SlutWalk: One decade later
Ten years ago today, I was standing on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery with a handful of organizers. We were scrambling through puddles of Sunday morning rain to set up speakers, extension cords, tables and tents. At one point my co-organizer friend Josh and I surveyed the wet empty lawn and he quietly asked “what if no one shows up?” It was a question neither of us knew how to answer.
For the past four weeks, we had worked around the clock to bring communities together for this event, connecting with stakeholders, sending out press releases, coordinating media interviews, identifying speakers for the march. But what if no one came?
We turned away from the lawn, facing the art gallery to rifle through some paperwork and review our plans one final time. And in what felt like a single moment, the lawn began to fill in, first with hundreds and then with thousands of people. Some were my classmates and colleagues. Some were folks that I played roller derby with. But most of these people I had never met before. They had read our interviews, heard us on the radio, saw the posters and came to be with us. It was humbling and horrifying to both feel seen by the community and to see how many people felt so strongly about victim blaming and sex shaming that they would march with us on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
When the day ended, I was left resolved to continue organizing. What I didn’t know was that my life would take several unexpected turns that would make this impossible. What I also couldn’t know was that the world was finally moving into a space where the idea of SlutWalk and holding abusers accountable was about to go much more mainstream. So ten years after our march began, how far have we come?
Where were we?
Before we talk about how far we have or haven’t come, I think it’s important to remember where we were ten short years ago. This is before the Jian Ghomeshi trial; before #MeToo went mainstream; before the Women’s March and the future was declared female. In 2011, 16 year-old Courtney Stodden (they/them) married Doug Hutchinson, 51. Stodden was maligned by traditional media and social media personalities alike for their marriage despite being a child married to a grown man. Toddlers and Tiaras was one of TLC’s most popular shows documenting the ins and outs of child beauty pageants. And at Simon Fraser University, where I was finishing my last semester of undergrad, I was enrolled in a first year kinesiology course to complete a graduation requirement. My textbook for the class, An Invitation to Health, had been published just one year prior and serves as a staunch reminder of how bleak things were in 2011. I know this because I still have the textbook. I held onto it after petitioning my professor to have the chapter on sexuality removed from the class syllabus, and then petitioning the publisher to have the same chapter significantly rewritten. I’m including some excerpts here, one in the body of this article and several to follow because they truly must be read to be believed (with a heavy content warning for victim blaming, misinformation about gender-based violence, misinformation about gender and sexuality, HIV stigma, anti-sex framing).
In the years that followed, when I would tell people about this textbook, they would always ask if it had originated in Texas, as if the lone star state had a monopoly on victim blaming and sex shaming. Folks didn’t quite know how to process when I told them that the author resided in Victoria, BC, a place that is commonly thought of as a progressive haven. And that’s why I think that this textbook matters for setting the scene of the 2011 Vancouver SlutWalk. Because this is what would have been taught in KIN 140 that semester if I hadn’t been in that classroom to object. Because the author fought me on all of the changes I requested in the summer that followed, fervently believing that a chapter on sexuality should open with a conversation about marriage and abstinence.
So are we better off now?
I wrote that headline, then I sat and took stock of the past decade. Even knowing for the last six weeks that I wanted to write this piece, sitting down to run through ten years of history related to gender-based violence and sex shaming left my stomach knotted.
When it comes to creating a future where survivors aren’t blamed for the violence they experience, here’s my list of the biggest steps forward and crashing falls back that we’ve faced over the past ten years.
Fall 5: The Ghomeshi trial
There is little that I can say about this trial that hasn’t already been said. The day the verdict came down, I calmly stepped away from my shared working space, walked to the staff washroom and locked the door before collapsing on the floor in a fit of breathless hot tears and anguish. If not even this man could be held accountable, what chance did any of us have at finding justice ever?
Leading up to and during the trial, the mainstream media dissected the actions of lead accuser, Lucy DeCoutere, with each of her behaviours taken as evidence of Ghomeshi’s innocence. Meanwhile, Toronto Life lauded the unflappability of the defendant’s lead counsel, Marie Henein. They went so far as to name her #15 on the 2016 list of Toronto’s 50 Most Influential Residents. Perhaps giving it to Ghomeshi himself was seen as too gauche.
I want to leave the final word about the many failures of this trial with the person who ought to have it: Lucy DeCoutere. Her bravery stopped a decades’ long pattern of abuse from continuing and she deserved so much better than the Canadian media and the courts doled out in return.
Fall 4: Failing young people
Recently, Courtney Stodden (they/them) has begun speaking out about their relationship with Doug Hutchison, saying that Hutchison had “groomed” and “taken advantage of” them. As previously mentioned, this was taking place in 2011, while the world watched and many online and in media spaces made jokes at Courtney’s expense, with some celebrities going further and bullying them. For grooming and marrying a child, Hutchison faced virtually no public blowback.
Have we learned anything from Courtney’s experience? Since 2011, Drake has been linked to several young girls, including Bella Harris and Millie Bobbie Brown who were teenagers when they met. Similarly, Leonardo DiCaprio first met his current girlfriend, Camilla Morrone (23), when she was 12. But there are no repercussions for famous men when they publicly participate in predatory behaviour. In fact, mainstream media go out of their way to normalize and idolize the relationships.
At a local level, the past decade has seen a continued rise in the number of reports of young people facing off against sexist and body policing dress codes at school. These policies are particularly damaging because they suggest that children’s bodies, specifically the bodies of girls (and young people assigned female at birth) are inherently sexual and that covering them up is (a) the responsibility of the child and (b) the only way to prevent the child from being a distraction to their male counterparts. This line of logic comes from the same swamp of thought that births the idea that Courtney Stodden is to blame for seducing Doug Hutchison because around the highly sexualized body of a child, a grown man is powerless and guileless.
When it comes to failing young people, though, it’s hard to find a clearer example than the outrage that exploded around Ontario’s sex ed curriculum in recent years. While still in power, the Wynne government faced profound backlash for introducing updated sex ed content in 2015 that engaged with concepts including consent and 2SLGBTQ identities. Upon election in 2018, Doug Ford announced that he was repealing the new sex ed curriculum and reverting to the 1998 edition. Ford was able to capture the leadership of the PC party largely due to gaining the endorsement of former candidate Tanya Granic Allen who ran on a platform of opposing and repealing the sex ed curriculum.
Fall 3: Continuing to give space to men’s rights groups
“You and I both know that feminism is cancer.” That line isn’t lifted from the Red Pill subreddit. It was the opening line from an email sent to University of Calgary students in 2017 by Wildrose On Campus Calgary. Their email, titled Feminism is Cancer, was sent out to promote a screening of Cassie Jaye’s 2016 film The Red Pill. Named after the popular men’s rights concept and aforementioned subreddit, the film lends a sympathetic eye to the growing cause. So what’s the harm?
Quite a lot. Men’s rights groups are a dangerous stew that mixes together disenfranchised young men with a hot sludge of toxic masculinity. Or, you know, a film screening gets billed as a chance for dialogue but the email that gets sent out to students pulls no punches and calls feminism cancer.
Despite the rage, hatred and violence that these groups espouse and, at times lead to, Canadian institutions continue to let the sludge flow. Universities across the country rent space to the country’s largest MRA, the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE). Senator Anne Cools and MP Karen Vecchio, the former Chair of the Status of Women Committee, have both presented multiple times at CAFE events.
Even Reddit has hit a limit with the men’s rights community. In 2018, the Red Pill subreddit was officially quarantined due to the misogynistic content in the community posts. Yet somehow, Canadian institutions continue to legitimize their existence and choose to ignore the very real anger towards women that is bubbling just below the surface.
Fall 2: Not naming the Toronto van attack as misogyny and gender-based violence
When I write about the violence that men’s rights spaces can lead to, I don’t have to imagine it. We have a clear example in our recent past.
The horrifying attack on April 23, 2018 has been called many things, but one thing it is not broadly recognized as in Canada is gender-based violence. For some reason, as a nation we are able to mourn the December 6, 1989 École Polytechnique massacre as gender-based violence but the 2018 attack does not get the same treatment. Maybe because the van attack, while aiming to maim women also killed men and we collectively can’t make sense of that more complicated narrative.
Journalists from the Guardian and Washington Post both detailed how men’s rights spaces, specifically those devoted to incels (involuntarily celibate men) helped radicalize the attacker who bragged that he had been in contact with another incel who had committed a mass shooting in California in 2014.
Outside of Canada, others are connecting the dots for us that this attack was fuelled by a hatred of women but for some reason Canada still won’t acknowledge the gender-based violence for what it was.
Fall 1: Government and settler inaction to protect Indigenous lives
Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was launched in 2015 by the Trudeau government to examine the reasons why more than 1,200 Indigenous women and girls have died or gone missing over the past 20 years. The inquiry itself was beset with over 20 resignations and firings, resulting in multiple delays. The final report was released June 3, 2019. It contains 231 individual calls for justice “directed at governments, institutions, social service providers, industries and all Canadians.” The federal government promised a national action plan within one year of receiving the report. As Pam Palmater wrote, one year later that plan had not actualized continuing in a long line of willful inaction to protect and value Indigenous life.
At every step of the way, Canada neglects and devalues the lives of Indigenous women and girls, with no plans in sight to end the genocide. It should be no surprise then that the former commissioners for the national inquiry have called for international and impartial oversight of the implementation of their calls for justice in response to Canada’s continued delays. Here we are, decades after reports, inquiries and commissions and Canada is still consulting instead of working with Indigenous women and their governments to take urgent and substantive action to end the violence and socioeconomic marginalization.
Read Palmater’s full piece from last summer here.
Step 5: Statistics Canada begins collecting disaggregated data
This may seem like a weird thing to include in a largely qualitative and reflective piece, but it is so critically important. In 2018, the federal government allocated $6.7 million to create the Centre for Gender, Diversity and Inclusion Statistics (CGDIS). “The goal of the CGDIS is to support evidence-based policy and program development by monitoring and reporting on gender, diversity and inclusion.”
The CGDIS includes data on gender-based violence and provides disaggregated data that can help communities to push for gender-based budgeting. More over, it signals a change in thinking at the highest levels in Canada’s data collection and policy making, that we need to start considering how gender and race impact a person’s lived experience and that these are attributes worth creating fulsome datasets around.
Step 4: #MuteRKelly
For decades it seemed as though R. Kelly was untouchable despite mounting allegations. When Atlanta resident Oronike Odeleye learned that Kelly was scheduled to perform in Atlanta in July 2017, she and Kenyette Barnes launched the online campaign.
While I didn’t have the power to sway the courts or investigate evidence, I knew that with social media, I could get R. Kelly off the radio, hurt his pockets and amplify the voices of survivors. But most importantly, through this hashtag, we could stop sending the message to our girls that their bodies and lives don’t matter or that they aren’t worth protecting.
Together, Odeleye and Barnes created a national movement. You can read about their journey from Odeleye here.
Step 3: Robyn Doolittle’s Unfounded reporting
Doolittle’s reporting was necessary and overdue. Filed for the Globe and Mail in 2017, her 20-month-long investigation uncovered how Canadian police forces handle sexual assault allegations. In this undertaking, Doolittle collected and analyzed data from more than 870 police forces. The resulting reporting included an interactive feature that allowed users to see dismissal rates for their local police jurisdiction. This groundbreaking report revealed that “police in 115 communities dismiss at least one-third of sex-assault complaints as unfounded.”
Following the release of Doolittle’s reporting, the RCMP, the Canadian military police, and police services in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island have reported that they all reviewing their policies.
“It’s incredibly rewarding that 37,000-plus cases are being reviewed,” Doolittle told the Canadian Women’s Foundation, “that thousands of cases are being recoded, that hundreds of cases are being re-opened, and that there’s a shift in specialized [police] training.”
Step 2: #MeToo
Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement began in 2006, before the first SlutWalk in Toronto. But the hashtag went wall to wall in late 2017. The power of Burke’s movement has been in showing how far-reaching sexual violence is and how many people continue to be affected by a problem that, as a society, we choose not to face.
It’s hard to think of a watershed moment that had a bigger impact on changing the way we think about and talk about sexual predators, sexual violence, and survivors. #MeToo continues to be part of the popular discourse and shape how we think about consent and sex in both pop culture and lived experiences.
You can read an interview with Burke here.
Step 1: The unseen and unpaid organizing of Black, Indigenous, and racialized folks
It’s difficult to think of something bigger than the #MeToo movement that has happened in this space in the past ten years. But that was something that started before the first SlutWalk, by a Black woman. If there is one thing that the past decade has reminded me of time and again it is that much of the progress and change that we benefit from collectively is rooted in the unpaid and unseen labour of racialized folks with marginalized genders.
We saw it when BLM Toronto disrupted Pride to call for, among other things, the removal of police from Pride events. While BLM Toronto faced hatred and abuse from the 2SLGBTQIA+ community for this stance, an extensive investigation of the Toronto police department just revealed that “anti-gay bias” among TPD officers allowed a murderer to escape detection and operate in the Village for seven years. South of us, the efforts of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and other racialized communities to organize this past fall in the face of brutalist voter suppression tactics were the only things that prevented a second Trump presidency.
Black, Indigenous, and otherwise racialized folks with marginalized genders experience gender-based violence at higher rates, experience poverty at higher rates, and have worse health outcomes at higher rates. To truly have revolutionary, life-affirming movements going forward, we need to centre on the experiences of these individuals and communities. The biggest thing that has happened in the past ten years are the seeds of resistance that have been planted. The biggest challenge for white folks going forward is to decentre ourselves and truly step into the role of accomplice and supporter.
As the SlutWalk movement was gaining attention and momentum globally, it began to receive a solid amount of criticism about the whiteness of the movement and the lack of intersectionality. You can read some of that criticism here and here. In September 2011, a group called Black Women’s Blueprint issued An Open Letter from Black Women to the SlutWalk (I would link to the full letter but the original website is gone, you can read an excerpt here). I reached out to the authors to thank them for their criticism, to let them know that I heard them, and to say that I wanted to work with them on what happened next.
I originally intended to return to organizing with SlutWalk Vancouver in 2012 (see below) to figure out a way through, to acknowledge the criticisms we had received and take these opportunities to grow. My life had other plans and I wasn’t able to get back to organizing.
SlutWalk was a name and a banner that I rallied under, recognizing the power in joining forces with organizers who were calling for change at the same time in Toronto. Together we created something that has international recognition for better and for worse.
We managed to have important conversations about clothing and consent, about who is to blame for sexual violence. I think back to some of the radio interviews that I did at the time and how I would need to walk radio DJs through the idea that wearing a short skirt would, in fact, not bring a van full of rapists into existence, and then watch as they started to understand what we were talking about. It was important work and I recognize that my whiteness got me into those spaces.
I am glad I was able to contribute to this movement in 2011. It was an important, though flawed, step on the road to justice for survivors and in the ongoing quest to end sex shaming and stigma. Ten years ago, I never could have conceived of the changes that would have unfolded in the years to come. We have so far to go still, but I know that if we act collectively, and when white people step meaningfully and enthusiastically into a supporting role, we will achieve great things.
Life gets in the way
[CW: health, death, sexual assault, police]
Three months after that first SlutWalk, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. It would be the first diagnosis on a decade-long road of illness, surgery, and specialist offices galore. The hardest part of getting diagnosed was finally needing to accept that I couldn’t do everything, no matter how much I wanted to. I was trying to maintain a scaled back version of organizing going while managing my health and may have been able to maintain it.
In late January of 2012, I got a call informing me that my mom had gone to the hospital for routine imaging that had revealed terminal cancer. I immediately flew back to Ontario to care for her, moving permanently that May. With my mom’s chemo and care schedule dominating my brain, everything else was knocked offline for me indefinitely. When she passed away, the fatigue that followed made the possibility of re-entry into organizing feel hollow and out of reach. It took a few years before I felt a spark for organizing again but by then I had been thoroughly priced out of the Vancouver housing market and could not figure out how to return to my old home. While I believed in the potential of SlutWalk Vancouver, I never had the chance to return to it.
One night in that first spring back in Ontario, I went to Toronto to see my sister. We headed out to a bar with a friend for the night. My sister wanted to stay but my friend and I were ready to call it a night. We headed outside and went our separate ways at the door. As I walked to the main intersection, I saw two drunk guys who had been bothering us inside. Not wanting to deal with them, I rushed to the curb and jumped into the first cab that met me. What happened next was not what I expected. I was continually groped by the cab driver who repeatedly threatened to pull over into dark parking lots while I begged for him to just take me to my sister’s house. I finally got to the house and got inside.
When my sister got home a few hours later, we called the police. It was the least invasive sexual assault of my life but I felt, as a SlutWalk organizer, I had a duty to report that this creep was out there. Two officers arrived at her house. I explained what happened. They looked at me and asked if this is what I had been wearing (jeans and my father’s windbreaker). For a second I foolishly thought they were going to take my clothes as evidence. Then I realized that they were trying to find a reason to blame me for what happened. Finally, they told me that the reason it happened was because I wasn’t from the city and I shouldn’t have told the cab driver that I was from out of town. They did not file a report. They did not look into it.
A few years later, a woman I follow on twitter posted a video tweet of her cab driver reaching back and groping her and my heart sank. I knew this guy. I had been in that cab.
This was my only experience with reporting.
Additional excerpts from An Invitation to Health below.
