Rape Culture In Canada

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Wente (2013) defined rape culture as the systemic attitudes that diminishes, dismisses, deflects and normalizes sexual assault. The public has been exposed to some very open displays of rape culture on Canadian campuses over the last few years. At Saint Mary’s University in Halifax in 2013, student leaders led several hundred first-year students in a chant that went like this: “Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight; U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for grab that ass.” Days later came reports of a similar cheer, this time at the University of British Columbia, a school that was in the midst of coping with a series of frightening sexual assaults (Tamburri & Sampson, 2014). In 2014, McMaster University suspended an engineering student group over a songbook containing what the university calls “sexist, violent and degrading” material. The songbook contained around 25 cheers and included multiple references to violent rape, murder, incest, bestiality, and sex with underage females. It was also rife with misogynistic and …show more content…

References were made to wean and convert lesbians and virgins into useful, productive members of society. Rape culture isn’t only visible on campuses. In November 2015, a group of faculty members at the University of Calgary brought forth a complaint against Justice Robin Camp for comments he made during a sexual assault trial that could be considered victim-blaming. Camp informed the survivor that she should have kept her knees together and situated herself as to not be positioned for the assault. He went on to inform his court that sex and pain sometimes went together, which could be interpreted as dismissing the survivor’s experience (Hoper,

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