Crucial Voices: Report on SFCC Student Consultations for the National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence, 2020-2021

Students for Consent Culture Canada (SFCC) is an organisation dedicated to supporting intersectional and grassroots anti-sexual-violence advocacy on campuses across Canada. We serve as a hub of resources, tools, and institutional memory to foster student engagement and leadership. As a part of the National Action Plan to End Gender Based Violence, from November 2020 to March 2021, SFCC consulted with a diverse range of key informants, organisations, and individual students from across the country, in interviews, group consultations and online surveys.

Our student consultations painted a troubling but ultimately hopeful picture. Their experiences show that having policies in place is only the starting point for addressing and reducing gender-based violence (GBV) on postsecondary campuses. Students reported failures to support and accommodate survivors, victim-blaming and discriminatory treatment, exclusion from meaningful consultation, and serious gaps between policy and practice. These experiences magnified the harms of gender-based violence, eroded trust in their institutions, and in a number of cases, led students to postpone or cut short their education.

What gives us hope is that students are not accepting the status quo, but calling for postsecondary institutions to do better across Canada. Survivors are advocating for gender-based violence prevention, accommodation, support, consultation, and leadership that are inclusive and accessible to all. This means coordinated, streamlined services and reporting mechanisms. It means more comprehensive and equity-informed training for students, staff and faculty, and an increase in direct financial support of student survivor advocacy and peer-led services. Our participants told us that student-led initiatives had a positive impact on their sense of safety, yet this work is generally performed for little or no compensation. We want this to change. Most of all, mitigating and ending gender-based violence will require strong commitments from all levels of government to fund prevention and support efforts, and to hold institutions accountable for fostering safe and accessible educational environments.