Chapter 1: Introduction to Sexual Violence Studies

Foundations and Frameworks

The study of sexual violence as an academic discipline draws on feminist theory, public health, sociology, criminology, and critical race studies. Rather than treating sexual assault as an isolated criminal act committed by deviant individuals, contemporary scholarship examines the structural, cultural, and institutional conditions that enable and perpetuate sexual violence. This course positions sexual violence as a citizenship issue: who is recognized as a full subject with bodily autonomy, who is rendered vulnerable, and how communities either protect or fail their members.

Why “Citizenship”?

The concept of citizenship in this context extends beyond legal status. Sexual citizenship refers to the right to sexual self-determination, the right to say yes, the right to say no, and the recognition that all others hold those same rights. When certain groups are systematically denied sexual autonomy through cultural norms, institutional neglect, or outright violence, they are effectively denied full citizenship. This framing connects intimate experiences of sexual harm to broader questions of power, belonging, and justice.

Self-Care and Community Care

Studying sexual violence can be emotionally demanding. The material engages with trauma, harm, and systemic injustice in ways that may resonate with personal experiences. Self-care involves individual strategies for managing emotional responses, such as setting boundaries around media consumption, maintaining physical health routines, and accessing counselling services. Community care extends this responsibility outward: creating classroom environments where peers support one another, where disclosures are met with compassion rather than judgment, and where the labour of emotional processing is shared rather than borne alone.

Land Acknowledgement and Colonial Sexual Violence

Any rigorous study of sexual violence in a Canadian context must begin with the recognition that settler colonialism is itself a system of gendered and sexual violence. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands was accomplished through, among other mechanisms, the deliberate destruction of Indigenous family structures, the sexual abuse of children in residential schools, and the targeting of Indigenous women for violence. Colonial sexual violence is not a historical relic; its legacies persist in the disproportionate rates of violence against Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people today.

Land acknowledgements, when offered with sincerity and substance, name the ongoing relationship between settler institutions and Indigenous territories. They also create an opening to examine how the very ground on which universities stand was seized through processes inseparable from sexual and gendered harm.

Responding to Disclosures of Sexual Violence

The Importance of Informed Response

One of the most practical and immediately applicable skills in this field is knowing how to respond when someone discloses an experience of sexual violence. Disclosures can happen anywhere: in classrooms, residence halls, workplaces, and informal social settings. The way a disclosure is received can profoundly affect the survivor’s willingness to seek further support and their overall recovery trajectory.

Core Principles of Disclosure Response

Believe the person. Research consistently shows that false reports of sexual violence are rare, occurring at rates comparable to false reports of other crimes (approximately 2 to 10 percent). Beginning from a stance of belief communicates safety and respect.

Listen without judgment. Avoid questions that imply blame, such as “What were you wearing?” or “Why didn’t you leave?” These questions reproduce rape myths and shift responsibility from the perpetrator to the survivor.

Respect autonomy. The survivor gets to decide what happens next. Whether they choose to report to police, seek medical attention, access counselling, or do nothing at all, their agency must be centred. Sexual violence is fundamentally a crime of disempowerment; the response process must not replicate that dynamic.

Know your resources. Being prepared with information about campus supports, community organizations, crisis lines, and legal options allows you to offer concrete help without overstepping your role.

Online Training and Preparedness

Many institutions now require students, staff, and faculty to complete online training modules on responding to disclosures. These modules typically cover the basics of trauma-informed practice, institutional reporting obligations, and the distinction between confidential and non-confidential resources. While no online module can fully prepare someone for the emotional weight of receiving a disclosure, these trainings establish a shared baseline of knowledge across the campus community.

Chapter 2: Consent Culture and Sexual Violence Culture

Defining Consent

Consent is the voluntary, informed, ongoing, and enthusiastic agreement to engage in sexual activity. Each element of this definition is critical:

• Voluntary: Free from coercion, threats, manipulation, or the abuse of power.
• Informed: All parties understand what they are agreeing to, including any risks.
• Ongoing: Consent can be withdrawn at any time; agreement to one act does not constitute agreement to another.
• Enthusiastic: The presence of a “yes” matters as much as the absence of a “no.” Silence, passivity, or lack of resistance do not constitute consent.

Legal Standards in Canada

Canadian criminal law defines consent to sexual activity under Section 273.1 of the Criminal Code. Consent is defined as the voluntary agreement to engage in the sexual activity in question. The law specifies several conditions under which consent cannot be obtained: when the complainant is incapable of consenting (e.g., due to intoxication or unconsciousness), when the accused induces consent through abuse of a position of trust, power, or authority, or when the complainant expresses a lack of agreement.

The affirmative consent standard goes beyond the legal minimum by requiring active, verbal or clearly communicated agreement rather than merely the absence of refusal.

Consent Culture versus Sexual Violence Culture

Consent culture describes a social environment in which seeking, giving, and respecting consent is normalized across all interactions, not only sexual ones. In a consent culture, boundaries are understood as expressions of autonomy rather than obstacles to be overcome. Communication about desires, limits, and expectations is valued and practised openly.

Sexual violence culture (often termed rape culture) describes the opposite: a social environment in which sexual violence is normalized, trivialized, or tacitly condoned through attitudes, norms, and institutional practices. Indicators of rape culture include victim-blaming language, the sexualization of non-consent in media, the minimization of sexual harm as “boys being boys,” and institutional failure to hold perpetrators accountable.

Wong (2021): Campus Consent Training

Research by Wong (2021) examines the effectiveness and limitations of campus consent training programs. While these programs have proliferated across North American universities, Wong’s analysis raises important questions about whether brief, often mandatory workshops can meaningfully shift deeply entrenched cultural norms. Key findings include:

• Consent training is most effective when it moves beyond legalistic definitions and engages students in reflective dialogue about power, communication, and desire.
• Programs that adopt a sex-positive framework, treating consent as enhancing rather than constraining sexual experiences, tend to generate greater engagement and attitudinal change.
• One-time training sessions produce limited lasting effects; sustained, multi-session programming embedded across the student experience is more likely to influence behaviour.
• Training must account for the diverse experiences of students across race, gender, sexuality, disability, and cultural background rather than assuming a single universal experience of sexual negotiation.

Chapter 3: The Sexual Citizens Framework

Hirsch and Khan’s Conceptual Architecture

Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan’s Sexual Citizens: Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (2020) presents a groundbreaking framework for understanding sexual assault rooted in ethnographic research conducted through the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT) at Columbia University. SHIFT is one of the most comprehensive studies of sexual assault on a college campus ever conducted, drawing on surveys, interviews, ethnographic observation, and the analysis of sexual assault journals kept by student participants.

The framework rests on three interlocking concepts: sexual projects, sexual geographies, and sexual citizenship.

Sexual Projects

A sexual project is the set of reasons why a person seeks out or engages in a sexual encounter. Sexual projects are not simply about physical desire; they encompass a wide range of motivations, including:

• Pleasure seeking: The desire for physical gratification and emotional intimacy.
• Identity construction: Using sexual experiences to explore or affirm aspects of identity, such as sexual orientation, gender expression, or social status.
• Relationship building: Sex as a means of establishing, deepening, or maintaining romantic partnerships.
• Social status: Sexual activity as a way of gaining peer recognition, demonstrating maturity, or performing masculinity or femininity.
• Experimentation: Curiosity-driven exploration, particularly common among young adults navigating new social environments.

Hirsch and Khan argue that when two people’s sexual projects are misaligned, and when one or both parties lack the communicative skills or social power to negotiate that misalignment, the conditions for assault are created. Understanding sexual projects shifts the analytical focus from individual pathology (the “monster in the bushes” myth) to the social ecology of sexual decision-making.

Sexual Geographies

Sexual geographies refers to the physical spaces in which sexual encounters occur and the ways those spaces shape the possibilities for both sex and assault. Hirsch and Khan demonstrate that space is never neutral; it is saturated with power relations.

Key Spatial Dynamics

• Room ownership: On college campuses, the person whose room a sexual encounter takes place in holds significant spatial power. They control the environment, the ability to ask someone to leave, and access to privacy. The guest is at a structural disadvantage, especially if intoxicated or unfamiliar with the building.
• Party architecture: The design and social norms of party spaces (fraternity houses, off-campus apartments, residence hall common areas) create specific risks. Dark rooms, loud music, controlled alcohol access, and invitation-only entry all structure the power dynamics of sexual encounters that originate in these settings.
• Alcohol-serving environments: The relationship between alcohol and sexual assault is well documented but frequently oversimplified. Hirsch and Khan argue that the issue is not simply that alcohol impairs judgment; it is that certain spaces are deliberately designed to maximize alcohol consumption while minimizing oversight, creating environments where assault is more likely and harder to detect.
• Residence arrangements: First-year students in shared dormitory rooms have less spatial autonomy than upperclassmen in single rooms or off-campus housing. This unequal access to private space creates a hierarchy of sexual geography that intersects with age, social capital, and economic resources.

Space as a Prevention Tool

Understanding sexual geographies opens up architectural and policy interventions that go beyond individual behaviour change. Better lighting in public spaces, redesigned party environments, accessible and affordable housing options, and the creation of safe social spaces that do not centre alcohol are all spatial strategies for reducing sexual violence.

Sexual Citizenship

Sexual citizenship is the most normative of the three concepts. Hirsch and Khan define it as the recognition of one’s own right to sexual self-determination and the simultaneous recognition that all others hold that same right. Sexual citizenship is not innate; it is cultivated through education, socialization, and community norms.

Dimensions of Sexual Citizenship

• Self-knowledge: Understanding one’s own desires, boundaries, and values. Many young people arrive at university without ever having had meaningful conversations about sex with trusted adults, leaving them poorly equipped to articulate what they want and do not want.
• Other-recognition: The capacity to see sexual partners as full subjects with their own desires, boundaries, and vulnerabilities rather than as objects to be acted upon.
• Structural awareness: Understanding how systems of power (gender, race, class, sexuality, disability) shape access to sexual citizenship. Not everyone enters sexual negotiations with equal standing.

Chapter 4: Gender, Power, and Sexual Negotiation

Gender and Sexual Scripts

Sexual scripts are the culturally constructed blueprints that guide how individuals understand, initiate, and navigate sexual encounters. These scripts are deeply gendered and shape expectations about who initiates sex, who sets limits, who expresses desire, and who is responsible for preventing unwanted outcomes.

Traditional Heterosexual Script

The dominant heterosexual script in Western cultures assigns men the role of sexual initiator and women the role of sexual gatekeeper. Under this script:

• Men are expected to pursue sex actively, interpret ambiguity as interest, and persist despite initial resistance (the “chase”).
• Women are expected to moderate male desire, say no even when they mean yes (the “token resistance” myth), and bear responsibility for preventing sexual encounters from going too far.

This script is harmful to all genders. It pressures men into aggressive sexual behaviour, denies women the ability to express genuine desire, and renders non-binary, queer, and gender-non-conforming people invisible.

Queering Sexual Scripts

Queer theory challenges the universality of heterosexual scripts by examining how LGBTQ2S+ individuals negotiate sex outside dominant frameworks. Same-sex and gender-diverse sexual encounters often lack pre-existing scripts, which can create both greater freedom for negotiation and greater uncertainty about expectations. Research on sexual violence in queer communities reveals that assault occurs across all sexual orientations and gender identities, often compounded by barriers to disclosure such as homophobia, transphobia, and the fear of reinforcing negative stereotypes about queer sexualities.

Power Dynamics in Sexual Encounters

Power is the central mechanism through which sexual violence operates. Power differentials in sexual encounters can be overt (physical force, explicit threats) or subtle (social status, economic dependence, emotional manipulation).

Types of Power in Sexual Contexts

• Physical power: The capacity to use bodily force or the threat of force. While physical power is the most visible form of coercion, it accounts for a minority of sexual assaults.
• Social power: Status within peer groups, institutional hierarchies, or social networks. A popular student, a team captain, or a faculty member holds social power that can constrain the ability of others to refuse sexual advances.
• Economic power: Financial dependence, housing insecurity, or precarious employment can create conditions where individuals feel unable to refuse sex. This dynamic is particularly relevant in contexts of intimate partner violence and sex trafficking.
• Informational power: The possession of compromising information (intimate images, knowledge of someone’s sexual orientation or HIV status) that can be used as leverage.
• Institutional power: The authority vested in individuals by their roles within organizations such as universities, workplaces, religious communities, or athletic teams.

Intersectionality and Power

Intersectionality, a concept developed by legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw, describes how multiple axes of identity (race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, immigration status) interact to produce unique experiences of power and vulnerability. A Black woman’s experience of sexual violence is shaped not only by gender but also by anti-Black racism; a disabled queer person faces compounded barriers to disclosure and support. Any analysis of power in sexual contexts that considers only one axis of identity is fundamentally incomplete.

Chapter 5: Active Bystander Intervention

The Bystander Effect

The concept of the bystander effect originates in the social psychology research of John Darley and Bibb Latane in the late 1960s. Their experiments demonstrated that individuals are less likely to intervene in an emergency when other people are present, a phenomenon they attributed to diffusion of responsibility (the assumption that someone else will act) and pluralistic ignorance (looking to others’ inaction as evidence that intervention is unnecessary).

In the context of sexual violence, the bystander effect explains why people who witness warning signs of assault, such as someone being led away while heavily intoxicated, coercive language, or visibly uncomfortable body language, often fail to intervene even when they recognize the danger.

From Passive Bystander to Active Intervener

Bystander intervention programs reframe community members not as potential victims or potential perpetrators, but as potential interveners whose actions can prevent harm. This shift distributes responsibility for safety across the entire community rather than placing it solely on the shoulders of potential targets.

The Five Ds of Bystander Intervention

Contemporary bystander training programs typically teach five strategies, known as the Five Ds:

1. Direct: Confronting the situation head-on. Example: “Hey, she looks really uncomfortable. Are you okay?” Direct intervention is the most visible but also the most confrontational and may not be appropriate in all situations.

2. Distract: Creating a diversion that interrupts the potentially harmful situation without directly confronting the aggressor. Example: Spilling a drink, asking for directions, or pretending to know one of the people involved. Distraction is often the safest and most accessible strategy.

3. Delegate: Enlisting the help of a third party, such as a bartender, residence advisor, security guard, or mutual friend. Delegation is appropriate when the intervener feels unsafe acting alone or when the situation requires authority or expertise they lack.

4. Delay: Checking in with the person who may have been harmed after the fact. Delay is appropriate when real-time intervention was not possible or safe but the intervener still wants to offer support and ensure the person has access to resources.

5. Document: Recording the incident (with attention to consent and privacy laws) to preserve evidence. Documentation should always be paired with one of the other Ds; recording without acting can itself become a form of voyeurism.

Barriers to Intervention

Research identifies several barriers that prevent bystanders from acting:

• Ambiguity: Uncertainty about whether the situation is actually dangerous.
• Relationship to the perpetrator: Reluctance to confront a friend, teammate, or authority figure.
• Fear of social consequences: Worry about being ostracized, ridiculed, or labelled as overreacting.
• Alcohol impairment: The bystander’s own intoxication reduces the capacity for risk assessment and action.
• Diffusion of responsibility: The belief that someone else, someone more qualified, closer to the situation, or with more authority, should intervene.

Building a Culture of Intervention

Effective bystander programs do more than teach individual skills; they aim to shift community norms. When intervention is framed as an expected behaviour rather than a heroic exception, and when communities celebrate rather than punish those who step in, the calculus of intervention changes. Key program elements include ongoing training (not one-time workshops), peer-led facilitation, scenario-based practice, and institutional accountability that ensures interveners are supported rather than penalized.

Chapter 6: Fat Justice, Desirability, and Sexual Violence

The Desirability Myth

Aubrey Gordon’s (2020) work, particularly Chapter 5 of her book, “The Desirability Myth,” challenges the widely held assumption that desirability is a natural, objective quality rather than a socially constructed hierarchy. Gordon argues that standards of desirability are deeply shaped by white supremacy, ableism, fatphobia, and heteronormativity, and that these standards have direct consequences for how sexual violence against fat people is understood, reported, and adjudicated.

Fat Bodies and Sexual Violence

Fat people face a specific and pernicious form of disbelief when they disclose sexual violence. The cultural script that frames fat bodies as inherently undesirable leads to responses such as “You should be grateful for the attention” or outright denial that anyone would want to assault a fat person. This desirability myth functions as a rape myth: it delegitimizes the experiences of fat survivors and insulates perpetrators from accountability.

Key Arguments from Gordon

• Desirability is political: Who is considered attractive, who is considered a legitimate sexual subject, and who is rendered invisible are not matters of personal taste but of cultural power. Standards of beauty enforce racial, gender, and body-size hierarchies.
• Fat people are denied sexual citizenship: When fat bodies are excluded from the category of the desirable, fat people are effectively denied the status of sexual subjects. They are positioned as grateful recipients of sexual attention rather than autonomous agents with the right to choose and refuse.
• Fatphobia compounds other oppressions: Fat Black women, fat disabled people, and fat queer people face compounded barriers to being believed, accessing support, and receiving justice.

Fat Justice as a Framework

Fat justice goes beyond body positivity (which focuses on individual self-acceptance) to demand structural change. A fat justice approach to sexual violence asks:

• How do medical institutions treat fat survivors of assault? (Research shows that fat patients receive lower-quality care across health domains, including sexual health and trauma response.)
• How do legal systems assess the credibility of fat complainants?
• How do prevention programs account for the experiences of people whose bodies are culturally devalued?
• How do campus support services ensure accessibility for people of all body sizes?

Chapter 7: Sexual Pleasure and Prevention

The Pleasure Deficit in Sex Education

Most sex education programs, whether in schools or on campuses, focus on risk: the risk of pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, and sexual violence. While these topics are important, a purely risk-focused approach inadvertently frames sex as inherently dangerous, something to be managed and survived rather than enjoyed.

The pleasure deficit in sex education has consequences for violence prevention. When young people are not taught that they have a right to pleasurable sexual experiences, they lack the vocabulary and the sense of entitlement needed to advocate for their own desires and set meaningful boundaries. If the only sexual script available is one of risk avoidance, then the positive case for consent (“I want to do things that feel good for both of us”) is never articulated.

Pleasure as a Prevention Tool

A growing body of research supports the integration of pleasure-based approaches into sexual violence prevention:

• When people understand their own desires, they are better equipped to communicate boundaries. “I like this, but not that” is a more empowering framework than “I don’t want to be assaulted.”
• Pleasure-inclusive education normalizes communication about sex, making it easier to negotiate consent in real-time.
• Framing consent as the pathway to mutual pleasure rather than a legal obligation increases engagement with consent education and reduces the perception that consent is a mood-killer.
• Pleasure-based approaches are inherently more inclusive of diverse sexualities and relationship structures than abstinence-focused or risk-focused models.

Barriers to Pleasure-Based Education

Despite its promise, pleasure-based education faces significant institutional resistance. Conservative political forces often oppose any sex education that goes beyond abstinence messaging. Even progressive institutions may be uncomfortable explicitly discussing pleasure, particularly for young people, queer people, or people with disabilities. Additionally, incorporating pleasure into prevention programming requires facilitators who are trained, comfortable, and culturally competent, a significant workforce development challenge.

Chapter 8: The #MeToo Movement

Origins and Evolution

The #MeToo movement has two origin stories that must both be told. In 2006, Tarana Burke, a Black community organizer and survivor, founded the “Me Too” movement to support survivors of sexual violence in underprivileged communities, particularly young women of colour. In 2017, the hashtag #MeToo went viral on social media after actress Alyssa Milano encouraged women to share their experiences of sexual harassment and assault in the wake of allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein.

The tension between these two origin stories is itself instructive. Burke’s grassroots, community-based work centred the most marginalized survivors, while the viral #MeToo moment centred the experiences of wealthy, white, famous women. Understanding this tension is essential for a critical engagement with the movement.

Impacts of #MeToo

Cultural Shifts

• Breaking silence: #MeToo made visible the sheer scale of sexual violence, countering the myth that assault is rare or exceptional.
• Accountability for powerful perpetrators: High-profile cases in entertainment, politics, academia, and media demonstrated that even wealthy, influential men could face consequences for sexual violence.
• Vocabulary expansion: #MeToo popularized terms like “sexual harassment,” “hostile work environment,” and “power imbalance” in everyday conversation, giving people language to name their experiences.

Institutional Changes

• Many organizations revised sexual harassment policies, established new reporting mechanisms, and increased investment in prevention programming.
• Some jurisdictions strengthened legal protections for survivors and whistleblowers.
• Professional associations in fields from medicine to journalism adopted new codes of conduct.

Critiques and Limitations

Whose Stories Get Heard?

The most visible #MeToo stories have disproportionately featured white, cisgender, heterosexual, middle- or upper-class women. The experiences of women of colour, Indigenous women, trans people, sex workers, undocumented immigrants, incarcerated people, and people with disabilities remain comparatively marginalized within the movement. Burke’s original vision of centring the most vulnerable has been only partially realized.

Due Process Concerns

Critics have raised legitimate questions about the absence of formal adjudicative processes in some #MeToo cases, where allegations made on social media can result in career destruction without investigation or opportunity to respond. Navigating the tension between believing survivors and protecting the rights of the accused remains one of the movement’s most challenging ethical questions.

Carceral Feminism

Some scholars critique the #MeToo movement’s emphasis on criminal prosecution and incarceration as the primary mechanisms of accountability. Carceral feminism describes feminist approaches that rely on the criminal justice system, a system that disproportionately harms racialized and marginalized communities, to address gender-based violence. Alternatives include restorative justice, transformative justice, community accountability processes, and institutional reform.

Chapter 9: Sexual Violence Policy on Campus

The Canadian Policy Landscape

Unlike the United States, where Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 provides a federal legislative framework requiring educational institutions to address sexual violence, Canada has no equivalent federal statute. The Canadian approach is a patchwork of provincial legislation, institutional policies, and criminal law.

Provincial Legislation

Several provinces have enacted legislation requiring post-secondary institutions to develop standalone sexual violence policies:

• Ontario: Bill 132, the Sexual Violence and Harassment Action Plan Act (2016), requires all publicly funded colleges and universities to adopt sexual violence policies, review them every three years, and provide information about supports and services to students who disclose.
• British Columbia: The Sexual Violence and Misconduct Policy Act (2016) imposes similar requirements.
• Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island have also enacted campus sexual violence legislation.

However, provincial laws typically mandate the existence of policies without specifying what those policies must contain in terms of investigation procedures, adjudicative standards, or sanctions. This leaves significant discretion to individual institutions.

Limitations of the Canadian Approach

• No federal enforcement mechanism: Unlike Title IX, which allows the U.S. Department of Education to investigate complaints and withdraw federal funding from non-compliant institutions, Canadian provinces generally lack robust enforcement tools.
• Inconsistent standards: The quality and comprehensiveness of institutional policies vary widely. Some institutions have developed trauma-informed, survivor-centred policies with clear procedures; others have policies that exist primarily on paper.
• Data gaps: Canadian universities are not consistently required to track or publicly report the number of sexual violence disclosures, reports, investigations, or outcomes. This lack of transparency makes it difficult to assess the scope of the problem or hold institutions accountable.
• Adjudicative challenges: Campus adjudication processes operate outside the criminal justice system, raising questions about procedural fairness, the standard of proof, the qualifications of decision-makers, and the adequacy of sanctions.

Title IX Comparison

Title IX in the United States provides a useful point of comparison. Under Title IX, educational institutions receiving federal funding must designate a Title IX coordinator, adopt grievance procedures, provide interim measures to complainants, and conduct investigations using a preponderance-of-evidence standard (though this standard has been subject to political contestation). While Title IX has its own significant limitations, including inconsistent enforcement, institutional conflicts of interest, and the re-traumatization of complainants through adversarial processes, it provides a structural accountability mechanism that Canada currently lacks.

Fischer (2022): Cultural Relevance in Sexual Assault Education

Fischer (2022) examines the often-taboo topic of dating violence and argues that sexual assault education must be culturally relevant to be effective. Key contributions include:

• Dating violence as overlooked: While campus sexual assault prevention programming has expanded significantly, intimate partner violence within dating relationships remains comparatively neglected. The focus on stranger and acquaintance assault at parties obscures the reality that a substantial proportion of campus sexual violence occurs within ongoing relationships.
• Cultural specificity: Prevention programming developed primarily for white, middle-class, heterosexual students may not resonate with students from different cultural backgrounds, where norms around dating, family involvement in relationships, and gender roles may differ significantly.
• Taboo and silence: In many communities, discussing dating violence is itself taboo, making disclosure and help-seeking particularly difficult. Culturally relevant programming must address these silences directly while respecting the complexity of cultural belonging.

Chapter 10: Indigenous Women, Sexual Violence, and MMIWG

The Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

The epidemic of violence against Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people in Canada represents one of the most devastating intersections of colonial violence, gender-based violence, and systemic racism in the country’s history and present.

Statistics and Scale

The scale of the crisis is staggering. Despite comprising approximately 4 percent of Canada’s female population, Indigenous women account for roughly 16 percent of all female homicide victims. Indigenous women are 12 times more likely to be murdered or go missing than non-Indigenous women, and 16 times more likely to experience violence than white women. Fifty-six percent of Indigenous women have experienced physical assault, and 46 percent have experienced sexual assault. Indigenous women and girls are vastly overrepresented among victims of human trafficking and sexual exploitation.

The National Inquiry

In 2016, the Government of Canada established the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). Over two years, the Inquiry gathered testimony from more than 2,300 family members, survivors, and knowledge keepers across the country. The final report, Reclaiming Power and Place (2019), concluded that the violence constitutes genocide, a deliberate, sustained pattern of violence enabled by colonial structures, racist policies, and institutional indifference.

The Inquiry issued 231 Calls for Justice directed at governments, institutions, social service providers, and all Canadians. These calls address the root causes of violence, including poverty, housing insecurity, child welfare policies that disproportionately remove Indigenous children from their families, inadequate policing, and the legacy of residential schools.

Morin (2020): Structural Roots of Violence

Morin (2020) examines the structural conditions that produce and sustain violence against Indigenous women. Key arguments include:

• Colonial continuity: The violence against Indigenous women is not random or individual; it is the predictable outcome of colonial policies designed to destroy Indigenous communities. The Indian Act’s gender discrimination (which stripped Indigenous women of status upon marrying non-Indigenous men), the residential school system, the Sixties Scoop, and ongoing child welfare interventions all created conditions of vulnerability.
• Spatial violence: The geographic displacement of Indigenous peoples onto reserves, often in remote locations with limited infrastructure and services, creates conditions of isolation and limited access to safety resources. The Highway of Tears in British Columbia, where numerous Indigenous women have gone missing or been murdered along a remote stretch of highway, is a devastating example of how spatial marginalization produces vulnerability.
• Policing failures: The relationship between Indigenous communities and police services is marked by a long history of mistrust, neglect, and abuse. Reports of missing Indigenous women have been systematically deprioritized, investigated inadequately, or ignored entirely. The Thunder Bay Police Service, the Saskatoon Police Service (the “Starlight Tours”), and the RCMP have all faced documented criticism for failures in responding to violence against Indigenous people.
• Intergenerational trauma: The residential school system, which subjected Indigenous children to systematic physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, produced intergenerational cycles of trauma that continue to shape family and community dynamics. Understanding violence against Indigenous women requires understanding the traumatic legacy of these institutions.

Chapter 11: Race, Racism, and Sexual Violence

Racial Dimensions of Sexual Violence

Sexual violence cannot be understood apart from the racial systems in which it occurs. Race shapes who is vulnerable to violence, who is believed when they disclose, who is prosecuted and punished, and whose experiences are centred in public discourse and policy.

Anti-Black Racism and Sexual Violence

The history of anti-Black racism in North America is inseparable from sexual violence. The enslavement of Black people was sustained through, among other mechanisms, the systematic sexual assault of enslaved women by white enslavers, a practice that was both a tool of domination and an economic strategy (since children born of these assaults were themselves enslaved). After emancipation, the myth of the Black male rapist was deployed to justify lynching and racial terror, while the sexual victimization of Black women continued to be ignored or normalized.

These legacies persist. Contemporary research, including the work of Singh and Francis (2022), documents how:

• Black survivors are less likely to be believed when they disclose sexual violence, due to racist stereotypes that hypersexualize Black women and frame them as incapable of being violated.
• Black men are disproportionately accused and convicted of sexual offences, particularly in cases involving white complainants, reflecting the persistence of the racist rape myth.
• Black women face compounded barriers to accessing support services, which are often designed around the experiences of white survivors and may not address the specific dynamics of anti-Black racism.

Hair Discrimination and Bodily Autonomy

Singh and Francis (2022) highlight the often-overlooked connection between hair discrimination and sexual violence. For Black women and girls, hair is a site of racial identity, cultural expression, and bodily autonomy. The non-consensual touching of Black women’s hair by strangers and acquaintances is a form of bodily violation that, while often trivialized, reflects the same fundamental disregard for bodily autonomy that underlies sexual violence. Policies that police Black hairstyles in schools and workplaces (such as bans on locs, braids, or natural hair) are forms of racial control over Black bodies that intersect with and reinforce broader patterns of sexual and gendered violence.

Racialized Stereotypes and Vulnerability

Different racialized groups face different stereotypes that shape their vulnerability to sexual violence and their access to justice:

• Indigenous women are stereotyped as sexually available and expendable, contributing to the MMIWG crisis discussed in the previous chapter.
• Asian women are fetishized through Orientalist stereotypes of submissiveness and sexual exoticism, increasing their vulnerability to sexual harassment and assault.
• Latina women are stereotyped as hypersexual, which functions similarly to anti-Black stereotypes in undermining credibility and normalizing violence.
• Muslim women face the intersection of Islamophobia and sexualized racism, particularly in contexts where the hijab or other religious dress is fetishized or politicized.

Chapter 12: Male Survivors of Sexual Violence

Breaking the Silence

Sexual violence against men and boys is vastly underreported, understudied, and under-discussed. The reasons for this silence are rooted in dominant constructions of masculinity that frame men as sexually insatiable, physically invulnerable, and emotionally stoic.

Prevalence

Estimates of sexual violence against men vary, but research suggests that approximately 1 in 6 men experience some form of sexual abuse or assault in their lifetime. These figures are almost certainly underestimates, given the profound stigma and barriers to disclosure that male survivors face.

Barriers to Disclosure

• Masculinity norms: Dominant masculinity scripts define men as strong, self-reliant, and sexually dominant. Acknowledging victimization contradicts these scripts and threatens the survivor’s masculine identity, creating powerful incentives for silence.
• Homophobia: When the perpetrator is male, male survivors may fear that disclosing will lead others to question their sexual orientation. This barrier is particularly acute for heterosexual-identified men but also affects gay and bisexual men, who may fear that disclosure will reinforce homophobic stereotypes about queer male sexuality.
• Disbelief and minimization: Male survivors frequently encounter disbelief (“Men can’t be raped”), minimization (“You should be flattered”), or re-framing of their experience as consensual (“You must have wanted it, otherwise you would have fought back”).
• Lack of services: Many sexual violence support services are designed for and marketed to women. Male survivors may feel unwelcome, may not know that services are available to them, or may encounter intake processes that assume a female survivor.
• Female perpetrators: When the perpetrator is female, additional layers of disbelief and stigma operate. Cultural scripts that frame women as sexually passive and physically incapable of committing assault make it particularly difficult for men assaulted by women to be taken seriously.

Institutional Contexts

Certain institutional contexts produce elevated rates of sexual violence against men and boys:

• Military settings: Hierarchical command structures, cultures of hypermasculinity, and geographic isolation create conditions for both peer-on-peer and superior-on-subordinate assault.
• Prisons and detention centres: Incarcerated men face extremely high rates of sexual violence, a reality that is often the subject of humour rather than concern, reflecting the dehumanization of incarcerated people.
• Sports teams: Hazing rituals that involve sexual humiliation or assault are well documented in athletic contexts, particularly in male team sports.
• Religious institutions: The clergy sexual abuse crisis has revealed the systematic sexual abuse of boys by male authority figures across multiple denominations.

Chapter 13: Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence

Defining Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence

Technology-facilitated sexual violence (TFSV) encompasses a range of harmful behaviours that use digital technologies to commit, assist, or amplify sexual violence. As digital communication has become central to social and intimate life, new forms of sexual harm have emerged that challenge traditional legal frameworks and support structures.

Forms of TFSV

• Non-consensual intimate image distribution (NCIID): Often colloquially (and problematically) called “revenge porn,” NCIID involves the sharing of sexually explicit images or videos without the depicted person’s consent. This may involve images originally shared consensually within a relationship, images obtained through hacking or theft, or images created without knowledge (e.g., hidden cameras). The term “revenge porn” is misleading because it implies a revenge motive and frames the content as pornography; in reality, the images are weapons of control and humiliation.
• Cyber-stalking and cyber-harassment: The use of digital platforms to monitor, threaten, intimidate, or control a current or former partner. This includes obsessive messaging, tracking location through GPS or spyware, creating fake social media profiles, and enlisting others to harass the target.
• Sexual extortion (sextortion): Threatening to distribute intimate images unless the target provides additional images, sexual acts, money, or other demands.
• Online sexual harassment: Unwanted sexual comments, messages, images (such as unsolicited explicit photos), or propositions delivered through social media, dating apps, email, or other digital platforms.
• Digital coercive control: Using technology to monitor and control a partner’s communications, social media activity, finances, and social connections. This may include demanding passwords, reading messages without consent, or using spyware.
• Image-based sexual abuse using AI: The emergence of deepfake technology has created new forms of image-based abuse in which a person’s face is digitally superimposed onto sexually explicit content without their knowledge or consent. This technology disproportionately targets women and has significant implications for consent, authenticity, and legal accountability.

Legal Responses in Canada

Canada has made progress in legislating against some forms of TFSV:

• Section 162.1 of the Criminal Code (added in 2015) criminalizes the non-consensual distribution of intimate images.
• The Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act (2014) addressed cyber-bullying and included provisions relevant to TFSV.
• Provincial legislation, such as Nova Scotia’s Intimate Images and Cyber-protection Act and Manitoba’s Intimate Image Protection Act, provides civil remedies including protection orders and damages.

However, significant gaps remain. Deepfake pornography is not specifically addressed in Canadian law. Enforcement of existing laws is inconsistent. And the global nature of the internet means that content distributed from foreign jurisdictions may be beyond the practical reach of Canadian legal processes.

Gendered Dimensions

TFSV disproportionately affects women, girls, and LGBTQ2S+ people. Research consistently shows that women are the primary targets of NCIID, sextortion, and deepfake abuse, while men are the primary perpetrators. However, TFSV also affects men and boys, particularly in contexts of homophobic bullying and the non-consensual sharing of images within peer networks.

Chapter 14: Trauma-Informed Approaches to Sexual Violence

What Is Trauma?

Trauma is the lasting emotional, psychological, and physiological response to events that overwhelm an individual’s capacity to cope. Sexual violence is inherently traumatic because it involves the violation of bodily autonomy, the experience of helplessness, and often the betrayal of trust.

Neurobiological Responses to Trauma

Understanding trauma responses is essential for anyone who may receive a disclosure of sexual violence or work with survivors. During a traumatic event, the brain’s threat-detection system (centred in the amygdala) activates the body’s survival responses:

• Fight: Active physical resistance against the attacker.
• Flight: Attempting to escape the situation.
• Freeze: Involuntary immobilization, in which the body becomes rigid and the person is unable to move, speak, or resist. Freeze is an extremely common response to sexual assault and is often misinterpreted as consent.
• Fawn: Attempting to placate the attacker by complying, being agreeable, or performing care-taking behaviour. Fawn responses are particularly common when the perpetrator is someone the survivor depends on or has an ongoing relationship with.
• Dissociation: A psychological detachment from the experience, in which the survivor may feel as though they are watching the event from outside their body, may lose track of time, or may experience emotional numbness. Dissociation is a protective mechanism that can interfere with memory formation.

Trauma and Memory

Trauma disrupts normal memory encoding processes. Traumatic memories are often stored as fragments: sensory details (a smell, a sound, a texture) rather than coherent narratives. Survivors may have vivid recall of certain details while being unable to reconstruct a chronological account of events. This fragmentation is frequently, and wrongly, interpreted as evidence of fabrication. In reality, it is a well-documented neurobiological response to overwhelming stress.

Trauma-Informed Practice

Trauma-informed practice is an approach to service delivery, policy design, and interpersonal interaction that recognizes the prevalence and impact of trauma and seeks to avoid re-traumatization. Its core principles include:

1. Safety: Creating environments (physical, emotional, and relational) where survivors feel secure.
2. Trustworthiness and transparency: Being clear about processes, expectations, and limitations. Survivors of sexual violence have experienced a fundamental betrayal of trust; rebuilding trust requires consistency, honesty, and follow-through.
3. Peer support: Connecting survivors with others who have had similar experiences, reducing isolation and shame.
4. Collaboration and mutuality: Sharing power and decision-making with survivors rather than making decisions on their behalf.
5. Empowerment, voice, and choice: Prioritizing the survivor’s autonomy and agency in all interactions.
6. Cultural, historical, and gender issues: Recognizing that trauma is experienced and expressed differently across cultural, racial, gender, and other identity contexts, and designing responses accordingly.

Re-traumatization

Re-traumatization occurs when a survivor’s interaction with institutions or individuals replicates the dynamics of the original trauma. Common sources of re-traumatization include:

• Being disbelieved or blamed by police, medical personnel, or institutional authorities.
• Being required to recount the assault multiple times to different people.
• Adversarial legal or institutional proceedings that position the survivor as a defendant of their own credibility.
• Encountering the perpetrator in shared spaces without warning or support.
• Loss of control over the process: having reports filed without consent, being pressured to participate in investigations, or having outcomes imposed rather than negotiated.

Trauma-informed systems are designed to minimize these experiences by centring survivor autonomy, reducing unnecessary repetition, and ensuring that every point of contact in the reporting and support process is guided by an understanding of trauma’s effects.

Chapter 15: Toward Sexual Justice

Integrating the Frameworks

The chapters of this course build toward a comprehensive, intersectional understanding of sexual violence that resists simple explanations and simplistic solutions. Several key themes weave through the material:

Sex Is Social

Individual choices about sex are always made within social contexts that enable, constrain, and give meaning to those choices. Hirsch and Khan’s framework of sexual projects, sexual geographies, and sexual citizenship demonstrates that assault is not simply the product of individual deviance but of social systems that fail to cultivate the conditions for just sexual interaction.

Power Is Central

Every form of sexual violence examined in this course involves the abuse of power: physical, social, economic, institutional, informational, or technological. Understanding power dynamics is the single most important analytical skill for studying sexual violence.

Intersectionality Is Not Optional

Race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, age, immigration status, and body size all shape experiences of sexual violence, disclosure, support, and justice. Any approach to prevention, response, or policy that treats these identities as separate or additive rather than co-constitutive will be fundamentally inadequate.

Structural Change Is Necessary

While individual behaviour change (learning consent skills, practising bystander intervention, developing trauma literacy) is important, it is insufficient without structural transformation. Effective prevention requires changes to the built environment, institutional policies, legal frameworks, cultural norms, and the distribution of power and resources.

Models of Justice

Criminal Justice

The conventional approach to sexual violence centres the criminal justice system: policing, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration. While criminal accountability serves important functions, including community safety and public denunciation of harm, the criminal justice system has profound limitations as a vehicle for sexual justice:

• Attrition rates are extremely high; only a small fraction of sexual assaults are reported to police, and of those reported, only a small fraction result in conviction.
• The adversarial trial process can be deeply re-traumatizing for survivors.
• The criminal justice system disproportionately targets racialized and marginalized communities, raising serious equity concerns.
• Incarceration does not address the root causes of violence and may produce further harm.

Restorative Justice

Restorative justice brings together the person who caused harm, the person who was harmed, and community members to collectively address the impact of the harm and develop a plan for accountability and repair. Restorative justice processes centre the survivor’s needs and prioritize healing over punishment.

Transformative Justice

Transformative justice goes further than restorative justice by seeking to change the conditions that produced the harm. Rather than asking “How do we punish the person who caused harm?” or even “How do we repair the harm?”, transformative justice asks “How do we change the community, the institution, and the society so that this harm is less likely to occur in the future?” Transformative justice approaches are particularly associated with communities of colour and abolitionist movements that seek alternatives to the carceral state.

Moving Forward: From Knowledge to Action

This course equips students with analytical tools for understanding sexual violence, but analysis without action is incomplete. Paths forward include:

• Personal practice: Developing one’s own sexual citizenship through honest self-reflection, communication skill-building, and the cultivation of empathy and other-recognition.
• Community engagement: Practising active bystander intervention, supporting survivors, challenging harmful norms in peer groups, and participating in campus and community prevention initiatives.
• Institutional advocacy: Pushing for stronger, more transparent, and more survivor-centred institutional policies. Demanding data collection, public reporting, and accountability from educational institutions.
• Policy engagement: Advocating for legislative reform at provincial and federal levels, including stronger protections for survivors, better regulation of digital platforms, and the implementation of the MMIWG Calls for Justice.
• Solidarity work: Building coalitions across communities and movements, recognizing that sexual violence is connected to other forms of oppression and that liberation requires collective action.

Glossary of Key Terms

Affirmative consent: A standard requiring active, verbal or clearly communicated agreement to sexual activity, rather than merely the absence of refusal.

Bystander effect: The phenomenon whereby individuals are less likely to intervene in an emergency when others are present.

Carceral feminism: Feminist approaches that rely on the criminal justice system to address gender-based violence, critiqued for disproportionately harming racialized and marginalized communities.

Colonial sexual violence: Sexual violence as a tool and consequence of colonialism, including the destruction of Indigenous family structures, residential school abuse, and ongoing violence against Indigenous women.

Consent culture: A social environment in which seeking, giving, and respecting consent is normalized across all interactions.

Deepfake: AI-generated synthetic media in which a person’s likeness is superimposed onto existing content without consent.

Diffusion of responsibility: The assumption that someone else will intervene, reducing any individual’s likelihood of acting.

Dissociation: A psychological defence mechanism involving detachment from one’s body, emotions, or surroundings during a traumatic event.

Fat justice: A framework demanding structural change to address discrimination against fat people, extending beyond individual body positivity.

Five Ds: The five bystander intervention strategies: Direct, Distract, Delegate, Delay, Document.

Intersectionality: The framework, developed by Kimberle Crenshaw, describing how multiple axes of identity interact to produce unique experiences of power and oppression.

MMIWG: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, referring to the crisis of disproportionate violence against Indigenous women in Canada.

Non-consensual intimate image distribution (NCIID): The sharing of sexually explicit images without the depicted person’s consent.

Rape culture: A social environment in which sexual violence is normalized, trivialized, or condoned through attitudes, norms, and institutional practices.

Rape myth: A false belief about sexual violence that shifts blame to survivors, excuses perpetrators, or minimizes harm. Examples include “she was asking for it” and “real rape involves a stranger.”

Re-traumatization: The experience of having institutional or interpersonal interactions replicate the dynamics of original trauma.

Restorative justice: A model of justice that brings together those who caused harm, those who were harmed, and community members to address impact and plan for accountability.

Sexual citizenship: The recognition of one’s own right to sexual self-determination and the simultaneous recognition that all others hold that same right.

Sexual geographies: The physical spaces in which sexual encounters occur and the ways those spaces shape possibilities for both sex and assault.

Sexual projects: The set of reasons, motivations, and goals that drive a person’s engagement in sexual activity.

Sexual scripts: Culturally constructed blueprints that guide how individuals understand and navigate sexual encounters.

Technology-facilitated sexual violence (TFSV): Harmful behaviours that use digital technologies to commit, assist, or amplify sexual violence.

Transformative justice: A model of justice that seeks to change the social conditions that produce harm, rather than focusing solely on punishment or individual repair.

Trauma-informed practice: An approach to interaction and service delivery that recognizes the prevalence of trauma and seeks to avoid re-traumatization through safety, trust, collaboration, empowerment, and cultural responsiveness.