We Need Federal Legislation Against Campus Sexual Violence in Canada

During my second semester at McGill University in 2017, there were numerous cases that made local and national news about how the institution and student groups protected perpetrators of gendered and sexualized violence. As someone raised in the United States, I was surprised to learn that there was no federal legislation akin to Title IX in Canada.

One case that stunned me was McGill’s failure to honor a restraining order from a survivor of a random violent attack. Around the time that the newspaper I was a part of, The McGill Tribune, broke that story, a fellow student threatened to assault me because he disagreed with me on the comments of an argument in a McGill Facebook group. I knew that McGill would not even try to protect me, and student services did not even respond to my email until the semester was over. The student who threatened me had a restraining order against him from his ex-girlfriend, so I was scared.

At that time, I leaned on friends for support and anti-violence organizers. Similar to countries like the United States that do have legislation which should protect survivors of gendered and sexualized violence, survivor-led groups often have to fight their institutions to be accountable to survivors. One of these organizations is Students for Consent Culture (SFCC), which supports student activists and pushes for anti-violence policies on a provincial and federal level in Canada.

In 2017, SFCC released the OurTurn National Action Plan, the first document to grade Canadian post-secondary education institutions on their sexual violence policies. OurTurn advocacy coordinator Caitlin Salvino, who co-founded SFCC and was the lead author of the action plan, told Scarleteen that a shortcoming of many anti-sexual violence policies is that they do not recognize violence beyond forced sexual intercourse.

“When you don't deal with the broad strokes of how sexualized and gender-based violence, racialized violence, and all of these kinds of violence are interlinked, you're addressing a symptom, not a cause, and I think that's a big policy gap,” she says.

Source: https://www.scarleteen.com/article/politics/we_need_federal_legislation_against_campus_sexual_violence_in_canada