The Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) and the Carleton University Academic Staff Association (CUASA) held a panel and town hall Sept. 23 discussing issues including rape culture and transphobia.
The event, called “Building Safe(r) Spaces,” was organized in response to several frosh leaders wearing shirts saying “fuck safe space” at an off-campus party at the end of fall orientation week.
The panel was made up of Julia Allen, fourth-year communications and women and gender studies student, D.J. Freedman, queer social worker, Leslie Robertson, lawyer and community member who originally tweeted a photo of the frosh leaders, and Dawn Moore and Doris Buss, legal studies professors.
Patrizia Gentile, the director of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies, moderated the discussion.
Allen discussed the problem with labelling the recent events on campus as “isolated incidents.”
“Calling these incidents ‘isolated’ not only dismisses the fact that casual discrimination occurs here every day, but it also makes us complacent in perpetuating discrimination and rape culture on our campus,” she said.
She said bystanders need to intervene in these situations.
“When you don’t intervene, it sends a message to bystanders and perpetrators that what they are doing is okay,” Allen said.
GSA sexual assault outreach coordinator Abigail Kidd said the GSA saw a need to have a discussion after the shirt incident and the assaults on campus.
“There was a lot of response to isolated incidents, but no further conversation after the initial responses,” she said.
Kidd said she wants students to take steps to change rape culture themselves.
The discussion was broader than the shirt incident. Freedman spoke on the panel about transphobia in the community.
“As a transfeminine person, I am still trying to prove my fucking existence,” she said. “We want to engage. We want to be here.”
Freedman said the world is full “of bullying and of hate.”
“We all gang up on the person who has less power,” she said.
Robertson discussed people who had “contempt” for the safe space program and were “clueless to their privilege.”
She said it was important for people with privilege to be involved in safe space conversations.
“Creating safer spaces is a community project,” Robertson said.
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