A petition started by students in a feminist activism class has garnered attention from the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) with its online call for CUSA to improve access to sexual assault resources for students.
Bethany Drader, a political science student at Carleton, said she and several other students—including law student Linda MacMillan—put the petition together as a group project.
The petition, hosted on Change.org, criticizes “a lack of information” on the CUSA website “for services such as Foot Patrol, The Carleton University Sexual Assault Centre, Student Run Sexual Assault Support Hotline, and The Womyn’s Centre.” Addressed to the CUSA vice-president (student issues) and vice-president (student services), the authors said the petition was “a call to update the information on these websites and to make it more accessible to the students.”
Drader said while she and other members of her group found that sexual assault resources on campus are well-organized and effective once they engaged with them, it was difficult to find out about them online.
“It was my idea to focus on the lack of access to information specifically,” Drader said. “But about 10 of us worked together on the project, and we’ve been sharing it within our own circles.”
Drader said the requirement for her class was to come up with an activist project they could promote for three to four hours in the atrium on campus, but she and her group decided to put the petition online as well to reach a larger audience.
CUSA vice-president (student issues) Maddie Adams said CUSA is aware their website needs work, saying an improved version is due to launch by the end of February.
“The positive thing about it,” Adams said of the petition, “is us knowing it really is important for us to have an up-to-date and reliable website, because people do go to our website as a source of information, so they just beat us to it in telling us that our information is not that great.”
“The petition came at an interesting time,” CUSA’s vice-president (student services) Frena Hailekiros said in an email. “CUSA is actually in the midst of finalizing a new website that will have a lot of the information the petition is dedicated to. Extensive detail about Foot Patrol, the Womyn’s Centre and the GSRC are all part of that.”
“There will also be a student feedback option on the site,” Hailekiros said, “so students can let us know what else they would like to see on the site. This is a great feature because we can make changes on an on-going basis and will allow students to connect with us directly.”
Debbie Owusu-Akyeeah, the programming coordinator at the CUSA Womyn’s Centre, said she would be willing to engage further on improving accessibility to resources.
“We try really, really hard to let people know what the services are, but our reach is only so far. Unless you know the Womyn’s Centre, or Foot Patrol, that stuff is missing,” Owusu-Akyeeah said. “Hearing this now, I feel like we—the entire CUSA staff—should feel compelled to want to work to improve that. Hopefully with a push from us at the Womyn’s Centre, that can happen.”
At press time, the petition has 112 signatures.
