This text is part of the special report The State of Quebec 2022
Can you change the world with your keyboard? Taking a stand on digital social media, is it “real” activism? What boundaries can we draw between the “virtual world” and the “world outside the Web”? What are the repercussions of online social movements like #MeToo on public policy, the media, feminist movements and society?
An underestimated parallel “pandemic”
In 2020, the United Nations described violence against women as a “phantom pandemic”. This formulation reflects an alarming situation denounced by UN Women, which, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, has observed an increase in gender-based violence in many countries. In a pre-pandemic situation, in 2019, statistics from the UN agency revealed that more than 243 million young girls and women aged 15 to 49 had suffered sexual or physical violence from an intimate partner in the world. . These data on sexual assault are worrying, especially since it is generally understood that they underestimate systemic violence of which girls and women are the main targets.
In Quebec, in 2001, the government adopted a definition of the term sexual assault in its Guidelines on Sexual Assault, which emphasizes the diversity of strategies used by perpetrators of sexual assault and the consequences of these acts on sexual assault. survivors.
The data and statistics currently available in the province to estimate the prevalence of sexual assault come mainly from the Department of Youth Protection, the police and agencies conducting population surveys. However, they only paint a partial picture of the situation. In fact, according to the Institut national de santé publique du Québec, “no survey currently makes it possible to provide estimates of experiences of sexual assault during life or during adulthood from a representative sample. of adult Quebecers ”.
Among minors, according to the Marie-Vincent Foundation, it is estimated that one in five girls and one in ten boys are victims of sexual assault in childhood. Additionally, we know very little about survivors from LGBTQIA +, immigrant, racialized, Indigenous, Afro-descendant, or physically or mentally disabled communities, although it is generally understood that these individuals are more likely to be targeted by this violence because of the various systems of oppression and marginalization they may experience.
Despite their high prevalence, sexual assault remains globally little denounced to formal bodies. However, social movements denouncing sexual violence are changing the situation and allowing a growing number of survivors to free their word, whether by disclosure (on digital social media, mainly) or by denouncing the police. .
Online denunciation social movements like #MoiAussi
Quebec has experienced several waves of denunciations of sexual violence on the Web, among which we find the movements # AgressionNonDénoncé, #OnYouCroit, #StopCultureDuViol, # Moi-aussi and the wave of denunciations of July 2020. According to Statistics Canada, “the increase the highest quarterly rate of sexual assaults reported by the police after the #MoiAussi movement was recorded in Quebec, where the rate swelled by 61% compared to the quarterly average observed before # Moi-aussi ”. However, it is unclear whether all these complaints have been authorized by the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions for indictment and trial, whether some have already led to guilty verdicts or whether they have not been followed up. due in particular to the cumbersome nature of the various stages of the judicial process.
Although they raise many legal, social and political issues, these social movements born on the Web are the symptom of a significant loss of trust between the population and the criminal justice system as well as other authorities and authorities. formal denunciation mechanisms, as illustrated in the documentary The perfect victim by Monic Néron and Émilie Perreault, released in the summer of 2021.
According to a report by News published in 2017, 3 in 1,000 sexual assault complaints would result in a criminal conviction in Canada. In 2017, The Globe and Mail also conducted a survey showing that in Canada, one in five complaints of sexual assault is deemed “unfounded”.
Without entering into a war of numbers that can quickly become sterile depending on how we define sexual assault, it is important to say that this violence is generally little denounced and that, among those that are denounced, very few lead to a criminal conviction. . Thus, these online social movements against the culture of rape and sexual violence also send the message of an aspiration for a profound societal and cultural change, even for a revolution of mores in the matter.
Why report on the web?
Survivors report their attackers online for a variety of reasons that are relatively poorly documented. However, their needs and demands are generally broader than a critique of the sexual assault justice system. For many survivors, this stems from a need: that of being heard, believed, listened to; to build a community of support around you; to join a social movement and cultivate a feeling of belonging to it; to protect other survivors and society more generally; or, to have control over his testimony and his story. These different reasons can lead many survivors to withdraw from formal mechanisms of denunciation, deemed obsolete or ill-suited to the diversity of their needs and concerns.
Activism on the Web can also give rise to a resurgence of activist activities in “the real world”, that is to say outside the Web, a sign that these two universes cannot be clearly cut out with a knife in order to distinguish them from one another. For many activists, being part of an online movement and community is a source of motivation and pride, and gives a sense of belonging to a cause and an intimate feminist identity. The Web is also becoming a means of awakening the feminist cause, especially for the young generation.
The cost of denouncing
The wave of denunciations of July 2020, during which many survivors denounced alleged attackers by explicitly listing their names on anonymous lists, led to numerous defamation lawsuits against the administrators of these web pages. For many jurists, this is an attempt to intimidate and muzzle women taking part in public debate. Under the guise of the legal principle of the presumption of innocence, the right to freedom of expression of survivors is generally little or not recognized. There are also several risks inherent in denouncing publicly, including fear of the reaction of those around him and Internet users, and leaving digital traces of his history of sexual assault.
In addition, for some or some, activating on the Web can be compared to a form of “slacktivism”, that is to say a so-called performance or pageantry activism. This can happen in particular when social movements that have become mainstream (general public) are taken over by various institutions and bodies, whether academic, political or linked to the business community, which has the perverse effect of depoliticizing them, sanitizing them and distorting their meaning and first origin.
Finally, cyberviolence and cyberstalking are big issues when it comes to feminist activism online. For many feminists 2.0, reprisals can be felt very quickly, especially from anti-feminist men who also organize themselves online on various platforms to intimidate, threaten death or rape, insult themselves or even themselves. indulge in doxxing, either the online disclosure of private information (IP and residential addresses), or the unauthorized sharing of intimate photos. A study by Amnesty International highlighted the fact that racialized women, particularly journalists and black politicians, are the first targets of insults on the Twitter platform. Unsurprisingly, the primary targets of cyberviolence therefore remain people living at the crossroads of multiple systems of oppression and marginalization.
The effects of online whistleblower movements
Despite this backlash, the mobilization of student groups and feminist activists in Quebec, both online and offline, has led to numerous legislative changes to better support and support victims and survivors. Let us think, among other things, of the abolition of the limitation period allowing a civil prosecution for sexual assault or domestic violence, of the Act to prevent and combat sexual violence in higher education settings, as well as to its counterpart in primary and secondary schools.
The government of Quebec has also set up a committee of experts which published in December 2020 the report Rebuild trust, in which 190 recommendations on domestic and sexual violence are made. Among these recommendations: the establishment of a specialized court in matters of sexual assault, access to free legal advice from the moment of denunciation, continuous support and information at all stages of the judicial process, consistency between decisions criminal justice, family justice or youth protection, in particular through the creation of a position of judicial coordinator, or the offer of specialized training for medical, psychosocial and judicial workers, the police and to actresses and actors in the legal world in matters of sexual assault and domestic violence. While these initiatives and legislative changes are far from having settled everything, they are nevertheless a sign of societal change and of the growing concern of our political authorities in the fight against this violence.
The struggles against sexual violence and the culture of rape
Social movements on the Web and outside the Web will now have to take into account several elements to truly reach all survivors. This will be all the more relevant when these movements are tinged with inequalities or power relations, or when victims and survivors do not fit into the scales of respectability or heterocisnormativity. These movements will also have to seriously consider other forms of justice and reparation (restorative justice, civil law, Human Rights Commission, transformative justice, for example) and invest more in them, in order to better align with needs of marginalized communities who do not wish to rely on the criminal and penal systems alone.
One thing is clear: we only see part of the specter of the phantom pandemic caused by sexual violence. More studies will be needed, both statistical and qualitative, in order to paint a more accurate, up-to-date and more complex portrait of the realities experienced by survivors of sexual assault. Society will also have to stand up against the culture of rape, which tends to make victims of sexual assault feel guilty while relieving the perpetrators of these attacks of responsibility and normalizing their actions. We must not leave behind the authors of sexual violence, violence which is symptoms of our collective and institutional failure to stem this social problem at its root. And it starts with prevention, from an early age.
This text is an excerpt adapted from The State of Quebec 2022. Its full version can be read in the collective work available in bookstores and online.