Introduction
By Addy Strickland and Emma Kuzmyk

No one gets into activism on purpose. When it comes to combatting sexualized violence, you don’t wake up one morning and decide “I’m going to fight my university’s administration,” or “I’m going to rewrite my school’s sexualized violence policy;” rather, you listen as an upper-year student tells you which professors to worry about. You cringe while reading poorly worded emails from administration. You decide not to go out because you don’t feel like being cat-called or groped and the walk across campus is dark and empty. You listen as every single one of your female friends tells you they’ve been harassed or assaulted by the end of your first year.

For far too many, sexualized violence is an unfortunate and unexpected side-effect of the post-secondary experience. It’s something you’re forced to learn about, even though it might not appear on any of your course syllabi. Statistics Canada found that one in ten women were sexually assaulted while attending post-secondary institutions in 2019 alone, and that 71% of all students experienced some form of unwanted sexualized behaviour.[1] These statistics are shocking enough at face value, but those involved in prevention and response work will also concur that both are most likely under-representations due to ongoing barriers in reporting.

For decades, activists and allies have been fighting to change those statistics and to rewrite the culture of sexualized violence on post-secondary campuses. There have been protests, petitions, sit-ins, walkouts, and endless campaigns, alongside tireless work towards policy and systems change. Our own experiences encompass only four short years of activist work—much of which would not have been possible without the work of those who preceded us—and it often feels as if we crammed decades of learning into what is, in the grand scheme of things, not a whole lot of time.

Coming to the end of those four years, as most senior students are prone to do, we started to reminisce on everything that happened. What went on in the classroom was, perhaps unsurprisingly, only a small part of our conversation. Instead, we remembered writing an open letter to university administration part way through our first semester. We remembered marching onto the basketball court in the middle of an open house with megaphones and linked arms. We remembered planning protests from the basement of an old residence hall, and painting words of resistance onto the windows of another. We remembered how it felt to march across campus in a pack of badass women, and to scream our worth at the top of our lungs. We also remembered how it felt to be told “no” and “never” and “not here” over and over again. We remembered the dozens, if not hundreds of stories of trauma we heard from our peers, and we remembered sitting across the boardroom from administrators trying to hold ourselves together while they asked us to prove that increased student supports were necessary.

Reminiscing about everything we went through and everything we learned in the process, we wanted to create something to honour the experiences we had while also passing on what we learned to future generations of activists. Somewhat jokingly, we threw out the idea of writing a book—we’d both written, published, and performed in various other media, so why not tackle something bigger? Evidently, we quickly stopped joking. Rather than only telling our own stories, however, we wanted to include the voices of other activists across Canada who were doing similar work and facing similar challenges. Hence, the idea of writing a book morphed into the anthology you’re holding now.

Throughout this anthology, you’ll find an array of stories, poems, and speeches written by student activists—both past and present—fighting sexualized violence on Canadian campuses. Sending out our call for submissions in 2021, the goal was to achieve as wide a range of stories as possible, representing the diversity of experience that exists across Canada, across campuses, and even within movements. We wanted to show the world the amazing work being done by students that is so often overlooked, and so rarely celebrated. The stories presented in this anthology come from twenty-four activists from seven provinces, writing about their experiences at fifteen different post-secondary institutions. Each of the stories are unique and demonstrate the diversity we were looking to achieve, yet by virtue of the work we do, also highlight the common experience of fighting for action and justice on issues of sexualized violence.

Across three categories—What We Faced, What We Built, and How We Survived—this anthology makes space for conversations about active protest, collective action, contentious movements, community care, institutional failure, combatting rape culture, creating solutions, and more. In the first section, What We Faced, our contributors write about and reflect on what it’s like to confront post-secondary institutions and their troubling policies (or lack thereof) head on. Among others, you’ll hear from the two of us, as well as from a few of our peers, about various movements that occurred during our time at St. Francis Xavier University (StFX); from Michelle Roy, who led a series of protests against sexualized violence at Mount Allison University in 2020; and from Caitlin Salvino, who founded the national OurTurn movement in 2016.

In What We Built, you’ll read stories about how peer support programs had their start at various institutions, including StFX, Dalhousie, and the University of Toronto. You’ll hear from Shelby Miller, who founded a near-national ribbon campaign in support of survivors; from Cameron Smith, who worked to rewrite Acadia University’s sexualized violence policy; and from Maddie Brockbank, who has led award winning work engaging men in conversations about sexualized violence prevention at McMaster. In How We Survived, you’ll hear from the co-founders and co-chairs of Students for Consent Culture Canada (SFCC)—a national, student-led non-profit supporting student activists across the country—about how they integrate practices of care into their work. You’ll read stories about recovery, about community care, about taking back power, and so much more.

Scattered amongst these stories and personal essays, you’ll find a variety of poetry, as well as transcribed speeches from the women’s marches, Take Back the Night events, and protests that our contributors have organized and spoken at. We don’t believe that activism has any one form, so writing about it shouldn’t either. In our own activist experience, creative work was a place of grounding, and a way to deal with the messy, complicated emotions that came with standing up for what was right; it was an alternate means of expressing what was often too difficult to process or say out-loud. In many cases, poetry came first, and activism was a way of putting poetic imaginings into action. And so, it has a home here on our pages—offering a window into the hearts and souls of student activists from across the nation.

It would be unjust to begin, as well, without acknowledging those who have come before us. Activists have been speaking up against institutions for decades, fighting for policies where before there were none and then continuously fighting to improve them, and believing and supporting survivors since before there were specific platforms and hashtags created to do so. It was their bravery and commitment to justice that have made the activism detailed in this book possible, and through our own work, we hope to continue honouring theirs.

This work has never been easy. It can be exhausting, isolating, triggering, and at times, frustrating beyond words. Often, it can feel as if you’re fighting a battle that can never be won, and yet, there are wins happening all around us. For many of us who are just leaving our campuses, we might not understand how much change we’ve made until we think back on what our campuses looked like four, five years ago—recognizing change, especially gradual, messy, high-level, complicated change that happens over the span of so many years, is not an easy task. Sometimes, in order to see the progress we’ve made we have to stop and reflect on where we started, and on how far we’ve come. We hope that the stories highlighted here will help start you, our wonderful reader, on that path of reflection and recognition, and that you might find hope and energy in the collective memory and experience of our contributors.

[1] “One in Ten Women Students Sexually Assaulted in a Postsecondary Setting.” Statistics Canada, September 14, 2020. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/200914/dq200914a-eng.htm.