Survivors walk in unity
Take Back the Night march in P.E.I. capital promotes consent, gender diversity
Rachael Crowder thinks the time is right to talk about gender-based violence.
She’s the executive director of the P.E.I. Rape and Sexual Assault Centre, and she’s been involved in that kind of work for decades.
With the rise of movements like Indigenous-Canadian reconciliation, Me Too and Black Lives Matter, the public is ready for hard conversations, she said.
“Those pieces really brought social justice into the minds of people.”
The night of Sept. 23, Crowder and dozens of supporters took part in Take Back the Night, an event she also helped organize.
Take Back the Night is an annual march that takes place all over the world to raise awareness about gender-based violence and support survivors.
The goals of the march — and the Sexual Assault Awareness Week it was part of — are to promote change, in culture relationships, as well as systems like government and policing, Crowder said.
“It’s all one huge system, which makes it challenging because it’s so interlocked. But all of the pieces matter.”
ORGANIZING
Rachel Adams has played a key role in helping push those goals forward in P.E.I. as the project manager for Take Back the Night and Sexual Assault Awareness Week, the first week of its kind in P.E.I. She’s also been running the social media pages for the events and organized three workshops for survivors over the summer on art, dance and writing.
She also helped to lead the Take Back the Night march from Rochford Square to Confederation Landing in Charlottetown.
“It’s definitely always been something I’ve been super passionate about,” she said, noting she is a survivor of sexual assault.
“Finding a role where I could, I guess, take my skills I have as an event organizer and kind of bring this together for a large group of people in Charlottetown that have been in the same situation as me has been really powerful.”
One of the places those skills have come into play is the ‘Only yes means yes’ consent campaign, which involved educational flyers placed around the city.
“It’s just been talking about how consent has to be given and explaining what that means and giving a lot of education pieces around that,” Adams said.
SAFETY MATTERS
The safety of transgender people was also an important element of the awareness week and Take Back the Night, said Anastasia Preston, who represented Peers Alliance on the event’s advisory council.
“As a large part of genderbased violence, we know that trans individuals face a lot of this violence as well.”
She pointed out how little data Canada has collected on trans people, and much of what is known about violence is based on U.S. statistics.
“There is a huge data gap around the LGBTQ community. It’s slowly being filled in ... but we definitely need more data collection.”
For her part, Crowder also noted the need for more data on gender violence.
In the meantime, anyone who wants to learn more about consent and the ‘Only yes means yes’ campaign can go to onlyyesmeansyes.pe.ca, she said.