Sexual consent forum reveals chilling truths

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This article was published 05/02/2016 (2995 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

University students from Winnipeg and Brandon wrapped up the first day of a two-day forum Saturday on ways to counter an atmosphere of rape culture on campuses with a basic take-home message.

“Students who are here will leave knowing that they have solidarity, that we are working together, and we’ll continue pressing our administrations and government to prevent sexual assault on campuses,” said Canadian Federation of Students spokeswoman Laura Garinger.

About 100 students from the University of Winnipeg, the University of Manitoba, Brandon University and Université de Saint-Boniface are registered for the Manitoba Consent Culture Forum, which is taking place at Wesley Hall on the U of W campus.

“People don’t know they can say ‘no’ in intimate relations. They don’t know you can’t give consent to sex when they’re intoxicated, and they don’t always understand there’s a power imbalance, say between a professor and a student,” Garinger said.

As the federation’s women’s commissioner in Manitoba, Garinger said the university forum is designed to promote education about legal rights and the laws around consensual sex.

The purpose of “consent culture” is to change the conversation from rape culture to consent culture, Garginger said.

The first day of the forum coincided with a rally against an American rabble-rouser who advocates rape be legalized on private property. The counter-rally was slated for Saturday night outside the Chapters entrance at St. Vital Centre.

The event was intended to counter the controversial views of Daryush Valizadeh, a.k.a. Roosh V, an American “pickup artist” and his International Meetup Day planned for the same day.

The Roosh V. event was cancelled this week after tremendous international outcry and amid global media reports Roosh V. had requested police protection against harassment over the backlash. He was pictured Friday in news photos speaking to officers on the stoop of his mother’s home in the U.S., where he reportedly lives in her basement.

Earlier this week, Mayor Brian Bowman issued a statement to alert city residents stating Valizadeh and his misogynist views are not welcome in Winnipeg, a position echoed by St. Vital Centre administrators. Websites since hidden behind privacy screens had said men who wanted to take part should meet at the mall Saturday, where they would be directed to a clandestine meeting. Similar meetings had apparently been organized in more than 100 countries for the same day.

The websites all reported women and gay men would not be allowed to attend the event.

In Toronto this week, wall-to-wall coverage of the trial of former CBC star broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi, who faces four counts of sexual assault, introduced the troubling legal slang “whacking” to the Canadian lexicon. It describes a standard legal-defence strategy where female accusers face a barrage of questions intended to discredit them and cast doubt on their allegations.

“That goes back to why we have to have this conversation,” Garinger said. “Survivors (of sexual assault) get their lives picked apart. They’re re-victimized every time they tell their story, and not just by lawyers. That’s a huge problem.”

Women in sexual-assault trials are routinely challenged on how they were dressed, whether they were drinking and how they were behaving in an effort to introduce confusion about whether they gave consent.

“You’d never ask that about someone who’s been robbed,” Garinger said.

Far too many walk free even if a sexual-assault complaint makes it to trial, she added.

The Ghomeshi scandal has highlighted the soaring rate of sexual assaults in Canada. One of the most commented-on statistics to trend on social media since the scandal broke more than a year ago is a pie chart from the YWCA, based on research put together by a University of Ottawa criminologist.

It took the number of sexual assaults reported annually by Statistics Canada, 460,000, and paired them with legal data that revealed only 15,200 formal complaints are made to police. Of those, 2,824 cases can be expected to move forward for prosecution in court. And of those, only half result in guilty verdicts. The result is conviction rate of 0.3 per cent. As the YWCA graph noted, that means out of every 1,000 assaults, “997 assailants walk free.”

Garinger said she believes confusion over what consent to sex means is the real problem.

“People aren’t aware they have choices,” she said.

She said she hoped this weekend’s forum would start a conversation to change that.

One in five women in post-secondary studies on North American campuses faces the same dismal reality — that they will be sexually assaulted before they finish their education.

The “counter-rally” in Winnipeg against Roosh V’s “Meet-Up” event, however, was scheduled to be held from 7:45 to 8:30 p.m. outside the Chapters entrance at St. Vital Centre, amid reports some men who follow the blogger would try to go ahead with their event.

Leaflets on consent culture were to be handed out.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca