During Orientation Week at Saint Mary’s University (SMU), a mid-size primarily undergraduate university in Halifax, 80 students leaders led 300-400 new students in a chant as part of a pep rally. The chant promoted nonconsensual sex with young girls. The event circulated on social media—it went viral. The chant was remarkably similar to one performed at UBC.

There are many horrors to this narrative. 1. The content of the chant is abhorrent and speaks to a culture of sexualized violence that is so inured to messages of violation that no one among the organizers recognized its toxic content, and no one present was able (or sought) to shut it down. N.B. The fact that this event happened in Halifax five months after Retaeh Parsons’s suicide contributes to the ghastliness of what went on. 2. Apparently this chant had been part of SMU’s Orientation Week since 2009. This year it circulated on social media—and so there was a hew and cry, but in four years it has gone unnoted. One must wonder how this is possible. Why would anyone think to shout jubilantly about raping children (period); concomitantly, what relationship does the sentiment have to do with building team spirit? What culture (or demographic) turns a blind eye to such speech? More parochially, what responsibility should university administration assume for orientation events where the university is not directly responsible for programming? 3. This could have happened on any Canadian campus. The fact that it was recorded at two geographically distant campuses (one in British Columbia and one in Nova Scotia; one big and one small) raises deep concern about what is happening across the country.

According to the General Society Survey (GSS) conducted by Statistics Canada in 2009, there were 472,000 women aged 15 and over who self-reported sexual assaults in the previous 12 months. This represents a rate of 34 sexual assault incidents for every 1000 women age 15 and over. Other statistics suggest that 1 in 4 women in North America may be sexually assaulted in her lifetime and 1 in 6 men may be sexually assaulted before age 18 (President’s Report 24). Governments are responding to violence. In Ontario, the provincial government launched Changing Attitudes, Changing Lives: Ontario’s Sexual Violence Action Plan in March 2011. More recently, on 31 January 2014, President Obama issued a proclamation on Teen Dating VIolence and Awareness.

The good news here is that SMU’s President took the on-campus incident seriously. He commissioned a report of the President’s Council, chaired by Wayne MacKay (law professor at Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University), which produced 20 recommendations for SMU but which can be adopted by other universities as we develop policies and responses that must address the endemic culture of violence.

Please read the SMU President’s Report published in December 2013 which gives some context for action—and urges universities to be the driver of cultural change. What the report makes clear is that the existent “rape culture” on university campuses must be redressed and not encouraged; universities must “demonstrate accountability,” as the onus is on us to create and maintain a “safe learning environment” for students, staff, and faculty.

Sadly, the SMU saga doesn’t end with the report (and there is a lesson in that, too). In January, 10 of its athletes were suspended for tweeting sexist, racist and homophobic remarks; the remarks were discovered by King’s College (Halifax) journalism students. David Murphy, SMU’s athletics’ director, took some responsibility for the students’ behaviour, by suggesting that he should have been monitoring the athletes’ social media accounts. As reported in The Toronto Star, “Murphy said the athletes were spoken to after the pro-rape chant, but no one monitored their online behaviour” (28 January 2014).

His remark seems wrong on two accounts: (a) clearly someone was monitoring their accounts–let’s applaud the journalism students here, but let’s also remember that social media is a public fora where speech is monitored, to think otherwise is naive. Social media read, circulated and consumed by both intended and unintended audiences; moreover, it has a digital memory. While tweets seem ephemeral, the nature of digital media means that they have the capacity to live “forever” and presumably attach or follow their authors or subjects for a lifetime; and (b) at some point the students must take sole responsibility for their behaviour. They thought it, they typed it (N.B.: it is reported that Facebook keeps a record of what its members type, whether they choose to post a message or not), they posted it, they responded to postings that did not reflect the hard-won equality rights, hate speech provisions, and ethical standards at the heart of Canadian culture.

During the week of February 14, 2014 Nipissing University’s Muskoka campus held a week of events in support of the “One Billion Rising” campaign: flash mobs and keynote speakers were followed on Friday with participation in the

Memorial March for Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women. I draw your attention to Maryanne Pearce’s recently completed PhD thesis at U

Ottawa’s law school titled “An Awkward Silence” (2014). Dr. Pearce has compiled a new public database that records the number of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada at 824; 80 per cent of whom were not engaged in high-risk behaviour—despite popular misconception.

In the Faculty of Arts and Science, and more globally, at Nipissing University we need to extract the lessons, cautions, and best practices from other post-secondary institutions; we need help to change the culture of sexualized violence and make a concerted effort to promote the values of a safe learning environment that will extend into the lifelong experiences of our students, staff, faculty, and community. Our campus has a reputation for being safe, but we must recognize that members of all genders of this community have been assaulted off campus and are dealing with the psychological and emotional legacies of those assaults, some with our support and some silently. Members of our community are being cyberbullied and are being threatened by (former) intimate partners who have “sex tapes,” we are doing our best to mitigate these threats when we have the trust of those being victimized.

This is part of a much longer conversation. “How do we effect a culture and promote an ethic of respect?” when the popular culture promotes a different ethic. The University’s continuing support of International Women’s

Week (IWW) events is one example of how we have demonstrated a commitment to issues of equity; representation; social, political and economic enfranchisement, as well as a frank discussion of both systemic and sexualized violence. On Friday 7 March, 2014, as part of IWW, Dr. Megan Rivers-Moore of Carleton U’s Pauline Jewett Institute of Women and Gender Studies will speak on “Trafficking in Victims: Sex, Work and the Politics of

Gendered Mobility.” This talk will locate concerns about gender, sex and violence in the increasingly globalized networks of work, migrancy and trafficking. The challenges that face us locally and globally respecting sexualized violence are great. As the President’s Report at SMU makes clear, it is a challenge we must face.