asked to talk about gendered violence or
violence in the workplace I felt like it
was my role to break the silence well
things have changed since October 2017
we’ve had the me2 movement I’m not a
representative of the me2 movement I’m
not a spokesperson so that leaves us the
question why am I here this morning and
what am I going to talk about so what
I’m going to talk about is my journey
as a feminist and a researcher into the
world of work so in the work at in the
workplace a lot of things can happen
everything from ongoing soul-destroying
harassment to extreme acts of violence
at the same time work offers us a really
good opportunity to make real change and
to create and build a more just and
equitable Society at work we exchange
experiences ideas opinions knowledge
informally and formally because we’re
connected to our co-workers we tend to
listen to them but we’re also among
people who are different from us so
we’re really exposed to diverse ideas
diverse experiences so these workplace
conversations they’re important for
organizations and they’re important for
us personally but more than that
they constitute a layer of public
discourse and for a lot of us it’s at
our work in our workplace conversations
where we really have the opportunity to
debate and deliberate and discuss
important societal issues gendered
violence is an important societal issue
and I’m going to talk to you about how
gendered violence has become a workplace
issue to be discussed in Ontario
workplaces I first began thinking about
gendered violence in the workplace in
1994 when Sharon Chapman called me when
I was working at the sexual assault
center London she had a really simple
indirect question what are you doing
to help women who are being sexually
Sharon had just quit a job that she’d
been at for thirteen years and where she
had been sexually assaulted on a daily
basis for being the only woman in an
otherwise all-male Department if you
bring that up with Sharon now it should
be quick to tell you that it took me
almost a year to get back to her with a
response it’s not something to be proud
of but it’s a reflection of the reality
at the time that we didn’t have even a
nascent let alone a coherent movement to
address workplace sexual harassment
sexual assault in rape crisis centers
across the province didn’t understand
the specific dynamics of sexual violence
when it took place within the context of
the workplace and we weren’t prepared to
support women like Sharon it’s hard to
say why because in the early 80s the
women’s movement had paid attention to
workplace sexual harassment after the
publication of two books in the u.s.
Catherine McKenna published sexual
harassment of working women and in
Canada Constance Backhouse and Leah
Cohen published the secret oppression
sexual harassment of working women these
books were really important because they
gave us language to talk about and
describe disturbing behavior that until
then had to often be considered part of
the job
following this bonding Robicheaux who
was a lead hand cleaner at CFB and north
bay she had been sexually harassed by
her supervisor as she waged a seven-year
battle from 1980 to 1987 that battle
culminated in a Supreme Court decision
that Canadian Human Rights Commission
would recognize sexual harassment as a
responsibility of the employer whether
they knew about the harassment or not
so now armed with some understanding of
the feminist history of workplace sexual
harassment Sharon and I decided that
what we needed to do was to break this
violence again so that she would have a
voice it was through that work that
Jackie Carr found us
so Jackie Carr was the daughter of
Teresa Vince Teresa Vince was murdered
in her workplace Sears in Chatham in
1996 by her supervisor her supervisor
have been harassing and stalking her for
thirteen months prior to her death she
complained and Sears had left her on her
own to deal with the situation even
after her death
Sears continued to refuse to take
responsibility for the sexual harassment
the family and advocates demanded an
inquest into her death at the inquest
Sears hired an American lawyer to
absolve the company of responsibility
with the argument that the murderous
supervisor was not a sexual harasser he
was a persistent pursuer the sexual
assault crisis center in chatham-kent
led by Michelle Shire was up for the
challenge she worked with human rights
lawyer Gerry Sanson and with MPP Pat hoy
to craft apart a private member’s bill
to make changes to the Occupational
Health and Safety Act what the private
member’s bill proposed was at workplace
sexual harassment would become an
occupational health and safety hazard
this is important because if you have a
hazard in your workplace the employer
must remedy it immediately we all have
the right to a safe workplace this was
in sharp contrast with the only remedy
in place at the time which was a human
rights complaint the human rights system
was difficult to navigate and most women
who complained that lay a complaint in
the system found by the time their case
was heard if it was hurt at all they had
already lost their jobs Pat Hoyts
private member’s bill introduced in 2001
didn’t pass three similar private
member’s bill introduced between 2001
and 2003 also failed to pass
so it’s feminists do we continue to do
research on this phenomenon of workplace
sexual harassment the Ontario Coalition
of rape crisis centers partnered with
the Centre for research and education of
violence against women and children and
researcher sandy Welsh in 2004 we
released our report workplace violence
and harassment this report is built on
the personal stories of women who
experienced sexual harassment but we
didn’t just look at the personal stories
we also looked at the context in which
these behaviors were taking place and we
concluded that if we want to end
harassment we have to transform the
inequality and discrimination that is
woven into the culture of so many
workplaces another important finding
from our research is that we have to
expand our analysis of sexual harassment
to take into consideration women’s
social location many of the women that
we spoke to told us that they raised
their ethnic identity their citizenship
status their disability sexual
orientation size language or other
perceived difference was as much at the
root of the harassment as their gender
in 2005 another tragic event further
broadened our understanding of workplace
harassment and violence
Laurie DuPont who was a nurse at Hotel
du Grace Hospital in Windsor Wood was
Marie murdered on the job by her former
partner also a doctor at that hospital
prior to her murder
the doctor had used his access to the
hospital to stalk harass and monitor
Laurie these deaths and other
experiences of harassment and workplace
violence where they were and are the
consequence of women’s inequality both
in the private sphere and in the public
sphere
we were fighting feminists and
professionals with the tools we had so
domestic assault was criminalized we
trained police to be more sensitive in
their response we began to understand
the wide-ranging mental and physical
impacts
a woman’s health and we work with health
care professionals we work to make
social services more responsive to the
needs of survivors and we had
specialized services like sexual assault
centers and rape crisis centers but we
were largely ignoring the problem in the
workplace with their ability to
implement legislation government set out
broad frameworks for systemic change and
they had established a framework for
promoting equality and diversity in the
back in the workplace through humans
right legislation pay equity labor law
and many employers as they went beyond
minimal compliance and began to embrace
these ideas of diversity and inclusion
in the workplace saw improved employee
engagement and productivity gains still
gendered violence remained a largely
invisible problem ignored both by
governments and by employers that
changed in 2009 when the Ontario
government announced changes to the
Occupational Health and Safety Act with
bill 168 so responding to calls from the
Vince family the DuPont family labor
activists and feminists the Minister of
Labour introduced new legislation that
would make violence harassment and
domestic violence occupational health
and safety hazards so they were
following the lead of many other
jurisdictions and making harassment and
violence occupational health and safety
hazards but this was the first time
worldwide that domestic violence had
been recognized as a hazard so we’re
convinced that the worksite is an ideal
site to address domestic violence so we
planned another research project
internationally research was telling us
that women who have experienced domestic
violence have more disruptive work
histories they have to change jobs more
often they have lower personal incomes
and they’re more likely to be employed
in casual and part-time work than women
who haven’t had those experiences at the
same time being employed is a
a pathway out of an abusive relationship
however we had no Canadian research on
this so the Center for research and
education and violence against women and
children partnered with the Canadian
Labour Congress to conduct the
first-ever survey on the impacts of
domestic violence on workers and the
workplace we had over eighty four
hundred workers participate and we had
some startling insights into the impact
of domestic violence and Canadian
workers in Canadian workplaces one in
three Canadian workers had experienced
domestic violence in their lifetime with
rates being higher for women for more
than half of these workers the violence
is following them to work they’re
receiving abusive phone calls text
messages emails abusers are showing up
at work they’re contacting employers are
contacting co-workers they’re being
stalked and harassed at or near their
workplace and sometimes abusers are
preventing them from even going to work
at all oh and all of these impacts are
we see a greater impact for women than
we do for men meanwhile when we were
doing that research feminists are
working with the Ontario government to
craft its never okay an action plan to
stop sexual violence and harassment that
plan included a promise to strengthen
the occupational health and safety
legislation in 2016 a definition of
workplace sexual harassment was added to
the act and employers were required to
educate about workplace sexual
harassment they’re also required to
conduct an investigation if there was an
incident or a complaint twenty years
after the death of Teresa Vince the
Vince family and advocates finally saw
our full list of demands fully
implemented in 2015 the ministry of
labor initiated the changing workplaces
review this is the largest review of
ontario labor law
in decades so we presented our research
on the impacts of domestic violence in
the workplace and we asked for changes
to Ontario Ontario’s labor laws that
would give survivors of domestic
violence paid time off work so that’s
time to consult a lawyer to attend work
or to attend court proceedings to get
counseling for themselves or for their
children time to search for a new place
to live time to look after health needs
we succeeded in putting the issue on the
radar and the reviewers wrote since the
interim report was issued we have become
aware that the issue of domestic
violence leave was a serious omission
the scope of our review we are more
aware of the prevalence of domestic
violence and the importance of providing
leave for victims in early 2018 the
Ontario government passed legislation
that will provide five days of paid
leave and an additional five days of
unpaid leave for survivors of domestic
and sexual assault very recently just
this past week the interior government
announced that we’ll provide training to
workplaces on domestic violence so this
is a really quick walk through more than
20 years of personal experiences and
observations of how we’ve begun to
accept that the workplace is an ideal
site to address gendered violence
there’s much that I left out and the
work of many people that I haven’t been
able to talk about encouraging as these
changes are there’s still a lot left to
do I think we can all recognize the gap
between law and reality so the me2
movement is an illustration of that gap
the leaders who are going to write to
guide the next round of changes are
operating in a time of changing social
norms affirmative consent is changing
the way we understand sexual violence
and that’s extends to the workplace when
emerging research tells us that gay and
lesbian bisexual transgender gender
fluid people experience both domestic
violence and sexual harassment
high rates even higher rates than women
so we’re gonna have to take that into
consideration in our gender analysis um
domestic violence and sexual harassment
have cost implications for individuals
and for society but also for workplaces
so we’re just beginning to be able to
measure those costs and when we need
more accurate measures of those costs so
that we actually know how much money we
can save through prevention work I like
to finish with a quick synopsis of the
lessons that I’ve learned first is the
value and the importance of speaking up
about grave and justices and the
tragedies that result from gendered
violence next is the importance of
amplifying our voices of we as we speak
out through alliances with other
feminists with the labor movement with
lawyers and politicians who get it one
story can be compelling but there are
always others it’s important to work
with academics to gather up these
stories then the stories become evidence
so we want to collaborate form alliances
advocate and provide policy policymakers
with the evidence they need to make
change sexual harassment and domestic
violence in the workplace have been
widely practiced and systematically
ignored we’ve begun to change that me
too has amplified voices in a way that
we’ve never seen before
but when headlines have faded and
journalists have moved on we want the
important impact of me to to be
sustained so we can’t be complacent
there are still women and vulnerable
Berg workers who are isolated and
without a voice there’s only one way
forward lead from where you are stand in
your power stand up for equality when
you see injustice reach out don’t be
silent
thank you you