Campus Advocacy
How we’ve helped campuses
Our team provides a range of resources and supports to students looking to take action on their campuses. This could be in areas of policy development and recommendations or in building sustainable anti-violence movements on campus.
What we can provide to schools
Resources and assistance in creating an on-campus student-led task force;
Support for students on institutional committees regarding sexual and gender-based violence;
Assistance in creating survivor-centric motions (i.e. acknowledging rape culture and survivor rights);
Support in grading your policy;
Support in starting an open letter campaign;
Materials and training on sexual violence prevention;
Guidance in the creation of an Internal Student Union Sexual Violence Policy (see below);
In addition to the resources already prepared, we are able to work individually with student unions/groups to continue developing resources as needed.
Student Union Internal Gendered and Sexualized Violence Policies
The student movement has historically been a place where a lot of gendered and sexual violence has occurred, whether at conferences, congresses, events, or at protests. It is time for us to begin to address this culture head on and remove predators from leadership positions in our movements, and holding each other accountable for the harm we cause each other in a concrete way. Student unions are gaps in jurisdiction within university sexual violence policies as universities have limited authority within student unions’ contexts of employment, official decision-making bodies, clubs, and services - necessary to maintain the independence of the union.
In 2017, after an outcry from their membership over mishandled complaints, the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) began the process of creating an internal policy and procedure for dealing with gendered and sexualized violence, which after a year and a half of consultation, writing, and re-writing, was passed by the SSMU Legislative Council on October 11th, 2018. Members of our SFCC team were involved in this process, and our hope is that the SSMU’s Gendered and Sexualized Violence Policy (GSVP), and the work of the team who led the project, Caitlin Salvino, Bee Khaleeli, and Priya Dube, can serve as a document and process for other student unions to refer to and better in approaching this work for their associations. We encourage anyone who wishes to start a similar process to read through all of the documents here and to reach out to advocacy@sfcccanada.org with any questions!
1) The GSVP Report - prepared by the GSVP team, this documents the events leading up to the creation of the policy, including consultations, approaches, and problems that the team ran into.
When using the GSVP report, please cite the report as follows:
Salvino, Caitlin, Bee Khaleeli, and Priya Dube. ‘Gendered and Sexual Violence Policy Report’. Montreal, QC: Students’ Society of McGill University, 2018.
2) Motion to Adopt the Gendered and Sexualized Violence Policy - passed by Legislative Council
3) The SSMU Gendered and Sexualized Violence Policy - the actual governing document
4) The GSVP Implementation Guide - explains the GSVP in a more accessible manner
3) SSMU Example of centralization of Sexual Violence resources on their website