Despite strides made by the #MeToo Movement and recent changes to legislation, Canadian women continue to live in deep rooted fear of rape, sexual harassment or physical violence, and worse, believe they’ll be judged for doing something wrong if it does happen to them.
That’s the finding of a recent study led by violence against women scholar Rebecca Lennox, who is calling for better consent education, a change in police messaging and stronger supports for female victims of violence in order to reverse the profoundly negative impact that fear continues to have on Canadian women, regardless of age, race, class, education or marital status.
After interviewing a diverse group of Canadian women last summer, Lennox, a PhD Sociology student at University of Toronto, found that despite a general perception of Canada as a safe place to live, fear continues to linger in the minds of all women when they go out in public. What’s more, the “safety work” women undertake to manage that fear – such as not going out late at night, avoiding dark streets, phoning or texting a friend before leaving the house, or thinking twice about the clothing they wear – is negatively affecting their mental health and self-esteem.
“What I found is that safety work actually keeps the possibility of violence active in their minds at all times and as a result, makes them more fearful,” said Lennox, adding that women feel they have to take preventative steps every day to avoid being judged as careless or overly sexual, or doing something to bring violence on.
Lennox also found that well intentioned violence prevention pamphlets issued by police forces in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, designed to help women feel safe, actually have the opposite effect, particularly among Black, Chinese, Southeast Asian, and South Asian women who have a high level of police distrust. “These very well intentioned safety advisories from police, outlining steps women can take to protect themselves, actually exacerbate fear of violent crime,” she said. “Women tend to internalize that messaging and the feeling is it’s up to them to prevent violence and ensure their own safety. It really has a taxing and damaging effect on all women over the course of their lives.”
Instead, Lennox would like to see strong messaging that tells women sexual violence is never their fault, that it has nothing to do with where they were, what they were doing or what they were wearing. She's also calling for more explicit high school consent education classes that put a direct lens on what consent means, and resources that help women work through emotions and trauma following violence instead of putting the onus on them to prevent it in the first place. In an ideal world, she added, cities would be designed with women in mind, including glass elevators and glass partitions in parking garages, for example.
“I asked women what a perfect world would look like and one woman said she simply wanted to ride a bus or walk on a road after dark without fear,” Lennox said. “What it boils down to is that popular culture continues to fail women; the moments of sea change around #MeToo haven’t trickled down into women’s everyday lives. Women need to feel like they matter and perpetrators of violence need to be held accountable for their actions, period.”