Hundreds marched against sexual and gender-based violence on campus on Friday night
Hundreds of people, joined by several Ryerson community members, marched Friday night around Scadding Court near Dundas and Bathurst Streets for Take Back the Night, an annual demonstration against sexual and gender-based violence.
The 39th annual event was put on by the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre. The Ryerson Students’ Union’s Centre for Safer Sex and Sexual Violence Support (CSSSVS) and Consent Comes First co-ordinated Ryerson’s participation. Attendees first painted posters related to women empowerment, sexual violence and consent, then joined others at Scadding Court for performances, followed by the march.
Sydney Bothwell, a full-time co-ordinator at the CSSSVS — which offers a safe space for Ryerson students to access trauma services and seek peer support — said it was her second year witnessing Ryerson take part in this global march.
“We had a great turnout with many folks excited to take to the downtown streets. Ryerson University definitely had a notable presence at the march,” Bothwell said, adding that the centre took part in this event to bring its services’ users and sexual assault survivors together to form a community.
Take Back the Night originally started when Susan Alexander Speeth, a young microbiologist in Philadelphia, was walking alone one night in 1975 and got stabbed one block away from her home. Protests followed after and it eventually became an annual event as thousands of women from more than 40 countries took to the streets in solidarity. By 1981, the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres designated the evening of the third Friday in September as the march’s official date.
Some of the performances at Friday’s demonstration consisted of spoken word poems by rape survivors, as well as musicians, including one who encouraged attendees to get out of their comfort zone and befriend others who “don’t look like [them].”