http://www.macleans.ca/education/unirankings/why-dont-canadian-universit...
Very few Canadian universities have policies or university-funded services that deal specifically with sexual assault, even though the prevalence is the same: nearly one in five women will be sexually assaulted as students, according to Charlene Senn, a women’s studies professor at the University of Windsor who is an expert on rape prevention....
There is a patchwork of policies on Canadian campuses, according to Jessica McCormick, national chairperson for the Canadian Federation of Students, but the facts are clear: Women aged 15 to 24 experience the highest rates of sexual violence in the country, according to a 2013 Statistics Canada report that relied on police-reported data. It also found that women reported 460,000 incidents of sexual assault to social-service providers in 2009, but less than 10 per cent were reported to the police....
Since McGill doesn’t have a sexual-assault policy, that will be Tétrault’s first priority. Any comprehensive university policy needs to have a clear definition of what sexual assault is and a “pro-survivor approach,” she says, meaning that academic accommodations, counselling and other support systems are available for victims from the minute they come forward.
While the University of Windsor also has no sexual-assault policy, its Bystander Initiative, led by Senn, is one of the most respected examples of rape prevention on campuses in Canada. Through workshops, students learn how to recognize sexual assaults, intervene appropriately and support survivors. The university funded the project in 2010, shortly after a bunch of male students were caught, more than once, peering into residence bathrooms as female students showered. But Senn says the university still has a lot of work to do. “I was horrified when I recently typed in ‘sexual assault’ and ‘rape’ into our website and found you don’t get any information telling you what to do or where to go if you’ve been assaulted,” she says. “It’s a very confusing process to find resources.”.......
Liz Quinlan, a sociology professor at the University of Saskatchewan, is leading a study on sexual-assault policies at Canadian universities, but she is hesitant to talk about her work because it’s “impossible to anticipate what the consequences might be.” Her daughter, Lakehead University sociologist Andrea Quinlan, another researcher in the group, says, “We’re working in a climate where some of us are having to reapply to the very universities we’re now speaking about in our research; it carries some risks for us in terms of the stability of our employment.”....
Women feel actively discouraged not only from coming forward about personal attacks but even from speaking up about the lack of sexual-assault policies for fear it will harm them professionally.