How one scholar took up the fight over sexual violence policy
Caitlin Salvino was in Washington, D.C., on a student exchange in the fall of 2016 when an email popped into her inbox: Her school, Carleton University, was soliciting feedback from students about its then-newly drafted sexual violence policy.
Curious, she clicked through to the email.
Salvino had spent her time at Carleton so far with her nose in her books. She describes herself as extremely studious, a straight A student in an honours human rights and law program who won academic awards. In fact, she was on a semester abroad at American
University in D.C. because she had received the Killam Fellowship. She was an engaged student, she says, but largely stayed out of campus politics.
“I cared a lot about what people thought of me. I didn’t want to make waves,” she says during an interview at a café in Centretown.
The 22-year-old, who spoke over the summer, is excited by what’s about to happen next. She’s heading off to Oxford University in England to pursue a law degree as a Rhodes scholar.
To Salvino, the draft sexual violence policy included in Carleton’s email had some glaring problems.
One was a seemingly purposeful omission of the term “rape culture.” Another was an exception clause she viewed as an escape hatch that would allow the school’s president to selectively avoid using the policy.
Something felt wrong, so she wrote to the student union and the school’s Human Rights Society club to inquire. “I didn’t really know about the politics behind it. I didn’t know about Bill 132, I didn’t know about all the work going on all summer at Carleton, and all the fighting over language like ‘rape culture,’” Salvino says.
In retrospect, she says that academic year between receiving the email in October 2016 and her graduation the following spring was like unknowingly entering a minefield.
“It all just blew up.”
A generation before Salvino enrolled at Carleton, Julie Lalonde had entered a similar minefield.
In 2007, a 24-year-old Carleton student was brutally attacked while working late alone in a chemistry lab on campus. Lalonde, a teaching assistant at the time, discussed what happened with a student originally from Alberta who suggested going down to Carleton’s sexual assault centre to volunteer with its support line.
Carleton didn’t have a centre, nor a support line.
That was a moment that clicked for Lalonde, she says. Other schools had these services, and Carleton did not. So she set out to lobby the school’s administration to create these services on campus, thinking it might take one or two semesters.
“It took six years,” Lalonde says. The long struggle to introduce progressive anti-sexual violence measures at Carleton has been well documented.
In 2016, Carleton professors publicly voiced concerns that the school was taking a bad approach to creating its sexual violence policy, which became mandatory under the 2016 passage of Ontario’s Bill 132.
Dawn Moore, an associate professor at Carleton, told the Citizen at the time that, “I’m lobbying for my institution to raise the bar, not scramble to meet it.”
That same year, Moore co-authored a 133-page report, “The Response to Sexual Violence at Ontario University Campuses,” that concluded universities needed to do a lot better on preventing sexual violence and creating traumainformed processes. Carleton was one of the three Ontario schools discussed in the report.
Carleton was heavily criticized in 2016 for its reluctance to acknowledge there was a “rape culture” on its campus. A mediator contracted by the university to help guide it through the creation of its policy resigned in frustration.
“My totally anecdotal, armchair, newspaper-reader sense of it is that Carleton has had much more difficulty and controversy over this issue, not in any way because they have more sexual violence on campus, it’s just been a different process for them,” says Daphne Gilbert, a University of Ottawa law professor who helped advise her school on its own sexual violence policy.
This is the fray that Salvino entered while perusing her inbox that fateful October day.
DRAFTING OUR TURN
Salvino spent the 2016–17 year wrapped up in a whirlwind of student activism that at times made her and her parents question whether she was compromising her academic future. She penned open letters, petitioned Carleton’s administrators and rallied support from students and professors, but she says the university resisted.
“We were told there was no appetite to reform the policy,” she recalls. “I was so terrified. We were calling out huge institutions. I was really worried we were going to get destroyed.”
The Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) reached out to Salvino and asked her to create a student framework in the absence of a comprehensive university-sanctioned policy. She dove in headfirst, poring over other schools’ policies and travelling across Canada to consult with other student unions.
The result was Our Turn, a survivor-centred framework for sexual-violence prevention. At Carleton, it is only a policy of the student union and not the university itself. However, all clubs and associations that fall under CUSA’s jurisdiction will have to send their members for peer-to-peer training on consent and preventing sexual violence. By then, Salvino says she felt “so incredible, but so burnt out.”
Still, by the fall of 2017, she was ready to take Our Turn countrywide.
Salvino and her organization released a national report card grading 14 Canadian universities’ sexual-assault policies. The average grade was C-.
Some universities complained to Salvino that their bad grades would discourage victims from coming forward. Student unions, on the other hand, embraced Our Turn. It is now on nearly three dozen campuses across Canada and has been an influential tool for local student movements to effect change at their own schools.
Carleton, of course, now has a sexual violence policy in place. As mandated by Bill 132, the school intends to review its policy in the coming academic year.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
Carleton University declined an interview request, but did send a statement: “Carleton University is currently establishing a collaborative process to review the Sexual Violence Policy in order to consider potential changes to clarify the policy. This consultation process will occur throughout the academic year, beginning in September 2018, and will include all members of the Carleton community including, faculty, staff and students.”
The school will also run the sexual assault resistance program developed by Charlene Senn, which is recognized for being the only program in existence that is proven to reduce the incidence of sexual assault for college-aged women.
Salvino would like to see better survivor protections in university policies, such as stopping face-toface meetings between accuser and accused. Administrators also need better training on how to handle complaints from a survivor-centred perspective, she says. She hopes Our Turn will give new and returning students the institutional memory it needs to continue the fight.
Off campus, Salvino is consulting on a federal advisory council on gender-based violence at Status of Women Canada.
According to a spokesperson from SWC, the department received $5.5 million in the 2018 budget to put toward developing and implementing “a national framework to address genderbased violence at post-secondary institutions.”
Quebec, Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba and Nova Scotia have all passed legislation in the same vein as Ontario’s Bill 132.
As her departure date for Oxford draws nearer, Salvino says she’s looking forward to hanging up her student-activist boxing gloves.
She’s grateful for being put to the test and coming out the other side with only a few battle scars.
“I think I’m different now,” she says. “I’m a lot tougher now than