Defining Gender-Based Violence

I purposefully have chosen to address the phenomenon of gender-based violence, which includes the study of violence against women but also explores violence across the gender spectrum between masculinity and femininity, including gender-non-binary and transgender identities. A focus on gender, instead of just women, “encompasses the gendered ideas about masculinity and femininity that place hegemonic men not just above women, but also above non-hegemonic men and non-heteronormative individuals” (Bardall et al., Reference Bardall, Bjarnegård and Piscopo2020: 918). The study of gender-based violence is also necessarily intersectional, as violence impacts people in distinct ways based on their multiple and interlocking identities. Racialized, dis/abled, poor, religious minorities and Indigenous gender minorities are by far the most frequent targets of some of the most debilitating forms of violence in almost every setting. Yet despite this, policies aimed at ending gender-based violence rarely include attention to its intersectional impacts.

Researchers intentionally define violence broadly along a continuum that manifests itself in many forms including, but not limited to, murder, rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalking, coercive control, verbal violence, psychological violence, economic violence, emotional violence, and/or environmental violence. Violence “can encompass neglect, abuse, harassment, microaggressions, erasure and exploitation” (Bruckert and Law, Reference Bruckert and Law2018: 11). Violence along this continuum has devastating impacts on its targets, wherever it is located on the continuum itself—from silencing and oft-experienced microaggressions, to verbal and/or nonverbal harassment online or offline, to unwanted sexual touching, to “everyday” exhausting sexism. In women's shelters and transition homes, service providers use the Power and Control Wheel developed by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs in Duluth, Minnesota, to help women understand gender-based violence. The wheel includes a wide array of examples of intimate partner violence which are delineated around several spokes, with the centre or hub of the wheel anchoring each spoke to the words “power and control” (Coercive Control Collective, 2018). Power and control are what gendered violence is all about—in all of its forms. You cannot understand it, nor can you eradicate it, without addressing structural inequalities in society.

It is commonplace to see gender-based violence routinely reported in the Canadian media, although cases of intimate partner violence (IPV) will often not be judged newsworthy unless it involves femicide or is particularly heinous or does not involve racialized victims or survivors. If we take a snapshot of top media stories from April of this year, it is quite easy to find reports of gender-based violence. Some examples that appeared last month include reports of the atrocities of wartime rape of women and children in Ukraine perpetrated by Russian soldiers that made headlines in Canada in late April after foreign affairs minister Mélanie Joly brought attention to the issue in a series of interviews and tweets (Paas-Lang, Reference Paas-Lang2022). Another involves the mayor of Woodstock, Ontario, who was recently charged with five counts of sexual assault involving two separate women that reportedly occurred between August 2017 and April 5 of this year (he was put on a paid leave of absence while police continued their investigation) (Trevithick, Reference Trevithick2022). A third tells the story of Shantelle Murphy and her two children who were found murdered in their Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, home when police discovered them after responding to a fire on April 10 (her partner and the father to the two children has since been charged) (Cram, Reference Cram2022). A fourth covers an April 18 story where the RCMP announced that they were reopening 242 sexual assault investigations after reviewing more than 30,000 that occurred between 2015 and 2017 but were deemed to be “unfounded”—this following the Globe and Mail's blistering report into how police routinely disregard sexual assault allegations across the country (Tunney, Reference Tunney2022). The list goes on and on and on, and similar stories repeat themselves in the media every month.

Perhaps not surprisingly, statistics on incidents of all forms of gender-based violence have also not improved in Canada in decades—and, in some cases, instead of improvements, we see things getting steadily worse. One woman is killed by her intimate partner approximately every six days in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2021). In the first six months of 2021, 92 women and girls were killed in Canada (14 more than during the same period in 2020 and 32 more than the same period in 2019) (Miller, Reference Miller2021). Twelve per cent of femicide victims were Indigenous, more than double their percentage in the Canadian population. Seventy-nine per cent of the over 100,000 (known) people over aged 15 who experienced intimate partner violence were women, according to police-reported data—and we know that much less is reported than actually takes place (Canadian Women's Foundation, 2022). According to self-reported data (in 2018), 44 per cent of women who have ever been in an intimate partner relationship (approximately 6.2 million women aged 15 years or older) reported some form of “psychological, physical, or sexual abuse in the context of an intimate relationship in their lifetime” (Canadian Women's Foundation, 2022). Sixty-one per cent of Indigenous women and 67 per cent of LGBTQ2S+ women in Canada reported experiencing IPV in their lifetime—one in five LGBTQ2S+ women experienced some form of IPV in the past year (almost double the reporting from heterosexual women). Fifty-five per cent of women with disabilities reported experiencing some form of IPV in their lifetime. While reports of IPV have indicated incidents have likely increased during the pandemic (according to numbers of women who have tried to access shelters and transition homes), Statistics Canada has not collected gender-based IPV data since 2019, so we don't have accurate data that confirms this yet (Hayes et al., Reference Hayes, Renzetti and Grant2022).

Reporting rates for sexual assault and sexual touching are low in Canada. Rates increased slightly in the 1980s but levelled off in the 1990s and have been on a steep decline ever since (Craig, Reference Craig, MacDonald and Dobrowolsky2021: 102). Fewer than 10 per cent of sexual assault survivors will report offences to the police. Despite improvements to directives to police and to gender-based violence laws themselves, conviction rates have not improved in over three decades. And police are investigating less of these reports over time (Craig, Reference Craig, MacDonald and Dobrowolsky2021: 102).

The Centre for Research & Education on Violence against Women & Children, the University of Toronto and the Canadian Labour Congress conducted the country's first national survey on harassment and violence in the workplace in the spring of this year—another area of gender-based violence plagued by low reporting rates. Almost 5,000 people from a variety of workspaces, including health care, social assistance and public administration, participated in the survey conducted between October 2020 and April 2021. Seventy-one per cent of those surveyed experienced at least one form of harassment and violence or sexual harassment and violence in the two years prior to the survey, with gender-diverse individuals being the most likely to report experiences of all forms of harassment and violence (Centre for Research and Education on Violence against Women and Children, 2022).

In the political sphere, reports of gender-based violence in political spaces were widespread across the country at all levels of government. A 2018 Canadian Press survey of political staff of cabinet ministers, MPs and senators found that 29 per cent had experienced sexual harassment and 9 per cent had been sexually assaulted. Of those experiencing sexual harassment, the vast majority (78 per cent) did not report it for a variety of reasons, including concern that reporting would negatively impact their careers. Examples of recent male politicians who have been identified as committing some form of gender-based violence include Brampton mayor and former Conservative Party of Canada leadership candidate Patrick Brown (who was deemed “cleared” by some because the advances he made to one former staffer happened when she was 19 instead of being reportedly under-age) and disgraced former senator Don Meredith (who used his position of power to have sex with a minor on numerous occasions). Just before I taped this address today, I read a CBC account of the “everyday” violence on the campaign trail being inflicted on racialized, women-identified candidates for the current Ontario provincial election, including racist and hateful defacing of campaign signs as well as verbal hate-filled insults at campaign stops and at door-to-door canvassing in neighbourhoods (Watters, Reference Watters2022).

Gender-based violence is also present within the political science discipline itself. The Women's Caucus of the American Political Science Association organized a short course at their 2018 annual conference under the title #MeTooPoliSci (following from the #MeToo movement that drew international attention to sexual harassment and assault after the 2007 campaign from black feminist activist Tarana Burke and then a decade later when actress Alyssa Milano—and countless others—brought attention to sexual harassment in the entertainment industry as well as in other workplaces around the world). #MeTooPoliSci established a research team which was awarded a $1 million NSF grant “to address the problem of sexual harassment in the academic discipline of political science” (#MeTooPoliSci ADVANCE, 2022). While a similar movement hasn't yet taken hold in the Canadian political science discipline, attention to harassment, sexual harassment, sexism and racism has been raised at a series of CPSA pre-conference workshop sessions on gender and political science at the University of British Columbia in 2019, and these themes were also raised during several panels at last year's annual online conference.

Gender-Based Violence Research in the Discipline

As part of the #MeTooPoliSci research project, Nadia E. Brown, the then immediate past president of APSA's Women's Caucus for Political Science, assembled a group of researchers to deliver a 2019 special issue of the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy on the topic of “Me Too Political Science” (Brown, Reference Brown2019). The fact that this special issue was in a more specialized gender-based journal, instead of a more mainstream, generalist political science journal, was not surprising, as most attention to gender-based violence has tended to be interdisciplinary, with little intersection to the mainstream discipline of political science. Gender-based violence research is often found in women's and gender studies, sociology, social work, psychology and law but rarely in political science. Patricia Strach conducted a 2019 study of the flagship journal of the American Political Science Association, the American Political Science Review, to see how often articles published in the APSR used words associated with some common forms of gender-based violence, including “sexual assault,” “sexual harassment” or “sexual misconduct.” Out of 25,369 potential articles in the APSR, only 39 used these words and fewer still (14) used the exact phrases—this represents essentially 0 per cent (0.15 per cent, to be exact) of articles in the APSR. Strach then decided to look for some more random, or what she called “ridiculous,” words to search as a comparator and landed on the words “dogs,” “cats” and “chickens” as a first grouping and then “beer,” “soda” and “chips” as the second grouping. She found 96 articles in the APSR used the words “dogs,” “cats” or “chickens” and 185 used the words “beer,” “soda” or “chips.” This worked out to 0.38 per cent and 0.73 per cent, accordingly. She didn't conclude that sexual harassment was less important than dogs or chips, but she did conclude that “all of these things matter very little to the discipline. Even in this sorry group, in which none of the searches accounted for even 1 per cent of total articles, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and sexual misconduct finish last” (Strach, Reference Strach2019: 13).

While I didn't replicate Strach's study for our flagship journal, I did review the titles and abstracts of all articles published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science to see if any of the following terms were included in any titles, abstracts or keywords over the course of its publishing history: in particular, I looked for the terms “gender-based violence,” “violence against women,” “domestic violence,” “family violence,” “sexual assault,” “sexual harassment,” “battered women,” “intimate partner violence” and/or “#MeToo” or just “MeToo.” Since 1968, the word “violence” appears in either the title of an article or in an abstract or keyword search a total of 11 times. Out of the 11 articles, two address Indigenous violence (including sexual assault of children in residential schools) and three address gender-based violence or sexual harassment (and I am an author or co-author of two of these). While the CJPS has not published as many articles as the APSR—only 2,207 articles over its history to date—these five articles make up a lower percentage than Strach's study of similar words in articles in the APSR, at 0.002 per cent. Again, though, essentially 0 per cent.

Many of you may be asking, So what? You may also be wondering why I have been talking so long about such a “periphery” topic for our discipline. But my argument here is that this topic isn't peripheral at all. And Strach agrees. Gender-based violence, sexual harassment and sexual assault are all about power, and the study of power is supposed to be what we do at the core of political science. According to Strach:

It would be easy to say that things are different here in Canada than in the United States, but clearly they are not. And like Strach, I think we have a duty to take on this research, because to ignore it is to do a disservice to society and would be turning a blind eye to core questions about power and inequality. The study of gender-based violence is not a niche topic; it is about the abuse of power, and it is inherently political.

Researching Gender-Based Violence

Like their counterparts in the US, some well-known feminist Canadian political scientists have raised important questions and gathered useful data on gender-based violence. Similarly, this research is often published in alternative venues, is interdisciplinary and, like much feminist political science (FPS), is not well known by generalists in the mainstream of the discipline (Vickers, Reference Vickers2015). Caroline Andrew was one of the earliest FPS scholars to make mention of violence against women in her Reference Andrew1984 presidential address on women and the welfare state. She argued that service provision in transition homes for “battered women” is better left as a welfare state provision that is “women-controlled,” as opposed to state-controlled, because it would “give a different model of providing service—a specifically female model” (1984: 681). What Andrew didn't mention was that funding for shelters and transition homes for women victims of violence, as well as attention to improved laws to address the issue of gender-based violence, would never have been on government agendas were it not for grassroots women's groups lobbying efforts (Collier, Reference Collier2008). Along with the ask for money has always been a demand for a feminist approach to these services alongside feminist control over programs.

As women's movement activism in Canada grew to include a variety of “women's issues,” violence against women and attention to intimate partner violence also grew in Canada in the 1970s and into the 1980s. Yet instead of a feminist approach to the problem, more state attention went to law-and-order approaches that missed the narrative surrounding power and control inside of patriarchal structures that were the root causes of violence (Sharma, Reference Sharma1997). S. Laurel Weldon's Reference Weldon and Laurel2002 cross-national 36-country (including Canada) study of violence against women policy is an important political science analysis of why and when governments will respond to gender-based violence through increased service delivery, public awareness campaigns and positive public policy solutions (Weldon, Reference Weldon and Laurel2002). She argues that strong autonomous women's movement activism is key, as opposed to other factors often cited in political science research, including the number of women in public office, political culture, region or religion. She further found that countries with strong women's movement actors that worked in tandem with women's policy agencies were more likely to ensure policy responses are enacted and that services were not clawed back. My own research on provincial-level attention to the problem of violence against women found that political party had some impact on government responsiveness levels in that left- and centre-left parties were more likely to respond favourably to strong women's movement demands than right- or centre-right parties in power. The latter will spend similar amounts of money on the category of gender-based violence but will put more of that money into reinforcing law-and-order responses which are often misaligned with women's movement demands (Collier, Reference Collier2008).

In 1997, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women—at the time, a strong national-level and increasingly intersectional voice of the women's movement in Canada—published a “Voter's Guide” with an entire chapter on male violence against women. That chapter highlighted the problem with the state-preferred law-and-order approach to gender-based violence (GBV): “Confining the government initiatives to legal ones can make us dependent on law and order instead of positive social change. Promoting law and order has sometimes won elections, but it doesn't reduce violence against women” (Sharma, Reference Sharma1997: 65–66).

Feminist legal scholar Elizabeth Sheehy argues that while the law is “an important tool in advancing women's equality rights, law alone cannot end this violence until all women's equality is fully realized” (Reference Sheehy1999: 62). Indeed, Elaine Craig (Reference Craig, MacDonald and Dobrowolsky2021) notes that while the laws that are “on the books” have advanced significantly since the 1980s, the interpretation and application of those laws remains problematic. Craig illustrates this with three recent sexual assault legal cases that all saw decisions that seemed to embrace legal traditions from the 1800s in Canada more than the progressive laws we now have in place in the current century. In 1892, Canada's Criminal Code only punished rape if it was committed by someone other than a woman's husband, and convictions were impossible unless a woman fought back violently and immediately reported the incident to “rebut the presumption that the complaint was false” (Sheehy, Reference Sheehy1999: 63). Yet these 1800s-era assumptions appear to explain the problematic legal decisions in Craig's Reference Craig, MacDonald and Dobrowolsky2021 study, including that involving former CBC radio personality Jian Ghomeshi's trial verdict (in 2016) which hinged on the confused responses of Ghomeshi's victims who (sometimes repeatedly) sought contact with Ghomeshi after the violent incidents occurred instead of vigorously fighting back and reporting the assaults immediately. Similarly, Judge Robin Camp's 2014 decision to acquit a rapist of a teenaged Indigenous girl was rooted in outdated assumptions about how a survivor should fight back against a perpetrator who outweighed her by 100 pounds. In this case, Camp wondered during the trial why the Indigenous survivor couldn't have just “kept her knees together” to prevent the assault in the first place, implying that the fact that she didn't must have signalled consent.

It is easy to understand why anti-gender-based-violence advocates have pushed for state responses that move away from law-and-order solutions, as clearly the laws themselves cannot change sexist, heteronormative, patriarchal, racist and misogynist attitudes and norms that continue to permeate Canadian society. Those norms protect heteronormative male dominance and power, and unless that power and related societal inequities are addressed, gender-based violence will continue unabated in Canadian society.

A Call to Intersectional Interdisciplinary FPS Approaches

Feminist political science is well placed to tackle this problem. We are seeing some important attention to GBV from a variety of theoretical lenses, including black feminist intersectional approaches as well from critical disability feminist thought. Today, I would like to draw attention to two interdisciplinary areas of research that additionally hold a lot of promise to address systemic power inequities that are at the root of gender-based violence in this country and elsewhere. The first research area is feminist institutionalism (FI) and the second is Indigenous feminism.

Concluding Thoughts

In my talk today I hope I have begun to make the case for the centrality of the study of gender-based violence in Canada (and elsewhere) to our discipline. This is fundamental work for political science, and this research should not be seen as niche or peripheral. The publication avenues for normalized, oft-cited and well-known political science research presently do not include attention to sexual harassment, sexual assault or gender-based violence. I have argued that this absence is highly problematic for a discipline that purports to centre itself on understanding power—who has it and who doesn't, and how to access it. If political science researchers continue to marginalize gender-based violence research, we are part of the reason why the norms of hegemonic, toxic, heteronormative, white androcentric masculinity continue to define political success, marginalizing those who do not fit this norm.

Beyond that, I also hope I have made a few of you reconsider a supposedly neutral non-normative approach to political science—one that we are often taught to replicate in our training and ensuing research. Nothing is neutral. Everything is political. By choosing a supposedly neutral pathway inside of the discipline, researchers reaffirm the status quo and do not help advance the discipline.

Perhaps some of you have heard of the wonderful podcast that Ethel Tungohan has created called “Academic Aunties.” In this strongly supportive feminist intersectional space, Tungohan often asks guest Aunties a similar question: “Why are political scientists a—holes?” This allows those marginalized and othered in the discipline to vent and have a lane to explore that marginalization. Thus, the podcast allows those same strongly critical and important scholars to explore, find and ultimately be reaffirmed in the work that Dhamoon reminds us “feeds [them] and [their] communit[ies].” We can do meaningful research in political science that is intersectional and that challenges and pushes boundaries to help solve wicked problems like gender-based violence. By incorporating innovative and promising theoretical approaches— including feminist institutionalism and Indigenous feminism, Black and critical disability feminisms, to name a few—we may be able to get closer to positive change in Canada and elsewhere and ultimately help improve the statistics on gender-based violence.

A forthcoming edited collection on gender-based political violence in Canada that I am co-editing with Tracy Raney is one example of the growing attention of feminist political science to gender-based violence that takes up the call to action I started my talk with today. Contributors include next generation FPS scholars willing to push against traditional political science boundaries. As Gina Starblanket reminds us, “Thinking of transformation as departure can be challenging, as it requires a willingness to critically interrogate and perhaps rid ourselves of the attachments that continue to hold many of our relations down” (2021: 137). I believe this is a challenge we can ill afford to avoid.

I conclude my talk with two “manifesta” thoughts from US feminist political scientist Shauna Shames, who wrote a short piece in the #MeTooPoliSci issue on “Why I Do Activist Work within the Discipline.” (Reference Shames2019). Shames starts with her first manifesta axiom that simply states “I am not crazy” and then builds to her last two that I feel are appropriate to end with today:

Thank you for your attention. Merci boucoup.