Rise in Vancouver stranger sexual assaults prompts questions about prevention

VANCOUVER (CityNews) — Vancouver police are holding women’s safety workshops amid a spike in reports of stranger sexual assaults in the city, but an advocate questions why no outreach is being done to boys and men who are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of these crimes.

In 2018/19, 99.2 per cent of those charged with sexual assault in British Columbia were men. Out of 920 people charged with sexual assault in British Columbia, and 913 were male, according to Statistics Canada. That same year, victims of sexual assault were 91 per cent female.

VPD Sgt. Steve Addison says the police are not trying to send the message that women and girls are responsible for preventing sexual assaults.

“We always encourage people to take reasonable steps to protect their safety,” he said at a news conference after three girls were groped by a man on the seawall earlier this week.

“We’re not trying to strike fear in people, we’re not encouraging people to change their behaviour — the people that really need to change their behaviour are the offenders.”

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Sexual assault, in general, is an underreported crime. In the majority of cases, the perpetrator is not a stranger. However, the VPD has noticed an increase in reports of stranger sexual assaults in the city.

In July of 2021, 16 sexual assaults in which the perpetrator was unknown to the victim were reported to the Vancouver Police Department. Overall, police received 39 reports during this period, meaning these assaults made up roughly 40 per cent of reported assaults.

A spokesperson noted this represented a 129 per cent increase in reports compared to July of 2019. That year, there were also 39 reports, but only seven were cases where the accused was a stranger, meaning these attacks accounted for less than 20 per cent of overall reports.

The VPD’s women’s personal safety workshops are facilitated by female officers, and have been running for eight years.

“Their goal is to educate, inspire, and empower women to take ownership of their personal safety,” according to the website.

“Their workshops teach tactics designed to be easily learned and remembered by women with no prior training in case they are ever faced with a situation of unavoidable violence.”

Interested in taking a virtual workshop with the #VPD Women’s Personal Safety team? Register today by emailing wpst@vpd.ca with ‘REGISTRATION’ in the subject line. Specify your preferred date, and include your full name and email contact. More info: https://t.co/k4TCUZPZLL #WPST pic.twitter.com/6KdbMzjD89

— Vancouver Police (@VancouverPD) August 18, 2021

Angela Marie MacDougall, with Battered Women’s Support Services, says there’s nothing “inherently wrong” with personal safety or self-defence workshops, noting her organization used to work with the police to facilitate them.

“It can be a really empowering thing when we can gather together and organize ourselves to consider our personal safety, and to learn some physical skills. there’s something actually really positive about that,” she says.

“What is the message that we’re sending when we’re putting on personal safety, self- defence workshops in the context of sexualized violence? Because what we do know is that girls and women — we are socialized to do everything we can to prevent stranger sexual assault. It is part of the social learning that we get early as children and it’s reinforced throughout adolescence and into adulthood.”

“Partly, why we’ve been able to have sexualized violence continue in such a way — to be so endemic and so much of an epidemic — is because of the amount of victim-blaming that is baked into our contemporary cultural understanding of sexualized violence.”

MacDougall says one pitfall of focusing on women’s behaviour is that it can reinforce victim-blaming, shifting the focus away from the perpetrator who is ultimately and solely responsible for the assault.

“Partly why we’ve been able to have sexualized violence continue in such a way, to be so endemic and so much of an epidemic, is because of the amount of victim-blaming that is baked into our contemporary cultural understanding of sexualized violence,” she explains.

“When we train our eyes more on those that would perpetrate, we’re in a better position to address it. We’re definitely in a better place as a culture as a society than we were, let’s say 40 years ago, but let’s not fool ourselves to think that we’re that far along because as we know we have a rise in reported stranger sexualized violence. It’s interesting, actually, that [the VPD] is not targeting boys and men in their workshops specifically. They’re not reaching out to individual groups, and having those conversations with men and boys.”

Three girls were groped on Vancouver’s seawall Tuesday afternoon. Police say the incidents may be linked, and suspect there were other victims who have not yet come forward. https://t.co/IrGCyn94cX pic.twitter.com/gYimSYv1nm

— CityNews 1130 Vancouver (Inactive) (@news1130) August 19, 2021

The VPD recently relaunched the social media campaign “Hands off!” making it clear groping is a crime. MacDougall says sending this message to potential offenders is a decent start, but does not go nearly far enough.

“I think that it’s actually a good thing when we put the emphasis on those that would do harm, and focus on behaviour change for those individuals,” she says.

“It should go well beyond a campaign, however, this should be sustained throughout every aspect and every segment of our society.”

Accountability is another thing MacDougall says is crucial to any effort to stop sexual violence. Most sexual assaults go unreported, and only about one in 10 sexual assaults that are reported to police result in a conviction.