One year may seem like a long time, 365 days and nights. Yet for victims of sexual assault it can feel like a blink of an eye. The emotional scars and shattered sense of reality imprinted into memory continues to wound. Friends and co-workers of Jian Ghomeshi struggle with their own perception of a person who was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The initial aftermath of the Ghomeshi sexual assault case created conservations but what has really changed in ending sexual violence and violence against women?
“Sue Montgomery is a former Montreal Gazette crime reporter and co-founder of the hashtag campaign #BeenRapedNeverReported . As a journalist, I’ve written many articles, I broke a big story about sexual assault at College-Notre Dame, but nothing — nothing — had the impact 140 characters had. I did no interviews, no research, no quotes, no nothing. And this has been probably the biggest thing of my career. This changed me for sure. Now I’m out of journalism. I’m giving talks to schools, all about the hashtag and what’s changed and hasn’t a year later. For a lot of survivors of sexual assault, it can destroy their lives. I’d like to show people that it doesn’t have to. It certainly has made me what I am today. I don’t take any bullshit. But it took many years to learn that what happened to me wasn’t my fault.”
“Gillian Hnatiw is a partner at Lerners LLP and represented Lucy DeCoutere, a complainant in the Ghomeshi case, at the October pre-trial hearing.” “The fact of the matter is, all of the systemic barriers that existed pre-Ghomeshi and worked against women coming forward are, for the most part, still there.”