their family, friends, cousins—the people they interact with daily.
Conservative
Project Coordinator, Male Ally Network, SAVIS of Halton
Yes, and that's the premise the program is based on. Family members impact a lot of what they think about. For example, I might ask, “Who's the person you most admire?” They answer, “Dad.” “What does your dad say about women?” Sometimes little things come out. It always varies with individuals.
It's not all bad. There are examples that are very good examples of where misogyny is not as bad. One of the things I realize is that language plays a very important role in society. For example, in Toronto we hear figures about the “number of teenage girls” who are pregnant. You listen to that, and the man is forgotten. The man's role is forgotten.
It's connected. It's all connected. You listen to them. What I've been doing is actively listening to what is not said.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
That's very good. Thank you.
I have the same question for the White Ribbon Campaign. What would you say in terms of reflecting on the impact that pornography or violent images might have with regard to men's view of women?
Managing Director, Parker P. Consulting, White Ribbon Campaign
We've certainly seen the hyper-exposure of pornography and the objectification of women's bodies as being a real challenge for this question. We do a lot of work in high schools, as well as at universities, as we try to help groups of students figure out and make sense of gender identity and gender roles, and what they're being asked to be—what it means to be a man, what it means to be a young woman.
We're seeing women with ideas and concepts about having to please their partners or boyfriends, and about being seen as really feeling objectified. At the same time, young men are getting really mixed signals about what it means to be a man: does that mean being macho and sexually promiscuous? They're also wrestling with whether or not that's comfortable for them.
There's really a whole mixed set of emotions and experiences as young people try to navigate what it means. The level of access to these images makes it very challenging for young people to make sense of what is actually normal and what partners actually want from each other. Getting to the questions around healthy relationships and actually talking to each other, intimately, is challenging for adults to do, let alone young people. We really want to focus on giving people the tools to start those conversations.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
If you were to ask the young men or boys who you work with on a regular basis, or interact with, where they get their perception of women from, what would they say? What are you hearing?
Managing Director, Parker P. Consulting, White Ribbon Campaign
That is some of the work my colleagues are doing on the ground.
They would tell me a different thing than they would tell a male colleague. They would probably say that they see it in magazines, they see it in videos, they see it in pop culture references, and those are some of the images—what athletes are doing, what athletes aren't doing. Popular culture is an important influence, but also the people close to home, how they see women treated in their lives and how they themselves want to treat women. It all has an effect on their perception of their ability to be a sensitive, responsible, and honourable young person.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Sheila Malcolmson
Thank you. That's your time.
Now I'm going to time myself and ask some questions of both witnesses.
To the White Ribbon Campaign, I really thank you for starting out with a reference to Jack Layton being a founder, to have the movement start in his son's bedroom office, as I understand, and then move now to 70 countries around the world. This is an example of a male leader using his voice for better. I love this quote from him: “Always have a dream that will outlast your lifetime,” which it has.
For this next chapter, for both organizations, what strategies have you found to be effective around how to inspire men to use their voice and to take that leadership role? How are you recruiting the next wave of male leaders into this movement to end violence against women?
Managing Director, Parker P. Consulting, White Ribbon Campaign
I can start.
Thank you for those reflections on Jack's leadership. We use those as a calling card all the time in thinking about where we want to take the work.
As I mentioned, we work from a strengths-based approach. We don't think it's particularly useful to shame men, to make them feel bad about all the misogyny that already exists in the world. We work from a place of positivity, and that means for men and women to think about why all the really challenging ideas about gender norms exist and to start to challenge those individually in their own lives and in their workplace, and extend that out into the larger ecosystem.
For us, in terms of some areas of intervention and ways that we focus on addressing on this, we don't do one set of interventions. We tend to do work both from a policy and legislative perspective and on the education, prevention, and promotion side. We do a host of activities and programs, and we want to see how we can challenge and innovate in this space.
I would argue that the work we're doing on the social enterprise side, trying to get organizations to think differently about these questions and to have their male leadership be invested in inclusive workplaces and environments, is a new way of working that we're really excited about.
At the same time, we know that the work we're doing in each and every classroom in Ontario and in different places around the country is really powerful as well, but we're trying to find, at the same time, approaches that have more system impact. Obviously we can't be everywhere, so we're trying to figure out some best practice approaches as we do this work. We use social media.
At the same time, we don't want to overstep into the space of other feminist organizations. We do a lot of amplification work and signal boosting of other fantastic initiatives and partners, but we're there to support and be part of a holistic approach to ending gender violence.
Project Coordinator, Male Ally Network, SAVIS of Halton
The first thing I think about in what I do is about being an example. I admit that I am flawed in any presentation I give. I have spoken to a number of male allies around Ontario, and that's one of the first things I do. We go into all the male-dominated spaces. I try to go into gyms, places where there are game rooms, the parks. The premise of our program is to go where males are, as you said, and from that you go to the campuses. We have relationships at the Sheridan campus and we are trying to go further and have more relationships at some other campuses even outside the Halton community.
As the last speaker said, we use social media. It's a very important aspect because even when we go to the community centres and give presentations, for example, on healthy relationships, one lovely thing that some of the centres do is put it on Instagram and Twitter. We offer pizza, so they come and we have that conversation. We make it a space where the youth and other males would want to come to have that conversation.
But most important is just being that example, building up our network where we have men all over in every sphere of society. Being at Sheridan, I communicated and connected with the dean, who indicated that he might come to be part of our volunteer training in two weeks. Having an individual like that says a lot. So we're having training where we have a dean and a 14-year-old kid in the same space who are discussing about ending misogyny. That's what we do.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Sheila Malcolmson
I have a second question.
I'd love some advice from the Halton group. When we post anything on social media about ending violence against women, inevitably we get someone weighing in with, “What about violence against men? Why don't you care?”
Do you have a short and sweet answer we can use to that question? How would you answer it?
Project Coordinator, Male Ally Network, SAVIS of Halton
How would I answer that? Men are the number one perpetrators of sexual violence—99%. That's the strongest answer. Men are the individuals who are doing it 99% of the time.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Sheila Malcolmson
I'm running out of time, so if you do have suggestions, please send them into the committee. Thank you.
Now we're going to Mr. Fraser for seven minutes.
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
Thank you very much, Ms. Malcolmson.
It's a pleasure to see you in the chair, and your questions were a pleasure, as always.
Just before I begin, I think it's not customary for the chair to ask questions, but given the single NDP slot, I think it's allowed in these circumstances.
NDP
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
My first question is to the White Ribbon Campaign, a bit of a topical question. We've seen, with Alberta MLA Sandra Jansen, some truly explosive and misogynistic comments that she read aloud in one of her member statements in the Alberta provincial legislature.
All public officials take a little additional heat or criticism, I think, because we make decisions and take stands on controversial issues all the time. As a male member of Parliament, I've never been told to go back to the kitchen. I don't anticipate I ever will. I'm thankful. I recognize that it's a privilege not to be treated the same way Ms. Jansen has been.
As a male elected official, what can I do to make public life and the public sphere more accepting to women so they can join the realm of public life?
Managing Director, Parker P. Consulting, White Ribbon Campaign
Thank you very much for the question. You're right that you're probably not going to be asked to go back to the kitchen very often, but you certainly are ripe for criticism within the public sphere, as all officials are.
I would suggest that you speak out when you see these incidents happen, both as they're happening, if you can in a way that's safe, but also follow up after. If it isn't going to be constructive to do it in that moment, you could speak to the person, after what was perhaps a live incident, and follow up with them. If it's happening online, it becomes a bit of a challenge.
Your job as a male ally is to help call this out and to suggest new ways and new language. You can be upset with a politician for their particular decisions, but attacking them on the basis of their gender, their race, or their ethnicity is absolutely unacceptable. On any of those fronts, you have a special role and an opportunity to speak out, support, and check in with that female leader to make sure she's doing okay, to see if there's anything she might need as support. Also, actively try to find more women leaders and voices to sit around you and inform you so you can understand their experience.
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
Thank you all.
I guess I'll take this opportunity, on behalf of men everywhere, to let Ms. Jansen know that she does have allies who reject in the most violent terms the misogyny she has faced in recent days.
Continuing on to one of the themes you touched on in your remarks, you mentioned that you're seeing some impact and that you promote evidence-based decisions. One of the things we've heard precious few comments about during the course of this study is how to measure the success of initiatives that seem to tackle violence against women. For the life of me, I don't know how to do it. It seems the more research we do, the more widely spread the problem appears to be, and it makes it very difficult to measure the success of individual programs. What is it you're doing to see success, so to speak?
Managing Director, Parker P. Consulting, White Ribbon Campaign
There are always challenges within all community interventions to seeing cause and effect and the impact. What we do really effectively, I think, is evaluate our programs for the experience of participants prior to and following.
I can speak to one particular initiative that we did in Zambia where we helped to create what we think is the world's first gender transformative financial literacy program. We found in a particular mining community in Zambia that incidents of violence were happening because men and women were talking about money, and then violence would erupt in a household. By creating this training program, we were able to see within that community a significant decrease in reported incidents of gender violence at this work site. We started with a baseline with the participants in our program. We checked in as the program was happening, and then a couple years out, we checked back to see what the incidence levels were. Those were some of the measures that we were able to do in that context.
That was a specific initiative that we had some parameters around, but it is certainly a challenge for all social scientists and all community programmers to figure out how to measure the impact of the work they're doing, especially if it's in the primary prevention space where you're not just counting numbers and doing the response pieces. It continues to be a challenge and a big question for everyone, but we're able to measure our programming at that level.
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
Mr. Henry, you mentioned the importance of getting into male-dominated spaces. One of the problems we've discussed on the committee with a few witnesses is how so much programming is directed essentially toward pre-sold audiences, people who already recognize that this is a problem, and the message isn't necessarily getting to all young men and boys who might be at risk of becoming perpetrators.
What can the federal government do? What could we recommend to the federal government to help organizations like yours? What initiatives could the government launch on its own to help spread the message of non-violence into the broader population so all men and boys understand the importance of standing up for women?