It's hard to speak out in a culture where you feel like an experiment. As a woman in the Canadian Armed Forces, especially in the combat arm, where I was one of very few—I went through all of my training. I was the only woman. I felt constantly that I needed to prove I needed to be there, that I was an experiment and that I was to conform and behave as I was expected to; otherwise, I would have been proven to not belong and to have failed the experiment for others.
When you feel like that, when something happens to you that doesn't happen to anyone else, and you're going to potentially rock the boat, take somebody down who's highly beloved, someone I felt love towards as a big brother, it's incredibly hard to speak out.
This is why I go back to the point about fundamentally it's about women and men not feeling equal. If you're constantly trying to conform to this toxic masculine behaviour, it's incredibly challenging to stand up for yourself. You have the idea that you have to be like them, and if you're not, you're wrong; you don't belong, and it will just prove you don't belong, so you stay silent. I think this is not just about sexual assault. It's also about the jokes, the showing of pornography, the ridiculous comments, the unwanted touching. It's all of it. Women and men need to be treated equally for that to stop, and that, I think, is the root problem that General Carignan has before her.