Status of Women Committee on Nov. 23rd, 2016

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Ms. Neubauer, did you want to comment?

[Julie Neubauer]

Thank you.

As a starting point, and with the things Bonnie has spoken about in terms of the needs of her client base, it's just addressing the basic vulnerability on a systemic level of women, full stop, whether they have ABI, whether they're coming from homelessness, or whether they're coming from intact families and looking around the world at how they are perceived and how they are addressed.

Very specifically, it's looking at training and raising awareness of people who are making the decisions. It's looking at judiciary training for judges across the supreme courts and making sure they have a fulsome understanding of domestic violence and the impacts of vulnerability and sexual exploitation. In Ontario, through the Ministry of the Attorney General, we need dedicated crown attorneys who will prosecute and have a really good understanding of what the issues are with the trauma these young women are enduring, and what criminal sentences will really mean in setting a precedent for that. Then there are police forces in terms of law enforcement.

There's a very large scale in terms of education. Ontario has just recently adapted a different sex education curriculum to include the notion of gender, inequality, vulnerabilities, and all those types of things. We need that larger systemic approach and then have it trickle down to the smaller units.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

I think Ms. Ludwig had a follow-on question, so I'll pass the time to her.

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

Thank you.

My question is to both of you personally. Are services available for staff working front line and also coping with the circumstances, with the frustration, the hurt, and the anguish that you hear every day, and also your own debriefing? Or do you need services?

[Bonnie Brayton]

Julie, you go first.

[Julie Neubauer]

Our self-care and our recognition of vicarious trauma is at the forefront of all the work we do. I support my front-line advocates, and we debrief on a daily basis. We talk very openly about the circumstances and the situations we hear, and we acknowledge how vicarious trauma enters our lives.

As an agency, Covenant House also recognizes that. Outside our EAP and supports for our staff, we also have numerous opportunities and training for our staff to understand how the trauma affects them.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I'm sorry, that's the end of your time. I'm really sorry to have to cut it off, but we're at end of our panel.

To both of our witnesses, thank you for coming today. You've heard the questions. If there are things you want to send on to the clerk, I would invite you to do so. We would love to see those and be able to review them.

We'll suspend, after which Ms. Malcolmson will be taking over as your chair.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Sheila Malcolmson]

Welcome to our witnesses.

This is the second hour of testimony of this afternoon's status of women committee meeting. We're investigating the impact of violence against young women and girls.

I'm Sheila Malcolmson, and I'm the vice-chair of the committee. I represent the NDP. We have seven Liberal members and two Conservative members. We'll be asking you questions.

We'll begin with SAVIS of Halton, who will have ten minutes for testimony. They also have a bilingual power point.

Then we'll move to a ten-minute presentation from the White Ribbon Campaign. Chi Nguyen is on the video conference. After that we'll move to questions.

With thanks for your work, we'll start with SAVIS of Halton.

[Walter Henry, Project Coordinator, Male Ally Network, SAVIS of Halton]

Good afternoon. My name is Walter Henry, and I'm the male ally coordinator for SAVIS of Halton.

I'm very passionate about my role. I'm not scared to admit that I'm flawed, because I was born into an imperfect world where women and female-identified individuals are still unfortunately seen as “lesser than” by a large number of my male counterparts, given the patriarchal, misogynistic nature of the societies in which we live.

Why is it important to have men as allies in a feminist organization? The truth is that a 2013 Statistics Canada report highlights that men are described as 99% of the perpetrators of sexual violence. As a result, the consensus has emerged that reducing and preventing violence against women requires the participation of men who can model non-violent behaviour and hold their male counterparts accountable. Men identify with other men.

The SAVIS of Halton male ally network program, or MAN program, is modelled after the above premise, where men and individuals identified as male become allies and start the discussion about the taboo topic of sexual violence from as early as age 10. However, given my experience in the field, I am of the fervent opinion that this conversation could be started at a much younger age. Boys are born into a toxic masculine culture that has an indoctrinating grasp and far-reaching impact, given the development of technology, especially in the previous 30 years.

On the impact of toxic masculinity on society, the male ally network of SAVIS of Halton is of the opinion that we must unlearn this toxic masculine ideology, which is one of the ways in which patriarchy is harmful to men. It refers to the socially constructed attitudes that describe the masculine gender role as violent, unemotional, and sexually aggressive.

In many ways, this toxic ideology is learned unknowingly through music, television, social media, family members, language, and peers. This contributes to the cyber-violence, street harassment, misguided understanding of consent, and rape culture faced by women and female-identified individuals daily.

Further, the traditional and modern media hyper-sexualizes the feminine gender and portrays women as weak and only able to be saved by a man. Perfect examples of this include the stories of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Men, however, are portrayed as gods and conquerors with little emotional intelligence and disregard for anyone or anything that represents weakness. We are taught not to cry, to be tough, and not to show weakness. This ideology dominates all spaces where men can be found.

How does MAN engage men? The male ally network understands that most sexual violence cases are perpetrated by men. However, most men are not perpetrators of sexual violence. Further, we admit that society is patriarchal and that men currently possess the most privilege. However, the primary aim of MAN, even before becoming an ally, is having that conversation about our privilege, being honest with ourselves that misogyny exists within our society, and that we are responsible for the way our female and female-identified folks are treated.

MAN's first engagement strategy is to go into male-dominated spaces like gyms, classrooms, community centres, game shops, and prisons to start the conversation about sexual violence and to recruit possible male allies for our network. We have developed partnerships with other male ally organizations, school boards, correctional facilities, colleges and universities, and agencies and businesses in Halton and surrounding communities. Through these connections, we're able to give presentations to male and male-identified individuals from age 10 and above. We participate in community events like Take Back the Night, Hope in High Heels, Sisters in Spirit vigil, Sheridan College frosh week, community fairs, and various networking events within the community. At these events, we have our male ally recruitment booth and distribute our outreach material—for example, stress balls and bumper stickers—and we make our presence known by further displaying the MAN banner.

MAN has an active Internet and social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat through which we advertise our events and recruit volunteers. MAN has developed a 14-hour training session to train our allies. The session covers redefining manhood, boys in solidarity, understanding violence in Canada, Male Allyship 101, be a man, and understanding masculinity. Thus far we have recruited and trained 10 males as allies. We have a further 15 individuals scheduled for training in early December 2016.

We use our maleness as our advantage to reach other men and develop a space where men could feel safe to express their opinions, which we respect. We come from a place where we seek to prevent violence from ever happening and dare to dream of a world without it. We seek to use men and boys as role models to start the conversation with their children, their peers, and within their everyday environment.

We identify strength in weakness and see the importance of exposing men to the stories of survivors of violence and sexual violence. Unlearning our misogynistic beliefs is the key to ending misogyny. Starting the conversation and being an active bystander may change the trajectory of life for many people, because we are all unknowingly intricately connected regardless of gender, cultural background, ethnicity, and socio-economic position.

Speaking of the challenges MAN faces, as a male ally giving a presentation, I always first admit that I am inherently flawed, because I live in a world where misogyny is cultural and embedded into every fabric of society. Therefore, for a male ally the challenges are many. Speaking about sexual violence with men is a taboo topic, and men are very skeptical and sensitive and would want to refrain from even starting the conversation about sexual violence against women and female-identified individuals. Therefore, it is important for men to engage other men and boys and begin that conversation, because many factors play a role in preventing the message from being heard and eventually received.

Some individuals do not agree with the message, for the same reason that the message should be heard: the misogynistic nature of society. In other instances, some individuals do not believe in the preventive ideology of MAN, and therefore subscribe to harsher penalties for sexually violent crimes.

Given recent developments in the world, patriarchy seems to be always winning, because for males there are many examples of individuals who are extremely successful by promoting misogynistic ideals.

Finally, our motivations and commitment are sometimes rightly questioned by females and female-identified individuals. However, through our actions and commitment, we hope to gain the confidence of everyone.

Thank you for allowing me and SAVIS to participate in these important presentations.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Sheila Malcolmson]

Thank you so much.

We will move now to Chi Nguyen, who is on video conference, representing the White Ribbon Campaign.

Thank you for coming.

[Chi Nguyen, Managing Director, Parker P. Consulting, White Ribbon Campaign]

Thank you very much.

Hi, everyone. This is the first time I've used this kind of technology. I'm hoping it's all working well on your end.

I want to start by thanking the committee for exploring this question and taking a look at the challenge of violence against young women. I specifically want to thank you for having included an approach that takes into consideration how we engage men and boys. I think it's an extremely important piece of this puzzle.

There are two things I would like to accomplish over the next few moments with you. One is to tell you a little bit about the work of the White Ribbon Campaign, and the other is to share some lessons from our 25 years of practice doing this work.

We are the only national organization that is working on the prevention of violence against women by positively engaging men and boys. This movement actually began as a response to the Montreal massacre. It started in 1991, as many good feminist conversations do, around a kitchen table, in the home of former NDP leader Jack Layton. Several men were sitting around asking what they could be doing to ally with feminists and women in stopping the violence that was happening in our communities. Twenty-five years later, we continue with a strong vision of a future with no violence against women, and our mission is to continue to engage men and boys in the prevention of violence against women and girls.

What started in 1991 with 100,000 men taking part across Canada has now become an annual campaign, which kicks off this Friday, November 25, and continues through December 6.

We ask those who wear the white ribbon to make a pledge, and we ask them never to commit, condone, or remain silent about violence against women. This really simple concept has now spread around the world, first to Europe, then on to Australia and Asia, and then to Latin America and Africa. Today we are the world's largest movement of men and boys working to end violence against women and girls, to promote gender equality and healthy relationships, and to create a new vision of masculinity, with our activities taking place in more than 60 countries worldwide.

When we talk about violence prevention, there are several intervention points. You can tackle it from before the problems begin; you can respond as the problems start; or you can respond at the tertiary level, following an incidence of violence. Our work at White Ribbon really focuses on lessening the chances that men and boys will use violence and that women and girls will suffer from violence. We focus on primary prevention, and we think that is where we can have the most impact.

The way we do our work at White Ribbon has four very strong principles, and these are absolute non-negotiables for us. We work from a human rights position, and we advocate for gender equality. That's the sort of framework and basis from which we begin.

We believe it is crucial not to compete with or divert resources from the support interventions or transition efforts for women and families leaving violent situations.

We also believe that our work has to be gender transformative. It's about challenging the often violent aspects of masculinities, as Walter described in his presentation.

Finally, we do work that is always informed by best practices and a strong evidence base. For us, that is really rooted in a strength-based approach.

The current ways we are working in this field are about education and training, research and best practices, as well as providing technical assistance to our community partners in civil society, in government, as well as community organizations. We also have a social enterprise arm that we recently established. We're taking this kind of work and bringing it to the corporate sector. We worked with Barrick Gold as well as with the University of Regina and McGill University.

My colleague and executive director Todd Minerson serves on both the Status of Women Canada advisory council on the federal strategy against gender-based violence as well as the Ontario round table on violence against women.

We are a really small but effective team of 10 people out of Toronto, and we are currently doing work in Kenya, Vietnam, and Cambodia. We are seeing impacts around the world, so we have a lot of experience globally and locally to draw from. Over the last 25 years we have gained some insights that we hope you will take into consideration as you consider the steps forward for this really important topic.

First, we believe that work with men is necessary. We believe that, as primary perpetrators, as well as our key audience for primary prevention, men have the ability to influence other men and can be engaged in the conversation on how to reduce and prevent gender-based violence. We've seen this really effectively in our partnership with the Toronto Argonauts on a project we did with them called “Huddle Up and Make the Call”, where we saw male athletes come into the classroom and work with students to actually have the conversation about what the leadership could look like.

We know that working with men can be effective. We're trying to gather more of an evidence base and ensure that there's rich data that tells us what looks like best practice, what some of the insights are, and we have just recently wrapped a really incredible initiative with nine other organizations, called a community of practice, with agencies working across the country on this question.

We know that this kind of work also has a positive and transformative impact on the lives of women and girls, but also for men and boys. Every year we have a huge event that starts on Yonge-Dundas Square, where we have about 800 people walk a mile in high heels. It's very interesting to see how men have the experience of kind of asking the question of what it feels like to be a woman in that sense. It's an opportunity to kind of reflect.

Finally, we think there are really interesting innovations and new avenues for asking this question. We know that men want to be allies and want to support and end this violence in their lives. We believe there are interesting entry points around fatherhood, athletics and sports, workplaces and schools, and faith and cultural communities. These all offer up interesting moments for men to step back and think about how they can be part of the solution.

We hear daily about everyday sexism that is faced by people in our communities. Yesterday a statement by MLA Sandra Jensen raised the misogyny and harassment that she faced as a public leader, as another reminder of why we need to do this work and challenge this violence.

I have a little toddler at home, whom I hope to raise to be a strong ally and feminist. We're working to give him the tools to intervene, to name and call out acts of violence. I'm teaching him about consent, to name his body parts, and to enjoy twirling in a dress, but the barrage of toxic gendered stereotypes and the images that are already being thrown at him are stunning. He's already been told that pink is for girls, and to stop with his tears and toughen up. He turns two on Wednesday next week.

We know that this work is needed now, more than ever, and we applaud the efforts of the committee in reviewing and consulting with civil society and experts. We look forward to your next steps and recommendations.

Thank you for letting us speak to this question.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Sheila Malcolmson]

Thank you so much, to both of the witnesses.

We'll begin our questions now from committee members, and we're starting with Mr. Serré for seven minutes.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for your presentations and your hard work and commitment. I wish there were more SAVIS and more White Ribbon Campaign functions across Ontario and across Canada. I think we need to find ways.

The White Ribbon Campaign did a survey in 2012 that looked at men's attitudes and behaviours. Can you expand a bit on some of the recommendations in that report?

[Chi Nguyen]

It predated my time at White Ribbon, but the report is publicly available. I can say that one of the things we learned out of the insights from that survey was that men are willing to be allies and to step up. They know that this is a problem and are ready to acknowledge that they want to do something. What we've been working on as a response to that is finding ways to give men tools to be part of that response, to help to intervene, and to support women.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

We've heard from other witnesses about a lack of research and data, especially related to women and girls specifically, but do you have any data or research that relates to men? You could either briefly discuss that now or to send it to the clerk, but do you have any data you want to share on the attitudes?

[Alma Arguello, Executive Director, SAVIS of Halton]

For SAVIS of Halton, when Walter, who's the front-line public educator, goes out in the community, we have noticed that the community itself wants the education. We are working on collecting data. The types of questions and the types of responses we're getting from the “guerilla survey” we're doing, both in correctional...because we are the sexual assault centre that goes into Maplehurst, which is the male correctional facility. They want information that also reflects the cultural diversity from their own community. That's very important, especially in Halton. It is a community, a region, that is starting to show cultural diversity. Targeted proper material that reflects their background and cultural diversity is very important, because that will make it easier for parents, youth groups, or communities to give that information out.

We're working on that, and we'd be more than happy to share that with the committee.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Mr. Henry, you talked about your target group of 10 years and older. As you know, there is Ontario government Bill 132. Was there any input from your group to the Ontario bill to make sure that it looks at specifically targeting men or young boys, either elementary or high school or college and university?

[Alma Arguello]

We didn't have an impact.

The reason we think this is...and we have noticed that this is very important. Children are telling us at the youth groups that they have either participated in an act that violated the sexual rights of a woman or young girl or they think it's funny. One of the examples one of them gave us was credit carding. I thought, what is that? Credit carding is when a young man goes behind a young girl and swipes his hand on her bum. This is an issue that victims services in our community are saying should stop. The education is very important. We at SAVIS have been aggressively trying to put questions together, and trying to see how we could start at a much younger age, because acts of sexual violence are beginning to start at that age.

When we talk to correctional services, the guys say, “We want to be better fathers, but this is what we saw. These were our examples.” In correctional facilities, we are working on how to teach them better parenting. We started a program where men record their voices on a CD, and they mail that CD to their kid. That's a way for the kid to know there is a father, there's love, and for a child to hear the father's voice. We're trying to also target the family unit.

Again, it goes back to the whole notion of diversity. Some cultures are more sexual.

[Walter Henry]

Some are more accepting of sexual violence. It can be close-knit; they don't talk about it a lot.

[Alma Arguello]

Specific education is very important, and that is something we are not seeing.

[Walter Henry]

What we find is that even in terms of family members where the family is close, the youth are exposed through school. That's why I think it needs to be started at a very young age, because they are exposed, and a lot of times parents do not know. Front-line workers, like me and teachers, are exposed to that. It's very important for the work to start at a very young age.

[Chi Nguyen]

If you don't mind my interjecting, we are currently doing some work with the Ontario government as part of the action plan. We've been funded for a multi-year, three-year initiative, as part of a joint consortium of community groups, including the Ottawa Rape Crisis Centre, to do a project called Draw the Line. As part of Draw the Line, we are bringing our materials and education around consent. We're starting work this fall to develop and tweak these materials to be appropriate for the elementary school audience. We know that this is an age cohort that we need to start reaching out to now. This is part of a piece of work that we hope to see start to make a difference in the coming years.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Sheila Malcolmson]

Thank you so much. That's your time. We'll now move to Ms. Harder.

You have seven minutes.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

I'll address the same question to each of you, but I will start with SAVIS.

I want you to reflect a little on how seeing pornography and violent images impacts the way that men and boys think about and treat women. Can you reflect on that a little, and on what you're seeing in the work you do?

[Walter Henry]

In terms of what I've seen, the boys sometimes don't want to talk about it. But it's there. It's underlying. It's kind of taboo. When you go into classrooms or the community centres, you listen to the underlying stuff, like “we see this”. You hear the conversations if you're at the back of the room. Sometimes you hear a murmur.

Given the space you're in, they don't talk about it a lot. You know it's an impact because they have the technology available to them. That's the important thing. It's the simple fact that you can ask a question and, right away, you see them go to their phones. You know that it's available. You know that they do it.

We're finding that they're not forthright about that right now, but it's there. By being very observant and, sometimes, by being at the back of the room and listening, you can hear it. They don't talk about it directly, but it's there. You know it's an impact.