As of November 2014, all universities in Ontario will be implementing uniform policies to address sexual assault. Looking forward, this could mean good things for safety and the overall experience for students and faculty on Carleton’s campus.
But according to a recent Maclean’s study, nearly one in five female students in Canada and the U.S. will be sexually assaulted before the end of their university career. Carleton has measures in place to deal with sexual assault on campus, but is it equipped to handle an issue that is this pervasive?
It’s still not enough
Julie Lalonde, the director of the anti-street harassment group Hollaback Ottawa, doesn’t think so.
“The sexual health centre has one full-time staff member and a couple part-time students, it needs more hands on deck . . . Carleton needs to give it a bigger budget and it needs more services,” she said.
“We definitely don’t have more services than we have need and until there’s zero wait time and people can just walk in and access whatever services they need, then there’s more work to do.”
Lalonde is a former Carleton student who spearheaded the coalition for Carleton’s sexual assault support centre.
She calls her fight to get the sexual assault support centre on campus an “uphill battle” that took her seven years.
“It was really hard . . . and it was at a time when talking about sexual violence on campus wasn’t ‘trendy,’ for lack of a better word,” she said.
A pervasive issue
On Nov. 15, an alleged sexual assault took place at 1:30 p.m. on Colonel By Drive. According to CTV News, the assault happened to a student who was in their first year of university.
According to Holly Johnson, a professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa who specializes in intimate partner violence, the research from Maclean’s is accurate as it has been replicated in many different environments over the last two decades.
Johnson said the study was based on the work of Mary Koss, who began examining how government surveys measure sexual violence in the mid 1980s.
“That was the beginning of thinking about ‘How do we measure this better?’” Johnson said.
Koss developed something called the sexual experiences survey, where she asked specific questions to a random sample of college and university students across the U.S.
According to Johnson, the large scale study found that about a quarter of the female students had been raped or had experienced attempted rape.
Standing together in response
In 1993, the federal government funded two Carleton researchers to complete the sexual assault experiences survey called Sexual abuse in Canadian university and college dating relationships: The contribution of male peer support, with a specific focus on dating violence—the only time the survey was used on a large scale in Canada.
This study, and many others to do with sexual violence, was funded in response to the 1989 shooting at École Polytechnique in Montreal—dubbed the Montreal Massacre—in which a student gunman killed women after saying he was “fighting feminism.”
Koss has since worked to revise the scale of her research and there is an updated version of the sexual experiences survey in use.
Coming together
Student movements to fight sexual violence and increase public discussion are often the result of events like the Montreal Massacre, according to Jessica McCormick, the national chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students.
“You know it’s been decades since students have been talking about the issue on campuses . . . it’s an insidious issue,” she said.
According to McCormick, some universities—including the University of Ottawa—have student movements requesting a mandatory gender studies course for students of all departments which would address sexual violence and intimate partner violence.
“It’s a bit of a patchwork across the country in terms of what is actually available from institution to institution,” she said. “A really integral component of addressing the issue of sexual violence on campus is offering educational programming that addresses the issue.”
“Whatever the strategy is that is developed at a college or university campus, it has to be something that is a result of collaboration between students and administrators . . . Oftentimes, students know best what will work on the ground on campus and what won’t.”
Increasing support on campus
The Sexual Assault Support Centre (SASC) was created because students asked for it and consulted with administrators to make it happen.
According to Carrolyn Johnston, the co-ordinator of sexual assault services at Carleton and the centre’s only full-time staff member, there has been an increase in the number of people who have visited the centre in the fall of 2014.
Johnston said SASC has supported public education campaigns on campus.
These include a series of public service announcements regarding consensual sex and sexual violence, as well as the #ThingsJustGotWeird campaign and social media app.
This campaign is in partnership with the Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women (OCTEVAW) and aims to help people identify “red flags” that may be signs of sexual violence.
“The campaign is aimed at trying to talk about experiences that might feel off and that maybe you can do something about . . . so it provides information on different types of things that might make you feel weird and how you can provide support to the person in the situation,” said Erin Leigh, executive director of OCTEVAW.
“It’s not about women listening to their guts if something gets weird, if they’re experiencing something related to violence, but rather that those around them are able to recognize it and have tools to intervene.”
Additionally, the centre has peer support volunteers who will meet with individuals and offer short-term counselling and referrals.
Carleton’s campus safety department believes with programs and tools such as these, as well as additional safety measures on campus, Carleton is well equipped to deal with sexual violence, according to community liaison officer Mark Hargreaves.
“What’s important to remember is that when a survivor comes forward to us, they will always direct the file and in a direct investigation we will never take a step forward in an investigation without their consent,” he said.
Collective voices
Recently, there has been an increase in discussion on sexual violence as many public figures have faced sexual assault allegations.
But on the Carleton campus, Hargreaves said this has not lead to an increase in reporting, nor should that be the goal.
“There are some campaigns that we continue to support where we see an increase in discussion and if that fuels someone coming forward and disclosing that they are a survivor of sexual violence, then that is good in a way. But I think the main goal is to raise awareness and increase discussion in hopes that in moving forward, we will end sexual violence,” he said.
Whether the public discussion on sexual violence will be sustainable in the coming months is up for debate. While representatives from OCTEVAW seemed skeptical, Lalonde is hopeful.
“I’m of the school of thought that this is a really pivotal moment for Canada right now,” she said.
“That there’s a conversation with the mainstream media about why women don’t report, about the normalcy of street harassment, about how it is a part of a sexual violence continuum—it encourages me.”
Lalonde is also hopeful that such discussion will lead not only to less cases of sexual violence, but the improvement of campus sexual safety services in the future.
“It allows us to say, ‘Hey, this is a problem for people’ and talk about it,” she said. “It’s really a chain reaction that starts with ‘I decide that this is safe to talk about’ and campuses, particularly administrations, can really set that tone.”
