May 15 2025
Sexual Assault Awareness Month and Beyond
May is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. But what does it mean to be “aware” of sexual assault? Surely we all know about it by now– certainly more so than a decade ago.
Ten years ago it was not uncommon to go into a university level class and ask for a definition of consent and get blank stares in return. Smart young adults, either unaware of or at least not confident enough in their knowledge to give even a basic definition. That would be unheard of now. In the last decade we’ve seen enormous changes in cultural conversations around consent and sexual violence. All post secondary campuses have at least one staff, if not a team of them, dedicated to sexual violence prevention and response; consent is now commonly taught in high school health classes around the province; and workers at all levels are protected by Bill 132, the Sexual Violence and Harassment Prevention Plan Act. Not only that, but the rates of police-reported sexual assault cases have increased 38% between 2017 and 20221. And while that sounds bad, it’s actually a sign that people have become increasingly able to recognize when a sexual crime has been committed against them and trust police enough to actually report it.
With all these positive changes, what does Sexual Assault Awareness Month really mean? From a Bystander Intervention model, noticing a situation and recognizing it as a problem are only the first two steps to intervening. After that, one must take responsibility for helping (step 3), know how to help (step 4), and then actually do the helping thing (step 5).
This model was designed to describe the series of steps an individual needs to take when they witness a specific interaction. For example if you are walking down the street and you see someone cat-calling a group of young girls at the park, you might choose to tell the cat-caller to leave the girls alone, or perhaps you might approach the girls and tell them that you overheard what the person was saying and affirm for them that it’s gross and weird and they don’t deserve that. Either way, you noticed the situation, recognized it as a problem, assumed responsibility for helping, knew how to do so, and then followed through. Precisely the type of individual problem-solving that we teach in our Bystander Intervention workshops.
But how can we take this principle and apply it to a broader social issue? How can you– yes, you reading this– intervene not just in any given individual act of assault or harassment, but throw a wrench in the whole system of sexual violence?
The first step, surely, is awareness. You have to notice the way things are and recognize the problem(s). You need to accept that not only do you likely know multiple survivors, but you know multiple perpetrators as well. One in three women2, one in four men3, and almost half of gender nonconforming folks are sexually assaulted in their lifetime4. The vast majority of those survivors, regardless of gender, are assaulted by men; in a systematic review of research between 2000-2017, it was found that on average 29% of young men (nearly 1 in 3) self report having perpetrated sexual assault5. That means that if you know 3 guys, statistically speaking, at least one of them is probably a perpetrator.
That’s a heavy fact to hear. One in three men is a lot. But it also means that we each have a lot of opportunities to make positive change. Once we’re aware, we can act. Regardless of your gender, you can have conversations about sexual violence with the boys and men in your life. Parents can teach kids about respecting other people’s bodies and can draw attention to moments in media when people don’t do that. Friends can call friends out on their bullshit. Students can start or join awareness-raising groups and campaign for more thorough and accurate education. Workers can organize lunch-and-learns and chat at the water cooler about problematic stuff they’ve seen online and call out their buddies for disrespectful comments. Anyone can volunteer, organize protests, share articles, and commit to learning more about this topic. No individual is going to change the whole world by themself, but each of us can make small changes in our own lives that will ripple outwards.
So for Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and truly all year long, we hope you choose to move beyond awareness and into action. We can’t do it alone, but together we can create a world without violence.