In the past few weeks at Carleton, there have been events for both sexual assault awareness week and a suicide awareness day. These two awareness campaigns alone are among the thousands of awareness weeks fit into a 52-week year. For every imaginable issue, we dedicate a week of the year to spreading awareness.
The purpose of any awareness week is to start a conversation about a particular issue. But if the only goal of the week is to make people aware, then the campaign has failed before it has begun. Perhaps this is just semantics, but labelling an event as “awareness” may prevent advocates from delving deeper into the issues. Every advocate wants people to truly understand the issue at hand. But when awareness weeks only skim the surface of issues that affect nearly everyone, awareness weeks end up being largely ineffective.
To truly decrease the prevalence of preventable issues such as sexual assault and suicide, the public needs to be aware not that these issues occur, but why they are prevalent. We need to be able to look at every important issue from an intersectional point of view and talk about the various factors that contribute to the reasons why we feel we need to dedicate a week of our time to talking about these issues.
That means sexual assault awareness shouldn’t just stop at consent. To truly understand the issue, we need to talk about the factors that contribute to gendered violence. We need to talk about unequal power relations, how power and gender are related, whether Canada has a culture where rape is normalized, and why men are continually excused for their actions but female victims are blamed. Each of those issues form the bigger picture of the issue of sexual assault, and only when those are addressed will people be able to comprehend the issue and consequently eliminate its prevalence.
The same problem is faced by mental health awareness weeks. For suicide prevention campaigns in particular, everyone knows suicide is an issue. If awareness is simply telling people there is an issue, then it is a waste of everyone’s time and disgraces the issue.
Suicide prevention campaigns tell people crisis numbers to call and places to reach out for help, but this does not address the root causes of the problem. Why is it that individuals have reached the point of suicidal ideation in the first place? It’s not just that they did not have access to crisis support services before they were given a slip of paper.
As Charissa Feres, an executive member of the Student Alliance for Mental Health, wrote on her Facebook page, “if our suicide prevention only starts when someone is having suicidal thoughts, then we aren’t doing suicide prevention right.”
Instead, we need to change the way people view suicide based on factors that contribute to poor mental health, including systems of oppression, bullying, poverty, and mental health stigma, to name a few. Yet many continue to see suicide as a selfish act.
Further, the fact that certain events have awareness months (versus awareness weeks or awareness days) creates some sort of hierarchy of societal issues. We seemingly rank the importance of cancer awareness, for example, over other issues, like sexual assault and suicide. Cancer is certainly worthy of public attention, but every issue should receive equal attention.
And finally, is a week enough to really delve into the issue and eliminate it? Why not make the effort to promote the issue every single day? Aren’t these issues important enough to discuss 365 days every year?
Awareness weeks are meant to change the way we see an issue, but they can do a better job promoting true awareness of the issue so they can be prevented.
