Gossip or not, the school’s silence around the possible crime was too loud to ignore. Women were scared; we wanted an update, to squash the rumour if it wasn’t true, so we could get on with our days, to cut through the fields like before, to walk back home after a late night at the library. The possibility that a rape had occurred on campus destroyed the assumption that we were entitled to protection in this communal setting. And we expected justice—for that woman and for ourselves, who knew just how easy it was to be raped, beaten, or killed while walking alone at night, while heading to the gym before dawn to get a workout in before class, while taking a run around the campus. We expected that, if there had in fact been an assault on a student, the school where we chose to study and live would acknowledge it. For many of the women on campus, including myself, it was like being silenced once again.
I went back to the gym later that week. The flowers, along with whatever horrors happened there, had been swept up and tossed away. The grass continued to grow and athletes carried on, their cleats ripping up the earth—and along with it, its secrets.
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Our first-year dorm floor was co-ed, and not co-ed at all. There were about thirty of us. One side housed all the guys, and down the middle of the hall were the remnants of a frame, possibly a former divider or door. On the other side was the girls’ hall. Taz and I lived right at the crossing. We spent our evenings constantly passing through, in the boys’ rooms and back to our side. By the end of the first month, the novelty of seeing people walking down the hall in their bath towels wore off. When the men’s bathroom was flooded, which was often, it was normal to see them in ours, walking out of the bathroom in their flip-flops with their shower caddies, or brushing their teeth surrounded by our makeup and hair products on the countertops. We became more like family, and we made a pact: no one would commit dormcest—no hooking up. No relationships meant no drama.
There are many secrets in dorm rooms—ghosts of past inhabitants’ regret and darkness etched into walls behind the blu-tack that holds up our posters, or seeped into mattresses that we cover with fresh sheets. Broken friendships, sadness, lacklustre experiences, true horrors. I thought about what those walls contained. I wanted as fresh a start as I could get; a clean slate from the girls before us. I wanted to make new memories—wild memories—to look back on years later, and to think of our tiny room as ours. And I did. I had to, when the room ended up housing some of my deepest secrets.
Of the secrets that people did talk about, one of the best-known was about the older male sophs, our student life mentors. They exited from these rooms in the middle of the night, begging the first-year girl they treated as a little sister to not say a word, her promise collecting among the other promises in the walls. Some male sophs had favourites. He’d sit in the common room with her and her awestruck friends, admired like a god. He’d lie on her bed doing his readings while she sat at her desk doing her own. He’d come to our dorm parties and never leave her side, drinking with the younger frosh when he could be out in the city at a club with his legal friends. Some of us found it odd, inappropriate even. “We’re just friends,” they’d both assert, giggling.
The stories were similar. One routine movie night turned into something different. One night the door closed and he changed. One night he was aggressive, pinning her to the bed. If a girl refused, she was stonewalled and made to feel guilty for leading him on, until she gave in. Some girls wanted to stop but he wouldn’t. One girl was covered in bruises, one had a bite mark. In the fall, one girl with shining eyes sat with him and her friends in the cafeteria; by winter she was alone and red-eyed.
The girls I knew were afraid to speak up. They didn’t want him to lose his job. They didn’t want to be blamed—people saw them flirting, they’d think she was lying. They didn’t want him to retaliate, not when there were three more years to go. They blamed themselves for welcoming it, for not doing enough to stop it, for being in a place between their bodies screaming “no” and their will collapsing in.
It took me several years to come to terms with what happened between Joshua and me in my own dorm room. People weren’t yet talking as openly about sexual assault and consent in 2010 and the proliferation of stories from women sharing their experiences wouldn’t arrive for several more years. This was just before the shift in how we started talking about sexual assault—before the Steubenville case, before Jian Ghomeshi, before Brock Turner, before #IBelieveSurvivors, #MeToo, and #TimesUp. Before journalists really started digging into sexual assault in institutions across Canada and before the next generation of brave young women stormed their college and university campuses demanding accountability and justice.
And even though the outcry against sexual assault on campuses has become too loud to ignore, we still talk about campus sexual assault as something that is perpetrated by strangers—at parties and while walking home alone at night—but nearly 90 per cent of women who are raped in university and college are raped by someone they know. I was raped on campus during a party, not by another student or stranger, but by a boyfriend who didn’t attend the school. So, where did I fit into the narrative, if at all?
Even though I learned more about consent from various campaigns on campus, I still didn’t know that you could be raped by a boyfriend, that you could also enjoy intimacy with the same person who forced it on you. I also didn’t know that consent cannot be given by someone who is under the influence of drugs and alcohol. I don’t know if Joshua knew any of this either, but I can’t give him the benefit of the doubt. He was a master of trickery, pushing my boundaries, equating love with sexual obligation. He knew how to wear me down until I surrendered, then treated my defeat as desire.
I didn’t tell anyone about any of it, unsure if I could handle the questions: If he was always forcing you to have sex, why did you do it? Why did you give in? If he was removing condoms, why didn’t you do more to prevent yourself from getting pregnant? That night, why did you drink so much? Why didn’t you talk to him about it? Why did you stay with him, then? Why do you women call everything rape? Why don’t you women take some accountability for putting yourself in that position?
The word why is inherently filled with blame and accusation.
Why asked me what choices I had made that caused my boyfriend to look bad. Why didn’t ask him about his choice to do bad things. Why demands that survivors answer for being assaulted. Why doesn’t demand that abusers be held accountable. Who needs the term victim-blaming when we have why?
Why did you go to his place? Why did you wear that dress? Why didn’t you tell the police? Why didn’t you speak up sooner? Why do you think it’s okay to ruin his life? Why do you think this happened to you?
Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
Why don’t you fucking ask him?
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Rape culture, a term coined in the U.S. in the 1970s, is, at its core, the way that society blames women for sexual assault while normalizing sexual violence. It is the promotion of violence against women—in films, TV, and ads. It is the belief that sexual assault is an inevitable part of life: women get raped, and men rape.
There is no larger hub of rape culture than university and college campuses. In 2014, 41 per cent of all sexual assaults in Canada were reported by students, and 90 per cent of those victims were women. In 2017, following the #MeToo movement, police-reported sexual assault (including on school grounds) hit a record number not seen since 1998. Women under twenty-five experience the highest rates of sexual violence in the country—before and after #MeToo.
Sexual assault is the most-reported crime on campuses—one in five women will experience some form of sexual assault while in college or university, and the first six to eight weeks of school are called the “red zone,” the period when female students are most likely to be sexually assaulted. Fraternity members are the main culprits—numerous studies show that m
en who join frats are three times more likely to commit rape than their non-Greek counterparts, and that women in sororities are significantly more likely to experience rape than other female students. Just last October, the University of British Columbia shut down its fraternities and asked the RCMP to start an investigation after several girls said they were drugged at frat parties during a weekend.
Pro-rape messages begin from the first day of university, and aren’t new. In 2013, Saint Mary’s University in Halifax made news after hundreds of frosh were filmed chanting: “SMU boys, we like them young. Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for grab that ass.” The chant had been a part of frosh week since 2009. The student president and vice-president resigned, and some of the student leaders were required to take sensitivity training. That same year at the University of British Columbia, first-year students on a school bus were reportedly encouraged to sing a similar chant. Student leaders quit and had to take part in sexual violence workshops.
In September 2016, Université du Québec students took part in a game that awarded points for completing a list of sexual challenges, such as taking a photo of a woman’s breasts and kissing a woman. Reports suggested the student leaders could face expulsion, though no updates have been given to the public. And that same week at my own alma mater, students wrote “No means yes…and yes means anal” on the window of an off-campus student home. Following public outrage, and Western’s silence, Glenn Matthews, the school’s housing mediation officer, told the London Free Press, “I get it: the message is really bad, but students do dumb things.” Western made headlines again in October 2019, when London’s mayor Ed Holder called out students at Western’s annual fake Homecoming party for promoting rape culture after banners were hanging outside off-campus housing that read “Queens Girls Spit, Western Girls Swallow,” “If Your Girl Goes to Western, She’s Not Your Girl Anymore” and “Our Roommate Is a Virgin Pls Help,” among others. While Western’s president Alan Shepard, addressed the banners in a statement, calling it “casual misogyny,” the letter didn’t mention what the school would be doing about the students involved.
Dismissing or minimizing pro-rape messages as mere stupidity or poor behaviour is the same sentiment behind the “boys will be boys” excuse that fuels rape culture. Because rape culture is always about justifying the “unintentional” actions of boys and protecting them at all costs. And it’s learned early on: in the wake of #MeToo, a camp of women, particularly mothers of sons, started using the hashtag #ProtectOurBoys to denounce what they believe is a culture of false sexual assault accusations by young women. That the lives of boys and men must be protected from the lies of girls and women who seek to destroy them.
Rape culture permeates every institution, from law enforcement to education to media, and it always upholds the futures of boys and men while blaming girls and women for the crimes committed against their bodies. When young women get raped, we question their intentions: Are they sure they were raped? Were they drinking? How many men have they slept with? Are they sure they want to ruin a young man’s life?
Thanks to “Unfounded,” the ground-breaking 2017 investigation by journalist Robyn Doolittle and the Globe and Mail investigative team, we know that, on average, Canadian police dismiss one in five reports of sexual assault. The Globe’s investigation not only brought to light the ways in which rape culture permeates law enforcement, but how it affects campus reporting.
The London Police Services had one of the highest unfounded rates in Canada, dismissing about 30 per cent of all sexual assault allegations between 2010 and 2014, the years I started and graduated from Western. Since the investigation, London’s police chief John Pare has issued an apology to sexual assault survivors who had a negative experience with London police, and promised that his force will review unfounded cases as far back as 2010.
And if students are going to the police to report a sexual assault only for it to be considered baseless, universities don’t offer much better support. Considering the prevalence of incidents, the data on reported sexual assaults on Canadian campuses is shockingly sparse. And post-secondary policies on sexual assault only contribute to re-victimizing and silencing survivors. In March 2016, following harrowing stories and an outcry from students and advocates around the province, the Ontario government passed Bill 132, which made it mandatory for each college and university in the province to have a policy for dealing with sexual violence, as well as to collect information on reported rapes. This change came over two years after an investigation revealed that only nine out of seventy-eight Canadian universities had a policy in place. Bill 132 seemed like a promising start in dealing with sexual assault on campus and providing more support for students. However, the bill allows each school the flexibility to include (and exclude) what they want in their policy, and to choose how they will apply it.
A national, student-led action plan against sexual assault called OurTurn found that nine Canadian universities have policies that restrict survivors from speaking about their sexual assault. These gag orders also determine who survivors can talk about their assault with, and on what platforms. Some schools don’t let the survivor know if the offender has been sanctioned. Eight schools had a section that discouraged “frivolous claims.”
Frivolous. As if women are too hysterical, too untrustworthy, to recognize violence against their own bodies. The underlying question remains: Are you sure you want to ruin this man’s life?
Ruining the lives of boys and men has been a key theme in high-profile sexual assault cases over the years. In Steubenville, Ohio, in 2013, teenage star football players Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond were found guilty in juvenile court of raping a sixteen-year-old girl. The survivor faced ridicule from both students and parents, who blamed her for being drunk and causing her own rape. Poppy Harlow, a CNN correspondent, said that she found the verdict difficult to watch because the two boys “had such promising futures, [were] star football players, very good students,” and that she “literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart.”
Rehtaeh Parsons was a Nova Scotian teen who took her own life in April 2013 after four boys gang-raped her, took a photograph of the incident, and spread it around her school. Two weeks later, supporters of those boys put up posters around Halifax, including in the area where Parsons’s mother lived, that read: “Speak the truth. There’s two sides to every story. Listen before you judge. The truth will come out. Stay strong. Support the boys.” A week later, National Post columnist Christie Blatchford wrote a despicable op-ed claiming there was no proof that the fifteen-year-old was too drunk to consent to sex. The newspaper has since removed it.
In 2014, it felt as though the way we spoke about survivors and sexual assault in Canada shifted, when CBC Radio broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi was charged with four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by choking (he was later acquitted). Women in media, and colleagues of Ghomeshi, came forward to admit that his name floated around their whisper networks of men to watch out for. But four years later, the New York Review of Books published an essay by Ghomeshi on how his life had been ruined by the allegations, in which he called himself the “poster boy” for bad male behaviour. Following public outcry and the departure of Ian Buruma, the editor responsible for the piece, the New York Review wrote a lengthy editor’s note admitting they didn’t know all the facts of the case and the essay was only shown to one male editor before publication.
In 2015, Brock Turner, the nineteen-year-old Stanford University student who was convicted of three counts of felony sexual assault against twenty-two-year-old Chanel Miller, was only given six months in prison (he served just three) by Judge Aaron Persky. Persky cited Turner’s father as a positive character reference—a man who argued that his son’s life was ruined for “twenty minutes of action”—as well as the role alcohol played. “A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him,
” Persky said in his ruling. “I think he will not be a danger to others.” Then came the mainstream #MeToo movement in 2017, which demanded we start believing women and pierce the bubble of protection around abusive men.
Of course, there is much to say about which boys and men we protect—white boys end up getting away with a slap on the wrist or a warning. Men of colour, already demonized by the stereotypes that work against them, are more likely to be arrested or jailed. And what does that say about women of colour, who are so rarely believed, who do not fit the image of the perfect rape victim? Though Black, Indigenous, transgender, and queer women, as well as women with disabilities, face disproportionately higher rates of violence, the overwhelming majority of women who report abuse are white and heterosexual. And like all women who don’t fit into the myth of the ideal victim, there’s also the fear of not being believed.
When did we start guilting women into being flattered by the unsolicited catcalls, the violence-tinged remarks about our bodies and what they’d do to us if they got us alone, the grimy, sweaty hands that grab and claw at our waists even as our bodies and voices say no? Why is it our responsibility to make a loud scene to have our decision respected? Who told men that a yes can’t become a no, and a no is always a yes? Who promised men that they were entitled to women’s bodies? And, most of all, why are women always held responsible for making sure they aren’t raped?
These are the questions that women ask themselves—when walking home, when in a club or at a house party, when in the home of a man. This is the mindset that women must have when we are targeted, harassed, beaten, humiliated, raped, stalked, and killed, every single day.
When an entire generation of young women has been in this situation or knows someone who has—and, even worse, has been blamed for what happened—that is rape culture. When we blame young women instead of holding abusers accountable—when we blame the victim—that is rape culture. When people believe that women who come forward with their story of sexual assault ruin the lives and careers of men, that is rape culture. When we make products for women—consent condoms, rape whistles, wristbands that detect spiked drinks, underwear with a lock—instead of investing in education to teach boys not to rape, that is rape culture. When one in three women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime, but we focus on the 2 to 8 per cent of false accusations (research shows the percentage is largely inflated because of improper or inconsistent protocols) to prove that women are liars, that is rape culture. When those who are sexually assaulted must wear the emotional and physical scars that their attacker has inflicted, and then are re-traumatized by a society that picks apart their credibility, that is rape culture.
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