2 / Oct. 22 - Nov. 4, 2015
@TheSheridanSun
Sexual Assault
KELSEY LYONS Yes means yes. Not meh, maybe or I don’t know. Last Wednesday, Julie Lalonde came to HMC to speak about her Draw the Line campaign, with a compelling lecture on sexual violence and the bystander effect. She was welcomed by the president of Sheridan Jeff Zabudsky, who briefly spoke about Sheridan’s Stand Alone policy and Dare to Care, which kicked off last Tuesday a the Take Back the Night March. “Sexual violence has no place at Sheridan,” said Zabudsky. “And the fact that you are here means you care.” Lalonde started the lecture by defining consent, not sexual assault, which she says is usually the first question people ask her. “I think an even better place to start is with ‘What is the definition of consent?’ ” she said. “And if it doesn’t meet that definition, then that is what constitutes as sexual assault.” Lalonde begins with what consent really means. “Only yes means yes, and the absence of a no does not mean you have consent,” she said. “I don’t have to say no and push him away to make it clear that I’m not interested.” She says that one of the main problems is that young women have the understanding that once they’ve said yes, they can’t take it back later but that’s not true. “So, yes to one thing doesn’t necessarily mean yes to absolutely everything you can put your mind to,” Lalonde
said. “It’s, ‘I said yes to this and that’s what we’re doing and then later on if we change to this, then you have to ask for my consent in that situation too.’ ” Once you’ve said yes, legally you can take it back whenever you want. “They say- ‘Well I said yes at first, but now I’m not into it anymore, but now I’m not allowed to say no,’ ” said Lalonde. “That’s not true… I can say yes and then when we get back to your house I say, ya I don’t’ feel good, you’re actually kind of creepy… You’re allowed to say I was cool with it but now I want to go home.” The Draw the Line campaign is a provincial anti-violence campaign that specifically targets bystanders. The bystander effect is where you see something that may seem out of place or inappropriate and you decide to do nothing because you think someone else will. The bystander effect was first seen in the medical community. “It happens in all kinds of situations, not just heart attacks,” said Lalonde. “Something shady happens…’I don’t have to do anything because someone else will do something.’ Or ‘No one else is doing anything so I’m not going to bother get off my butt to help.’ ” The campaign tries to get people think about and share their thoughts on what they would do if they witnessed sexual violence. “We ask real life scenarios, we pose people questions in terms of what they would and wouldn’t do in different moments,” said Lalonde. Lalonde says that it’s important to ask these questions and raise aware-
photograph by kelsey lyons
Activist Draws the Line on what constitutes sexual consent
Julie Lalonde delivered a talk to Sheridan students about sexual consent last week at HMC. ness on the topic. “Sexual violence is perpetrated in large part by our silence,” said Lalonde. She says that perpetrators know that it’s taboo to talk about and it’s embarrassing and they aren’t likely to report the incident, and that’s where they get their power. “It’s really important to talk about it because you’re taking it out of the shadows. You’re really disempowering the perpetrators and saying you’re not going to get away with this and I’m not going to sit at home and be humiliated by this,” said Lalonde. “You should be embarrassed by what you did.” This campaign started in 2011. “I’ve been working at it for four years and I started doing it because I’m seeing that it has an impact,” said Lalonde. However, the first couple years of the
campaign Lalonde received negative reactions when she said she was going to talk about sexual violence. “I would see some blank stares, a lot of people saying ‘That doesn’t really happen here,’ ” she said. “Whereas now I think people are realizing that this is a thing that happens everywhere and a survivor and a victim could be anyone.” Sheridan student Chelsea Wright, 18 says that it’s important to start educating people on sexual violence and inform them at a younger age. “When you’re younger you don’t really think about it, but as you get older you see it,” she said. “You’re exposed to everything and whatever you were taught when you were younger will show how you’re going to deal with these situations.”
Peer mentors lead march to show solidarity for sex assault victims CONTINUED from page 1
photograph by samantha tu
“The reason why it was important to have this event is because of all the violence that has been happening on campus,” said organizer and peer mentor, Hafsa Nadeen. “We felt that people need to know that it is a safe environment, that there is help out there for you, that things happen to everyone, and you’re not alone.” “I think [sexual violence on campus] is still a problem,” she said. Speakers referred to violence
against women in Canada as a crisis. Jess Kiley, a worker from Sexual Assault & Violence Intervention Services of Halton, spoke at the event and lamented the rates of sexual violence against women. “Unfortunately if you talk to women and girls, feminine-identifying folks, in your communities, in your classrooms, almost all of them will have an experience, an experience of sexual harassment, of being groped, of having their space violated,” she said.
Students, faculty and peer mentors show their solidarity for female sexual assault victims at the Take Back the Night walk.
According to a 2011 Statistics Canada study, 173,600 women aged 15 or older were victims of violent crime that year.
“The crisis of violence against aboriginal women in this country, this is something that has been met with a lot of dismissal by the current government.” JESS KILEY
Social worker While that number is only slightly higher than the rate of violence against men, women experience much higher rates of sexual violence. “Women were 11 times more likely than men to be a victim of sexual offences and three times as likely to be the victim of criminal harassment (stalking),” Stats Canada reports. Many of the speakers denounced the rates of sexual violence occurring on university
and college campuses. “There are a lot of studies about sexual violence happening on college campuses, one in particular from the University of Alberta, where 21 per cent of students reported having at least one unwanted sexual experience in their life, with 15 per cent occurring after the age of 14,” said Kiley. “Of those students who were apart of that number, 42 per cent said it took place while they were on student campus. This is a place of learning, a place where you should be realizing your potential as a human being, a place where you can connect with yourself and connect with others.” Contributing to this crisis is the lack of a response from the federal government in regards to the hundreds of aboriginal women who have gone missing over the past two decades. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has claimed that, “most cases were solved.” However, the RCMP has refused to release data to back
up this claim. In March 2015, an expert UN human rights committee found that, Canada was responsible for “grave violations” of human rights due to the failure to protect aboriginal women and properly investigate crimes. “The crisis of violence against aboriginal women in this country, this is something that has been met with a lot of dismissal by the current government,” stated Kiley. “We are not seeing a response. So part of that response has to come from us.” Take Back the Night’s response has come in the form of healing, and working to create a dialog to solve problems. “We are agents of empowering people,” said Paula Laing, Sheridan’s Aboriginal Initiatives Coordinator. “We don’t need to be helped as if we are less. We need to feel empowered … we retell the stories of the missing and murdered aboriginal women, we retell the stories of our own victimization so that we now have back our power.”