Edited by: Jina Aryaan
In 2011, a Toronto police officer told students at a York University crime prevention forum that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized”. This comment sparked outrage, triggering a group of students attending the forum to organize the first SlutWalk Toronto (SWTO) march, igniting a chain of similar events in more than 200 cities across the globe.
Despite the movement’s intention to problematize, combat, and raise awareness of our society’s practice of slut-shaming and victim blaming, the movement was criticized for its narrow view on rape culture; focusing almost exclusively on the perspective of university students. One of the main criticisms focused on the failure of the movement to acknowledge and center the voices of communities who are most disproportionately affected by issues of sexual violence.
In August 2017, I joined SWTO for my second time to experience the movement and explore how it has changed since its inception. I was particularly interested in seeing if, and if so, how, the movement’s initial overlooking and silencing of marginalized communities had been resolved.
While sexual violence is first and foremost a women’s issue, due to the nature of the critique leveraged against SlutWalk, this article will focus on the experiences of women who belong to communities that are socially marginalized and disproportionately exposed to the effects of sexual violence. Specifically, the focus will be on the experiences of women who identify as part of the sex worker community, women of colour and/or Indigenous women, as highlighted in both the critique and this year’s SWTO event.
SlutWalk 2017: The Event
The focus of SWTO 2017 was on sex workers rights and the disproportionate violence that their community experiences. SWTO organizers partnered with Maggie’s Toronto Sex Workers Action Project and featured presenters from Butterfly: Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network, among other organizations, at the event. The nature of these partnerships is important to further SWTO’s anti-violence work, as it centers the voices of community representatives which are at the forefront of the movement for sex workers rights. This amplifies the voices of those women who are able to speak to and characterize victim blaming, as it applies specifically to their communities.
Author and friend’s signs at SlutWalk 2017
SlutWalk added an important layer to the conversations surrounding sexual violence and rape culture by addressing the connections between the institutions that stigmatize sex work and the resulting violence. Our criminal justice system marginalizes sex workers by criminalizing their industry, with laws such as Bill C-36, which has been argued to further endanger workers who are operating in an already over-policed and under-protected industry. The bill endangers workers by making operating in an indoor venue, advertising services or communicating for the sale of sexual services, under many circumstances, punishable by law. Criminalizing sex work functions to take away workers’ agency and human rights, as well as to keep the industry unprotected by labour laws, which are designed to ensure the health and safety of workers.
Ellie Ade Kur, an ambassador of Maggie’s Toronto and founder of the Silence is Violence (SIV) UTSG chapter, one of the movements that partnered with this year’s SWTO, explains, “It’s incredibly important to us to create space to shine a spotlight on these struggles and partner with groups like SlutWalk Toronto and Maggie’s Toronto to center the voices of QT/BIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black and Indigenous People of Colour) sex workers, as narratives of victim blaming and slut shaming are applied to these communities in a very particular and excessive way.”
The event opened with the Aboriginal Sexwork Warrior Drummers and was made accessible by translating the speeches into American Sign Language. Among the speakers was Monica Forrester, a celebrated advocate for transwomen and sex workers rights at Maggie’s Toronto, who addressed the dynamics of privilege and how sex workers’ experiences with sexual violence and abuse are often discredited by slut-shaming and victim blaming. In a 2014 article about Bill C-36, Monica argues that criminalizing sex work specifically leads to the lack of safe-sex education, isolation from essential services such as healthcare and protection by law enforcement, and moves sex work from operating indoors, onto the streets. She points out that when sex workers are afraid to call the police, share information or seek help, this increases rates of sexual violence, murder and the spread of sexually transmitted infections.
Another speaker, Akio Maroon, a human rights advocate, characterized how communities of poor and disabled women, women of colour, Indigenous women and sex workers are silenced through the practice of referring victims of sexual violence to law enforcement, as this ignores the relationships between these communities, police brutality and victim blaming. “…What you’re saying is that we need to move to the back. […] You’re saying that those of us that are black and Indigenous and have precarious statuses, what you’re saying is that we need to be quiet because us, we, these people, we are not able to seek out any kinds of support in our current criminal justice system. What are you doing to change that,” questioned Maroon.
In order to change current institutions of power and social circumstances that reinforce the marginalization of these communities, SWTO explained that they are “attempting to create a platform where people can come together to build and reinforce community, show up for each other as allies, and practice resistance to these attitudes and systems that validate perpetrators while inflicting further oppression and trauma on marginalized people”.
The SlutWalk Movement: Criticism and Change
Has SlutWalk addressed their criticism? Have they provided the necessary platforms through which to amplify the voices of those marginalized women who they had previously silenced? To answer that, we must take a look at the movement’s evolution since its inception.
In 2011, an open letter from Black women to SlutWalk was written by Black Women’s Blueprint, an organization which works to empower black women, as well as combat sexual violence affecting women of colour. They criticized the movement for focusing on women’s rights without consulting their communities, “Every tactic to gain civil and human rights must not only consult and consider women of color, but it must equally center all our experiences and our communities in the construction, launching, delivery and sustainment of that movement. We ask that SlutWalk take critical steps to become cognizant of the histories of people of color and engage women of color in ways that respect culture, language and context.”
Critics have highlighted that a movement which fails to center the voices of those who are most marginalized overlooks intersectionality. This term refers to the overlapping nature of social identities such as race, class, gender and sexual orientation, and how those identities intersect with systems such as oppression, colonialism and institutional violence. In referring to how they address intersectionality, SWTO explained, “Intersectionality is about being accountable to every individual in our community and highlighting voices that are so often left out of popular discourse… We hope to engage in partnerships with other anti-oppression groups, community organizations, and social justice advocates, to call out oppression and the disproportionate injustice and inequality for marginalized people in its various forms.”
Institutional violence is incredibly complex, but put simply, it works to marginalize communities through reinforcing inequalities which results in those communities being left disproportionately vulnerable to violence, including sexual violence. An American-based journalist Aura Bogado, wrote a blog post in 2011 about how SWTO’s initial request made to Toronto police to take steps to regain their trust, overlooks the institutional violence within systems of law enforcement that affect women of colour and sex workers: “…our communities, meanwhile, never trusted the police to begin with. For a group of privileged students to stage such a massive event and dismiss the work that our communities have done to make sense out of the disproportionate accumulation of violence that we face is wholly unacceptable.”
Through this year’s partnerships, SWTO has hoped to center local community advocacy groups, like SIV. Ellie Ade Kur explains how the movement works to address institutional violence while being accountable to all its communities, “SIV speaks to institutional silencing and the mechanisms within institutions such as universities, policing and the broader criminal justice system that look to shame, humiliate and intimidate communities impacted by violence and abuse. First and foremost our organization is led by people impacted by violence and abuse, prioritizing space for QT/BIPOC, sex workers, drug users and communities living with disabilities because we believe that those most impacted by intersecting forms of oppression should be the ones at the front of the anti-violence movement with the support of privileged communities who recognize that our liberation and our struggles are connected.”
Tying it all Together: SlutWalk’s Future
Movements like SlutWalk are about opening a dialogue and raising awareness. Calling out its exclusion was essential in beginning a path to change and unification. This year’s SWTO touched on themes of racism, survivorship and the right to sexual autonomy, in an effort to characterize the struggles and successes of individuals whom belong to various marginalized communities. SWTO provided a platform to amplify the voices of sex workers whom spoke about their experiences with sexual violence and its intersections with institutions of power that continue to silence women based on their race, social economic status, disabilities and mental health, among other factors. On August 12th, Toronto stopped and listened to the collective demands of equality and freedom.
SlutWalk 2017
The event’s focus on the experiences of individuals within the sex worker community is an illustration and reflection of the type of advocacy a movement like SWTO can undertake with different communities of women in their push for access to healthcare, reform of the criminal justice system and freedom of identity. SWTO explained that they hope to be a community platform for people to practice resistance against oppression and on an ongoing basis are “engaged in looking at how our language and behaviour could impact or harm others, and when we disagree and call each other in, we work to communicate with care, hear each other, and be open to learning from one another.”
To answer the question of whether SWTO was able to accomplish its goal of providing a platform to amplify the voices of women belonging to marginalized communities in the fight against sexual violence, it’s important to recognize that change has no final endpoint.
Change is an ongoing process and for a movement like SlutWalk, it means continuing to create new ways of engaging with conversations about institutional violence, privilege and allyship. Its 2017 event was thought-provoking and I was privileged to have been part of a movement that engaged in safe and open conversations about consent, rape culture and victim blaming by connecting me with the voices of individuals who are often overlooked and silenced. I walked away from the event more aware, more connected and with more questions than I had walking in; and in that way, SWTO’s goals are on their way to being addressed.
