Carleton has received feedback from various campus stakeholders on the first draft of its standalone sexual violence policy, which was released to the public on Oct. 6.
A student-written open letter that outlines five key recommendations for changes to the draft has been signed by individual members of the Carleton community and several student organizations, including the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA), the Graduate Students’ Association (GSA), and student representatives on the Board of Governors (BoG). As of Nov. 1, the letter has been signed by 45 student groups and 278 individuals.
The letter recommends the draft be reviewed to clarify, expand, remove, and strengthen various parts of the policy.
Specifically, the letter calls for the establishment of a review committee made up of experts independent from Carleton, and the clarification and expansion of services provided to those who experience sexual violence.
On Oct. 6, the university sent out an email to students asking for feedback on the current draft of the policy. Suzanne Blanchard, Carleton vice-president (students and enrolment), headed the development of the draft. The policy draft was created to comply with a provincial government requirement for all post-secondary institutions to implement a stand-alone sexual violence policy by January 2017.
Since then, campus groups have reacted to the draft in various ways.
Caitlin Salvino, a fourth-year human rights and law student and one of the authors of the open letter, said she and her friends saw the need for the letter because they knew it was important.
“It has really been quite overwhelming and incredibly inspiring how many people are supporting this [letter],” Salvino said. “I think it just shows how much Carleton students are invested in this policy and how much they’re concerned with the way it’s currently drafted.”
Salvino said many students are too busy to take the time to evaluate the draft for themselves.
“The legal language and the way [the policy] is written doesn’t make it easy for students to pick out some of these [clauses],” Salvino said. “That’s why we really wanted to make it clear.”
The letter also says the policy should strengthen the use of the terms “rape culture” and “intersectionality,” as well as expand the definition of “Carleton community” that enables alleged assaulters to “suspend the complaint process by ending their relationship with the university.”
Salvino said she hopes the administration seriously considers all the recommendations made by the letter.
“We hope that they abide by all of them but even if they were to make a few changes, I think that would be really really important,” she said.
Greg Owens, the undergraduate representative on the BoG, signed the letter and said he wants to make sure the revised policy the board will vote on reflects the community feedback.
“If we’re holding a vote just to make sure we don’t miss this deadline [in January], then there’s no point in really holding a vote in my mind,” Owens said.
Fahd Alhattab, CUSA president, said he and his team edited the letter and discussed it with Sydney Schneider, the programming co-ordinator with the Womyn’s Centre. According to Alhattab, they provided Schneider with feedback and suggested several language and format edits to present the letter in a more “academic tone” in writing and approach.
Alhattab said he was involved in a “back and forth” discussion with Schneider about making edits to the open letter. This involved sending her a draft of the open letter with CUSA’s edits. He said CUSA suggested a number of edits to the original letter, mainly providing suggestions for language changes.
“Some sections were simply grammatical things, others were about adding terms to give it a more legalese take on it, to show our understanding to the university of legal implications,” Alhattab said about the edits.
According to Schneider, “We took the [edits] we wanted most.” She said most of CUSA’s edits that made it into the letter were structural or language, not content-based.
“We weren’t allowing anything that would change the content of the letter itself because we had so many signatories by that point,” Schneider said.
The open letter was emailed to Blanchard and the Carleton administration on Oct. 28, the deadline for feedback, and asked Blanchard to give a public written response to the letter and its five recommendations. Salvino said the letter will still be accepting signatories until the final draft of the policy is presented to the BoG in December.
According to Alhattab, CUSA also provided their own feedback to the university. He said there were a few differences between the feedback from Salvino and CUSA, such as on the duty to report incidents of sexual violence.
“We feel that there should be a larger procedure and a larger discussion around whether it’s a staff member’s duty to report a survivor’s incident or that they need the consent of a survivor before reporting it,” Alhattab said.
Before the recent draft was released, the university hosted consultations with student groups and unions, according to Lauren Montgomery, the women’s caucus chair of CUPE 4600. She said the process was difficult.
“In my experience in the ones that I went to was that the process wasn’t very meaningful and that there actually wasn’t a lot of respect on the part of people from the university’s side,” Montgomery said. “A lot of the time they wanted to debate with us or argue with us and that’s not the point of a consultation.”
Some staff at Carleton have also provided feedback on the draft sexual violence policy.
The Carleton University Academic Staff Association (CUASA), a union that represents 850 academic staff at Carleton, provided a list of more than 20 changes it wants to see in Carleton’s sexual violence policy, according to the Ottawa Citizen.
A representative of CUASA has declined to comment at this time.
Montgomery said CUPE 4600 and the GSA have been discussing and reviewing the draft for some time.
The GSA has come together and written their own response to the draft, according to Montgomery. However, since CUPE 4600 is currently in collective bargaining, individuals have been signing other letters such as Salvino’s or supporting the work of CUASA and the GSA, Montgomery said.
She said she appreciates the recommendations CUASA made on issues such as review bodies and training, but there are “some points of difference” between student groups and CUPE 4600 and what CUASA is “willing to discuss.”
“We sort of differ around using the term ‘rape culture,” she said. “From what I’ve heard from their release, they said they don’t really want to use the term but that they want to recognize that sexual violence is institutionalized and normalized and legitimized in university spaces.”
Montgomery said she believes in not recognizing the sexual violence occurring, the administration is trying to “protect their reputation” by taking what she calls a “risk-management approach.”
But Carleton president Roseann Runte said the term rape culture is not about the reputation of the university.
“There were a lot of people who didn’t want to say that [rape culture] exists at Carleton because people don’t want to be considered like that,” Runte said. “It’s not about the reputation of the university. It’s what lots of people wrote and said ‘We don’t have that kind of culture here.’ ”
Blanchard said Carleton’s ultimate goal is “to have a policy that reflects the Carleton community.” She said she has been really pleased with the community engagement with the policy and that there is a team currently going through all the feedback to identify common themes.
“We will definitely be responding to the community in terms of the feedback we’ve heard before it goes to the board,” Blanchard said. “We will be seeing some changes in the policy.”
