The Okanagan College Students’ Union has partnered with Okanagan College to launch a campaign designed to stimulate awareness and dialogue on campus about the issue of consent and Okanagan College’s sexual violence and sexual misconduct policy and supports. We host events and actions in support of this campaign annually on each campus. Please sign our pledge to get involved, pledges are available in all three offices.
Not sure what consent means and some of the language used with Consent culture? Here is a handy definitions guide.
Resources at Okanagan College
Not Anymore
Sexual violence has no place on campus. Okanagan College students and faculty are able to access the NOT ANYMORE sexual violence prevention videos, offered through Safecolleges.
Register here.
Community Resources
Salmon Arm and area
What Were You Wearing?
In January 2020, we helped host the What Were You Wearing exhibit on the Kelowna campus. This powerful exhibit shows participants that sexual assault has nothing to do with the clothes a person wears.
The exhibit has been shown in cities all over North America. Each one is modelled after the original 2013 presentation by Jen Brockman and Dr. Mary Wyand-Hiebert of the University of Arkansas.
The exhibit walls are lined with clothing items like a blue shirt and jeans, a tank top and shorts, a child-sized pair of pyjamas. On their own, these are simple, ordinary clothes; they hold no provocation, no meaning. But the framed description under each article of clothing transforms these clothes into something unsettling. Each of these descriptions tells a short but poignant anecdote from the mouths of the survivors whose clothes are now on display, recounting their experience. It asks participants to understand not only the grief and anger of the survivors, but also the hurt they felt when they were asked, “But what were you wearing?”
If only understanding a sexual assault was as simple as the clothes the victim wore. Blaming it on the clothes is an easy, uninvolved way to explain a situation that is complicated and traumatizing. Participants are forced to look beyond these misconceptions and face the ugly reality. That these victims are, simply put, victims. Not a temptress who had it coming, or a man who “should have wanted it.” These stories are clearly, painfully, humanizing.
Safety cannot be guaranteed by throwing on another layer. Changing clothes does not rid the survivor of their harrowing experience.
It asks participants to ask themselves, “Why? Why do we ask what they were wearing?”
