A UBC student is leading the charge on trying to change attitudes towards sexual assault in the government-funded French immersion program Explore.
“I thought I was going to get a Francophone, Québécois cultural experience,” said Kyla Jamieson, participant in the Explore program at the Université de Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR).
Instead, says the graduate student in creative writing, she got a healthy dose of rape culture.
The Explore program was founded in 1971 and has since been facilitating a five-week immersion program at various university campuses across seven provinces. The program is possible for many students thanks to bursaries, provided by the federal government through the Council of Ministers of Education (CMEC), that cover course fees, accommodation and food costs.
After administrators at the UQTR campus of the program presented a skit which many found to trivialize the use of date rape drugs and sexual assaults, Jamieson spearheaded a petition aiming to “re-educate Explore.”
The skit was presented to students during one of the welcome assemblies. According to Jamieson and other audience members, two girls are at a bar and one is emphasized as pretty and popular, the other as frumpy. Both have date rape drugs slipped into their drinks; the next scene shows a man trying to decide which unconscious girl to take home. The punch line of the skit is that the would-be rapist found one girl too unattractive to sexually assault.
Jamieson says multiple Explore administrators told her the skit was performed in response to sexual assaults that occur regularly during the program at UQTR, although when a CBC reporter later followed up on these claims, they were denied.
Jamieson ended up leaving Explore at UQTR early, after finding administrators unable to understand why she and other students were upset over the skit, as well as other incidences such as jokes made by students in class to instructors that also trivialized sexual assault.
“I know we’ve had these problems on our [UBC] campus too -- we saw the rape chants, we’ve had that series of sexual assaults and there was a debate about how we were having that conversation,” said Jamieson. “But the situation in Trois-Rivières was so different in that I talked to administrators about the date rape drug skit, and they couldn’t understand … how the skit was problematic.”
Comments on the petition started by Jamieson and other Explore participants contain allegations of a pattern of attitudes tolerant of sexual harassment at other Explore campuses.
“The skit was the smoke. Now I’m finding out about the fire,” said Jamieson. “[When] we’re choosing which Explore programs to apply to… we have no idea that the federal government is paying for us to go to these places where we’re being targeted [for sexual harassment] and where our complaints are not taken seriously about sexual assault."
The Ubyssey attempted to contact the authors of these comments to verify their accounts without success.
When contacted for comment, the Explore program at UQTR directed The Ubyssey to its policy on sexual assault and said in a emailed statement, “Our intention is not to return [to these] events.”
Louis Lizotte, interim director of CMEC, said in an email statement that CMEC is committed to ensuring that institutions offering the Explore program “provide a safe and welcoming environment that is free from discrimination and harassment.”
The work to “ensure sexual assault and anti-discrimination policies [are] in place at each institution promote and advance human rights education … has already begun,” according to Lizotte.
One outcome thus far of Jamieson’s petition is that Explore at UQTR won’t be presenting any more skits.
“That's the easy way out,” said Nic Walry, an SFU student and participant in Explore at UQTR. In his newspaper writing module during the program, Walry wrote an article on the student protest and petition attempting to change the way sexual assaults are handled by Explore programs. He was blocked from publishing it in the newspaper distributed to all Explore participants at UQTR by the administration.
“But come next year when they have more students, I don't know… if they're really going to take into mind what has gone on this past year.”