Sexual Violence
Sexual violence involves forcing sexual behaviours on others without their consent; this can include – but is not limited to – sexual harassment, sexual assault, sexual exploitation, and child sexual abuse. All forms of sexual violence can be best understood as abuses of power. When people engage in sexually violent behaviours, they exert power and control over others. Unfortunately, this means that people who have less access to power and/or privilege are often targeted for sexual violence at higher rates. As a system of oppression, racism creates power imbalances at every level of society. For this reason, sexual violence impacts people differently depending on their racial group. This is why it’s important to understand the relationship between racism and sexual violence.
Racism and Sexual Violence
Racial violence and sexual violence have a shared foundation since both forms of violence are upheld by oppressive attitudes such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism. This doesn’t mean that everyone who holds these beliefs will act violently, but it does mean that holding these beliefs allows people who commit racial and sexual violence to feel justified in their actions. When people believe others are less deserving of respect, then inflicting harm on those people isn’t viewed as a problem.
Part of the reason racial and sexual violence have the same foundations is because, throughout history, sexual violence has been used as a deliberate tool in acts of racial violence. For example, during colonization, sexual violence was used against Indigenous Peoples to “dilute” their bloodlines and perpetuate ongoing genocide. Further, during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, sexual violence was used against enslaved African people to produce more labour and profit for owners of enslaved people. Beyond early colonization, racism and sexual violence still have deep historical ties. For example, early Chinese migrant women in Canada were commonly forced into sexual exploitation.
This early history of sexual violence as a colonial tool influences how racialized folks experience sexual violence today:
How to Support Someone Who Has Experienced Racialized Sexual Violence
Many cultures and communities have different expectations and practices around responding to sexual violence. For example, some communities view sexual violence as something that brings shame to the family or community, while others look down upon making formal reports due to distrust of institutions. While you may not be able to change how different communities respond to sexual violence, you can still provide support and options to people who have been impacted, regardless of the community to which they belong.
As a supporter, it is not your job to tell a person how they should respond, but rather support them in making their own decisions about how to move forward. It can be helpful to have cultural competence (being knowledgeable of a person’s culture) while supporting them, but it is not completely necessary. Cultural humility is also an important component of supporting someone outside of your own culture, and this means recognizing and respecting that each individual has a unique set of experiences due to their cultural background. Cultural humility involves committing to ongoing recognition of your own biases, challenging oppressive systems and practices in your life, and maintaining an openness to the differences in others’ experiences.
Believing people when they disclose an experience of sexual violence is a critical element of supporting any survivor, since many are met with disbelief and judgement. Racism adds another layer of harm to disbelieving, since racist ideology can be used to justify a lack of belief in racialized survivors in particular. An example of such racist ideology is the idea that Black and Indigenous people are not trustworthy and that their claims should be met with higher scrutiny. This same idea also exists within xenophobic attitudes towards newcomers and immigrants, such as beliefs that immigrants cannot be trusted because of their “foreign” cultures and practices. This current day distrust of racialized communities has a historical basis, since many people of color did not have legal personhood at various points in both Canadian and American history, and since many communities experienced sexual violence as a legally sanctioned tool of racism and colonialism. These examples demonstrate how racism creates an unfair bias for distrusting racialized people, highlighting the importance of believing racialized survivors when they disclose their experience to you.
Outside of believing, some other key elements of providing emotional support (regardless of culture) involve active listening and giving the person space to define their own experience. You don’t need to provide them with answers and can support them in deciding for themselves how their healing will look. You can learn more about providing support after sexual assault in our Supporting Adults Impacted by Sexual Violence article.