This week, I had the opportunity to meet with Jennifer Hollinshead, a counsellor at UBC Counselling Services who focuses on counselling survivors of sexual assault. She brewed tea for us in her office during our interview, and has a very warm and relaxed manner.
Jennifer describes her career path as something she “stumbled” into. “It was very serendipitous in terms of how I came to be in counselling.” She explains that she started out in Biochemistry but ended up falling into Psychology during her undergraduate years. She ended up working at a women’s domestic violence shelter. “It was very much entry, entry, entry level,” says Jennifer of that job. “I ended up getting a day job there as a crisis counselor and realized that maybe I wanted to do a master’s degree and be a counselor.” She adds that, “While working at the shelter I realized that helping people heal from trauma and lead healthy, happy lives was a true passion that I knew I wanted to pursue through education and more experience.”
In addition to individual counselling sessions, Jennifer explains to me that she has “started a support group for female-identified students who’ve survived sexual violence,” she says. It is a drop-in group that is accessible to students who come in to Counselling Services and are referred to it. “The other thing my role involves is helping to support and create the Response and Support Protocol which has been a big task that I started when I first started work here in March of last year. And that’s ongoing; it’s almost ready to be rolled out.”
I was interested to hear Jennifer’s take on the university’s response to the highly publicized sexual assaults on campus as well as the Sauder frosh incidents of last year. There has lately been a fair amount of criticism levelled at universities in general for how they respond to sexual assault, and some specific to UBC as well. Jennifer replies that her “experience as someone they’ve hired to sort of be a subject matter expert is that they are extremely motivated, and genuinely concerned, genuinely wanting to shift things.”
Jennifer also shared with me some of her thoughts on steps that need to be taken to deconstruct rape culture as a whole in our community. She mentions something called the “pyramid of violence,” and explains to me that she first heard of this from an anti-violence project at University of Victoria. If you think of a pyramid,” Jennifer brings the tips of her fingers together to demonstrate. “The top of the pyramid is really violent offenses: rape, murder, sexual assault. Those are the really high intensity violent offenses. But there are many things that go into making an environment where those things happen, right?” She goes on, “So things like equality, like equal pay for equal work, gender equality. Also things that can combat rape culture might be just shifting people’s awareness…so looking at the different gender roles, so women shouldn’t be ‘good for this,’ and men are only ‘good for this.’ Those types of really binary gender roles can be really harmful in terms of creating a culture where sexual violence happens.
“I believe that it would be really valuable to have a place where men could discuss the harmful parts of patriarchy that are harmful to men and women. So ideas of masculinity that can silence men into not talking about their feelings, that can shame them for various tendencies they may have. I think having a space where men can explore these harmful pieces, and how harmful they can be for themselves and others, I think would be really important in shifting rape culture on any campus.”
Jennifer also adds that she thinks it would be beneficial to have more media coverage of good things that are happening in relation to this issue, in addition to spotlighting the problem. “No one has come in and talked about the support group that we’ve started here. No one has talked about all of the good things that are happening. How we work together with academic advisers to support survivors, if they need to drop a course they do that without penalty. There’s different things that are happening on campus that don’t get as highly publicized.”