Read: 2min
Georgia LaPierre, YWCA Canada’s Project Coordinator, works to advance YWCA Canada’s mission to end Gender-Based Violence. Here she speaks about her experience as a student advocate, when her and her colleagues worked to create a survivor-centered and trauma-informed campus community. Now, through YWCA Canada’s project, “Not Online. Not On Campus.” she hopes that all post-secondary communities, regardless of their resources, are able to support survivors.
It all started on a brisk November morning in 2021, waking up to a message on the bridge to campus: “He Raped Me. I Reported. He’s Still in My Class. BU Take Action.” Although my fellow colleagues and I of the Bishop’s University’s Sexual Culture Committee (SCC) had been working towards institutional and cultural changes at our university for years now, this was the moment where everything began to change. A media storm came rushing towards the small burrow in the eastern townships of Quebec, and, unexpectedly, much of the community turned to our small student group for answers.
A negative sexual culture, with high rates of sexual violence, yet few survivors reporting was not an issue unique to Bishop’s University. Gender-based violence is a crisis on post-secondary campuses across the globe. But suddenly, the SCC’s suggested policy changes were rushed to the Board of Governors. We were asked to review the current trainings offered to the community, we sat on committees to review all aspects of campus culture, our call for a unique office dedicated to responding to and preventing gender-based violence was created, and our plans to implement an online reporting system were pushed forward. We received messages from faculty and staff wanting to know what they could do to support survivors. The whole community began to rally, with a massive attendance at a silent vigil for survivors, a student walkout, and our annual Take Back the Night March (despite pouring rain).
With all areas of the community behind us, the policies, responses, prevention and our culture began to shift. Conversations about consent and healthy, safe sex, and relationships became commonplace. Our collaborative work with various student groups to raise awareness about the intersections of gender-based violence with 2SLGBTQIA+, racialized, Indigenous and black communities increased in attendance and attention. And there was an overall care and awareness about the what, why, where, when, and who of the gender-based violence crisis.
Without the backing of our community and the bravery of survivors, all these changes would never have come. Every member of the campus community has a role combatting gender-based violence, and in the year of 2021 the Bishop’s community stood behind our small, student-led committee with a hope for change.
This need for community support is why YWCA Canada’s “Not Online. Not On Campus.” project will make a difference on post-secondary campuses. This free training and toolkit to equip all members of campus communities with the ability to respond to disclosures of gender-based violence. It is in this proactive support of survivors that campus cultures will begin to shift away from a culture of silence and towards one that believes, supports, and protects survivors of gender-based violence.
