[URBAN NOTE] "Why SlutWalk Toronto is as important as ever"

[rfmcdonald]

blogTO's Amy Grief wrote about the importance of SlutWalk, the Toronto-founded feminist street protest that occurred here yesterday.

Toronto's Heather Jarvis and Sonya Barnett started SlutWalk in 2011 after police officer Michael Sanguinetti told a group of York University Students, "'women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized."

Since then, cities around the world have organized their own SlutWalks. And the Toronto edition is happening tomorrow. But while it's still as relevant as ever, SlutWalk, at home and abroad, has changed since a group of about 1,000 people marched towards Queen's Park on April 3, 2011.

"There was a shift in the SlutWalk organizational team, starting in 2012, from this demand for police accountability to focusing more on how sexual violence affects the most marginalized people in our communities," the SlutWalk organizing committee tells me via email about the current direction of the Toronto movement.

"We are looking at opportunities to build and reinforce communities that experience sexual violence at higher rates, with emphasis on non-binary, trans, and queer folks, as well as Indigenous people and sex workers. We feel strongly about highlighting that not only women face sexual violence and that not only men are perpetrators."

Kaitlyn Mendes, a senior lecturer at the University of Leicester in the U.K., has seen this shift in other cities, such as Chicago, as well. "The SlutWalk movement has more of an intersectional understanding," she says.