When the man who Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz says raped her in her dorm bed two years ago was found not guilty in September, the visual-arts student started lugging her mattress around campus; she says she won’t put it down until he is expelled. Known around the world as “mattress girl,” Sulkowicz is an icon in the battle against sexual assault on university campuses, and one of 23 students from Columbia and Barnard who filed a federal complaint against their schools alleging their sexual-assault cases were mishandled. Since then, celebrities including Jon Hamm and Kerry Washington have joined the White House’s new “It’s On Us” campaign, which encourages everyone, especially men, to prevent on-campus sexual assaults. Now, California has passed its “Yes Means Yes” law, which makes schools evaluate cases in relation to a new definition of consent as “an affirmative . . . agreement to engage in sexual activity” or risk losing their funding. And the U.S. Department of Education is cracking down on universities for underreporting cases, taking too long to deal with them and not supporting victims in a sensitive way.

Here in Canada, the story couldn’t be more different, and more the same. Very few Canadian universities have policies or university-funded services that deal specifically with sexual assault, even though the prevalence is the same: nearly one in five women will be sexually assaulted as students, according to Charlene Senn, a women’s studies professor at the University of Windsor who is an expert on rape prevention. While some universities have tried to address the problem, new cases are making headlines every month, not to mention incidents underlining a pervasive rape culture on campuses. Last month, Carleton students donned “F–k Safe Spaces” T-shirts, and frosh at both St. Mary’s University in Halifax and UBC in Vancouver were castigated last year for an offensive chant about non-consensual underage sex.

There is a patchwork of policies on Canadian campuses, according to Jessica McCormick, national chairperson for the Canadian Federation of Students, but the facts are clear: Women aged 15 to 24 experience the highest rates of sexual violence in the country, according to a 2013 Statistics Canada report that relied on police-reported data. It also found that women reported 460,000 incidents of sexual assault to social-service providers in 2009, but less than 10 per cent were reported to the police.

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Meanwhile, Canadian universities are not required to make public or even keep track of the number of sexual assaults reported to them, making it difficult to get accurate data. For example, campus security at Queen’s University reported one incident of sexual assault in 2013, according to its website.

Universities typically resist conversations about the issue for fear of negative publicity and how it might affect their reputation and ability to raise funds. But in a rare move, McGill University hired Bianca Tétrault earlier this year as its first harm-reduction liaison officer once they discovered three McGill football players had been charged in 2012 with forcibly confining and sexually assaulting a Concordia student. (The cases are ongoing.) Since McGill doesn’t have a sexual-assault policy, that will be Tétrault’s first priority. Any comprehensive university policy needs to have a clear definition of what sexual assault is and a “pro-survivor approach,” she says, meaning that academic accommodations, counselling and other support systems are available for victims from the minute they come forward.

While the University of Windsor also has no sexual-assault policy, its Bystander Initiative, led by Senn, is one of the most respected examples of rape prevention on campuses in Canada. Through workshops, students learn how to recognize sexual assaults, intervene appropriately and support survivors. The university funded the project in 2010, shortly after a bunch of male students were caught, more than once, peering into residence bathrooms as female students showered. But Senn says the university still has a lot of work to do. “I was horrified when I recently typed in ‘sexual assault’ and ‘rape’ into our website and found you don’t get any information telling you what to do or where to go if you’ve been assaulted,” she says. “It’s a very confusing process to find resources.”

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