Sexual Violence

In the province of Ontario, Canada, universities and colleges were mandated in 2016 by government legislation to develop and implement campus sexual violence policies. In this chapter, the author attempts to draw out some of these potentially taken-for-granted assumptions about sexual violence in the interests of suggesting how such assumptions might be exposed and challenged. The problems with campus sexual violence policies are multifaceted and complex. That Black and Indigenous faculty, students, and staff had to be specifically targeted for consultation on the draft sexual violence policy speaks volumes about the extent to which “women” as a category continues to be widely imagined in many settings as white by default. Smith suggests that activists like Wells-Barnett deny the “veracity of any white woman’s testimony against a Black man”, thereby “subordinat[ing] the sexual to the racial dimension of interracial rape”.