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Sexual Violence Awareness Month: Increasing Education and Destigmatizing Survival: By Ash
- gsa-comms
- May 21
- 6 min read
(Content warning: sexual violence, gender-based violence, explicit language)
For our April book club, we read Halfbreed by Maria Campbell.
This memoir details Maria’s life growing up Métis in Saskatchewan, and discusses themes of identity, belonging, addiction, recovery, discrimination, racism, poverty, and violence - including gender-based and sexual violence. It was a really impactful book, and I’d recommend reading it (if anyone is interested, feel free to email gsa-equt@uwaterloo.ca for a PDF of the 2019 edition of the book). The book has been released and rereleased multiple times, so multiple versions of the book exist. At our book club meeting, we realized that there are significant differences between different versions. Most notably and infuriatingly to me was that the version that I read (from 1973) was missing a passage in which Maria discloses that she was raped in her childhood home by the RCMP.
The erasure of survivors’ stories and voices is one way that rape culture is perpetuated. If we don’t know that these things happen, then we don’t bear the responsibility of changing our behaviours or cultural norms. Out of sight, out of mind. But not for survivors, who are forced to bear the weight of their trauma and the weight of the broader moral failure of rape culture. May is Sexual Violence Awareness Month (SVAM), and I’ve been thinking about this a lot. With the risk of being self-centered, I’m going to talk a bit about myself here, but before I go further, I want to caution that the following is very blunt and might be uncomfortable or triggering. I don't write bluntly to seem insolent or to put people off from reading my writing, but because speaking openly and honestly about my experience is one way I feel that I regain autonomy over my narrative. I also want to contribute to normalizing open discussions about sexual violence and survivorship to hopefully destigmatize survival in my own mind and in my community.
It’s ironic to me that I was raped during Sexual Violence Awareness Month. I was a teenager and my high school didn’t have much information about sexual violence. I didn’t even know that SVAM was a thing. At my school, the most you could do if you were assaulted was go to a school guidance counsellor, who would probably go to the cops, and that was the last thing I wanted. In fact, I didn’t want anyone to know what happened. The world can be so cruel to survivors. Sometimes the first reaction when someone comes forward is “Well, what if they’re lying?” or “Maybe they’re saying this for attention”. Even when people believe you're telling the truth, many of them still stigmatize your situation and find ways to blame you. When I began talking about what happened to me, I was asked things like “Well did you fight back?” and was told (by a therapist, no less) that “maybe there’s something we can learn from this”. Victim blaming is a sinister bastard.
Many people also have a very narrow perception of sexual violence, which is fed into by mainstream media. The stereotype is that the perpetrator is always a stranger lurking in an alley somewhere and the victim is always careless, or even worse, “asking for it”. The concept of consent is loosely defined at best. Nobody talks about coercion or emotional manipulation. Nobody talks about stealthing. Nobody talks about when your attacker is your romantic partner. It’s not uncommon for victims to not realize that they were assaulted until later on. And for those that do realize it, many don’t talk about it. I didn’t talk about it for years. Maybe if there had been more information, more education, more advocacy, I would’ve felt less alone. In my culture, people don’t really talk about sexual violence, which also didn’t help. I felt ashamed, I felt dirty, and for a long time, I felt like my body didn’t belong to me. I didn’t understand the lasting psychological, physical, and sociological impacts of sexual assault because nobody talked about it. I wish people would talk about it.
What happened to me obviously isn’t unique. Over 2 million people living in Canada were sexually assaulted in the year leading up to the 2025 Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces (SSPPS), with 87% of victims being assaulted by someone they knew (Cotter & Savage 2019).
Colonialism, racism, sexism, ablism, and queerphobia are all tied to the perpetration of sexual violence, and as such, women, BIPOC, 2SLGBTQIA+ disabled, and multiply-marginalized communities are disproportionately impacted. Here are a few statistics about sexual assault to give an idea of these disparities:
Women are 5x more likely than men to be sexually assaulted (Cotter 2021)
Indigenous women are 3x more likely to be sexually assaulted than non-Indigenous women (Conroy & Cotter 2017)
Non-heterosexual adults are 2.51x more likely than heterosexual adults to be sexually assaulted (Conroy & Cotter 2017)
Amongst unhoused youth, 37.4% of women, 41.3% of gender diverse people, and 35.6% of 2SLGBTQIA+ people are sexually assaulted (Schwan et al. 2020)
The 2015 US Transgender Survey found that 47% of transgender participants had been sexually assaulted (James et al. 2016)
Disabled people are twice as likely to be sexually assaulted than non-disabled people (Conroy & Cotter 2017), and disabled women are 4x more likely to be sexually assaulted than non-disabled women (Cotter 2021)
To address sexual violence, we must also address the underlying social structures through which it is produced.
With the creation of harmful, unregulated technology (specifically AI deepfakes), new forms of sexual violence are taking shape. We all have a responsibility to learn how sexual violence is inflicted, how rape culture is perpetuated, and how we can eliminate the stigma around surviving sexual violence to make survivors feel safe coming forward. Sexual violence cannot remain “out of sight, out of mind”.
Sexual violence is important to think about every month, but SVAM encourages a unique time of reflection. I've attached some resources below that I recommend checking out if you’re looking to do some reflecting or if you’d like to learn more. If you’re a survivor reading this, I’ve also attached some local resources that you might find helpful.
If you or someone you know has been impacted by sexual violence and you want to talk about it, call the Sexual Assault Support Centre of Kitchener Waterloo (SASC) 24-hour support line at 519-741-8633
Resources for Survivors
Resource | Services | Contact Info | Location | Website |
UW Sexual Violence Prevention and Response Office (SVPRO) | Counselling, education, referrals | Commissary Building, first door on the left | ||
Campus Wellness | Counselling, primary care appointments | Counselling: Needles Hall North Building, 2nd Floor
Primary Care: Health Services Building | ||
Sexual Assault Support Centre of Kitchener Waterloo (SASC)
| Counselling, support line, | 300-151 Frederick St., Kitchener | ||
Sexual Assault/Domestic Violence Treatment Centre - Kitchener Waterloo (SADVTC) | Medical treatment, counselling, evidence collection, STI and drug screening, crisis support, pregnancy options, safety planning | 519-749-6994 | 400 Queen Street South Kitchener
Can be accessed via Emergency Department of St. Mary’s General Hospital | |
Victim Services of Waterloo Region | Crisis intervention, safety planning, community support sessions, referrals, education, | 45 Columbia St. E Waterloo
200 Frederick St, Kitchener | ||
Ontario Network of Sexual Assault/Domestic Violence Treatment Centers | Resource directory | Multiple locations across Ontario | ||
Ontario Coallition of Rape Crisis Centers | Resource directory, education, advocacy | Multiple locations across Ontario |
Educational Resources
SVPRO education and learning: https://uwaterloo.ca/sexual-violence-prevention-response-office/education-learning
Ontario Network of Sexual Assault/Domestic Violence Treatment Centers research hub: https://www.sadvtreatmentcentres.ca/research-listing/
Government of Canada Women and Gender Equality Information: https://www.canada.ca/en/women-gender-equality/campaigns/gender-based-violence-its-not-just/sexual-violence-and-consent.html
The Impact of Trauma on Adult Sexual Assault Victims: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/jr/trauma/p2.html
Assembly of First Nations Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Gender-Diverse People https://afn.ca/rights-justice/murdered-missing-indigenous-women-girls/
Native Women’s Association of Canada MMIWG2S+ Advocacy Resources: https://nwac.ca/wg2stgd/mmiwg2s/teach-the-genocide/
References
Cotter, A. (2021). Criminal victimization in Canada, 2019. Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2021001/article/00014-eng.htm
Conroy, S. & Cotter, A. (2017). Self-reported sexual assault in canada, 2014. Juristat: Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, 1,3-34. Retrieved from https://proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/self-reported-sexual-assault-canada-2014/docview/1922422019/se-2
Cotter, A. & Savage, L. (2019). Gender-based violence and unwanted sexual behaviour in Canada, 2018: Initial findings from the Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces. Statistics Canada. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2019001/article/00017-eng.htm
James, S. E., Herman, J. L., Rankin, S., Keisling, M., Mottet, L., & Anafi, M. (2016). The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey. Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality. https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Full-Report-Dec17.pdf
Schwan, K., Versteegh, A., Perri, M., Caplan, R., Baig, K., Dej, E., Jenkinson, J., Brais, H., Eiboff, F., & Pahlevan Chaleshtari, T. (2020). The State of Women’s Housing Need & Homelessness in Canada: Executive Summary. Hache, A., Nelson, A., Kratochvil, E., & Malenfant, J. (Eds). Toronto, ON: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press. https://womenshomelessness.ca/wp-content/uploads/Executive-Summary-State-of-Womens-Homelessness.pdf
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