'People are fed up': Ottawa activist discusses Royal Military College harassment
The Royal Military College has apologized to a well-known advocate for sexual assault prevention after the Ottawa woman was subjected to harassment last year when she visited the Kingston school to provide training to cadets.
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Julie Lalonde says she didn’t go public in October after she was subjected to cat-calls and harassment at the Royal Military College in Kingston — which had hired the outspoken advocate for sexual-assault prevention to speak to cadets — because she wasn’t convinced people would believe her.
But then the allegations and, later, criminal charges against former CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi surfaced, triggering, in her words, “a watershed moment” that changed the contemporary conversation about sexual assault and sexual violence directed at women.
“I really do believe that people are fed up with what’s going on, but I don’t think what happened to me was particularly unique,” she said Friday of the incident at RMC, for which school officials have now apologized.
“I think it was status quo for that institution, and the only thing that’s changed is our perspective on it.”
RMC had hired Lalonde, who works for the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres, to speak to cadets about the legal definition of consent, statistics of sexual violence and assault in Canada, and bystander intervention. She also discussed alcohol-related sexual assault and online harassment.
It’s a standard, 90-minute presentation the Ottawa woman says she’s given dozens of times across the province, to everyone from sixth graders to people in their 60s.
But this time was different — and hostile, she said.
There were cat-calls, rape jokes and, from one young man who looked her up and down, the suggestion that he “might have listened to you if you weren’t a civilian and a woman.”
“It was absolutely awful,” she said. “By the time it got to the afternoon, I was very frank with them in saying, ‘I’ve given this exact same content to kids in junior high and they have been more receptive, more mature and more respectful.'”
Lalonde says the 1,000 cadets, divided into four groups of about 250 students, were among the rowdiest she’s ever dealt with. Plus, they’d been forced to give up a Saturday to attend the session, which may have put some in an adversarial mood to begin with, she says.
Afterward, Lalonde said, fearing for her safety, she requested an escort back to her car.
She later complained to organizers at RMC and provided school officials with a timeline of the incident.
The head of the school, Brig.-Gen. A.D. Meinzinger, confirmed in a letter to the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres that several of the incidents outlined by Lalonde “could constitute harassment under the CAF/DND Harassment Prevention and Resolution Policy.”
He also apologized and said steps would be taken to identify the cadets responsible to address the behaviour.
“I would like to reiterate my apology for the unprofessional behaviour of select Officer Cadets, and any challenges that resulted from the setup and organization of the presentation,” the letter said.
The situation comes at a time when there is heightened focus on the issue of sexual assault and sexual violence against women.
Earlier this month, Toronto television reporter Shauna Hunt called out several men who had shouted lewd language at her while she was trying to interview soccer fans after a game. The incident prompted a social media backlash that resulted in one of the men being fired from his job at Hydro One.
There was news this week that an Ottawa comedian walked off stage at a corporate gig in Toronto after an audience member’s heckling took on what she described as a “rapey” tone (the employee has been suspended with pay pending an internal investigation).
And then there’s the military’s ongoing struggles with the perception of sexual assault and violence within its ranks, which incidents such as the one at RMC underscore. Lalonde alluded to the recent report by retired Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps, which found an “underlying sexual culture” in the Canadian military that is hostile to women and leaves victims of sexual assault and harassment to fend for themselves.
Despite her negative experience, Lalonde says she would return to RMC to do further presentations, so long as there is public recognition that what happened in October was not OK.
But she said she’s heard nothing from the school.
“It’s not just about me getting a wishy-washy apology,” she said. “It’s about them owning up to the fact that they’ve got a culture of entitlement, of misogyny, that needs to change.”
