[dropcap]N[/dropcap]early one in five female students will experience sexual assault while at university, according to U of Windsor professor Charlene Senn.
Despite sexual assault being a huge issue at Canadian universities, there is very little data regarding university assaults. As reported by Maclean’s, this is because Canadian universities are not required to “make public or even keep track of the number of sexual assaults reported.” Many have no policy on sexual assaults at all and often will discourage survivors from reporting their case to police for fear of garnering a bad reputation.
A notable example of this is the ongoing scandal at the University of British Columbia, where the faculty’s failure to respond to reports from multiple women against a single student led to “additional harm,” according to an open letter from UBC published on January 7.
Just 45 minutes away lies our own university. When searching SFU’s website for a policy on sexual assault, the only information to be found is on what to do if you’re assaulted: don’t shower, don’t douche, tell a friend, the list goes on. While important, it’s concerning that there’s no assurance on what will become of the attacker. While no scandal has yet taken place here, something else concerns me: SFU doesn’t have a sexual assault centre.
Sexual assault centres offer a plethora of services that other university resources, such as the Women’s Centre or SFPIRG, are simply unable to do. Examples include, but are not limited to: accompaniment to the hospital, assistance in filing police reports and with the court process, accompaniment to the court, and personal counselling.
These resources would not only provide indispensable support for survivors, but the presence of a centre could have major influence in decreasing the frequency of assaults.
Too alleviate the risk, SFU needs an accurate scope of the issue at hand.
There are two main arguments against such centres. The first is that it would be too expensive. To respond to this, one should examine the overall cost of sexual assault to begin with. According to the website Canadian Women, medical costs to victims can be calculated at roughly $113 million per year. Upon considering lost productivity, an additional $211 million is lost, and when putting a price on “pain and suffering,” the number skyrockets to $4.3 billion.
These are just the costs to survivors. The annual cost for taxpayers to fund the criminal justice system’s prosecution of these cases, social services to victims, and employee losses is estimated by Canadian Women to be $200 million. The economic toll is significant, and nothing compared to the cost of a sexual assault centre.
The second argument against a centre is that many opponents also claim that upon the arrival of such centres, assaults actually increase. What is true is that reports of sexual assaults have increased. According to the CBC, many universities report between zero and five assaults per year; SFU reported three on the Burnaby campus for 2015, and zero on both the Vancouver and Surrey campuses.
This seemingly positive low number should not be regarded as such. Statistically speaking, it’s impossible for the number of assaults to be this minor.
What’s actually happening? Survivors aren’t reporting — by no means a local problem, but a problem all the same. What a sexual assault center would do is make survivors feel safer in filing a report. This is not only extremely important for survivors, but also the university as a whole. After all, in order to alleviate the risk, SFU needs an accurate scope of the issue at hand.
As a university that shouts its progressive and radical nature from the top of its concrete rooftops, I am, quite frankly, appalled that SFU has yet to take this simple step forward to lead universities across Canada in the fight against sexual assault.
