Study Background & Rationale
“One of the most pressing human rights issues facing Canadians today is the high rate of sexual violence against women.” (Benoit et al., 2015)
Gender Based Sexual Violence (GBSV) is an ever-present and increasingly police-reported problem in Canada (Moreau, 2014), particularly affecting school-aged children (Statistics Canada, 2014). Given the prevalence of GBSV in this demographic, schools have an important role to play in preventing and addressing this problem (Muscari et al., 2022).
Despite the obvious relevance, existing pedagogical approaches remain wholly absent or inadequate (Basile et al., 2022; DeGue et al., 2021; Espelage et al., 2015). Discussions of GBSV, healthy relationships, and consent are often highly controlled, minimized, or relegated to the sexual education curriculum. In the current context, claims of parental authority, developmentalist and protectionist views of children and youth, and ignorance of the GBSV experienced by youth within and beyond schools result in negligent educational responses that have many adverse consequences.
Above all, gender based sexual violence persists. GBSV inflicts significant repercussions on survivors, leading to outcomes such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, suicidality, and diminished academic achievement (Muscari et al., 2022, p. 693).
Moreover, by omission students learn that eliminating sexual violence is not a societal priority (Harding, 2015) and those who have experienced GBSV learn that they are not important, as their stories are silenced, ignored, or distrusted (Tucker, 2023). The result of this pedagogical negligence is that sexual violence continues to be normalized in our culture; rape culture remains unchallenged in schools while it is simultaneously legitimized and endorsed in popular media and culture.
Popular media is one of the “primary sites through which rape culture [is] understood, negotiated, and contested” (Phillips, 2020 p. 68). Popular media plays a significant role in teaching society about the inevitabilities of sexual violence, misogyny, and patriarchy (Harding, 2015).
Education aimed at challenging rape culture, and the GBSV that is its consequence, requires a critical media literacy approach because popular media is precisely where dominant understandings are learned (Moorhouse & Brooks, 2020).
Study Objectives
The overarching goal of this project is to examine how schools and school systems can respond to GBSV at professional, pedagogical and policy levels.
It has three principal objectives:
1. Explore how educators perceive the difficulties, barriers, and possibilities for teaching about GBSV and consent in K-12 schools.
2. Analyze how and where GBSV is (or is not) situated within curricular documents and divisional and/or provincial policies, and how educators perceive these documents as providing supports and/or roadblocks for teaching about GBSV in K-12 schools.
3. Develop, refine, and enact pedagogical approaches using popular media to frame discussions of GBSV and consent in K-12 contexts.
Study Methodology
Sexual violence thrives in environments that isolate and shame survivors and those who work to support them. Within our research context, we recognize that some K-12 educators may perceive that it is risky to raise their voices and discuss these issues—even though statistics, media depictions, scholarly literature, and feminist theory demonstrate how pervasive the experience of sexual violence is in our lives. The design of this study is informed epistemologically by feminist critical participatory action research (Fine & Torre, 2021) and grounded methodologically in teacher practitioner inquiry (Campano, 2009; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Guitierez, 2019).
We have designed a methodology that intentionally brings together a feminist Research Collective (RC) of 5-8 educators (e.g., classroom teachers, student support teachers, educational administrators, B.Ed. students) who recognize or have experienced the impact of GBSV in schools and are committed to identifying and enacting action to prevent GBSV through curricular development, student support practices, and policy changes.
In this study, we will engage in two interconnecting phases of research and knowledge mobilization to achieve our research objectives.
PHASE 1. Establishing the Context for and Barriers to Teaching about GBSV in K-12 Schools
Research into teachers’ perceptions and experiences of teaching about GBSV is scarce and is context dependent. Issues facing educators in a rural, prairie-province school may be different than in a large urban center. Teachers may be more willing to address GBSV in their classrooms or advocate for policy or practice changes to support survivors if they have research that demonstrates collective understandings of the need for the work, and that demonstrates the support and gaps of provincial, divisional, and school policies and curricular documents.
While engaging in this phase of research will create a baseline of the larger context and perceived issues from educators in the province of Manitoba, it also contributes to methodological approaches for studying GBSV in other contexts.
To meet the first objective to explore how educators within the K-12 context perceive the difficulties and barriers, and/or hopes and possibilities for teaching about GBSV and consent in K-12 schools, we will recruit 8 – 15 educators from across the province of Manitoba to engage in semi-structured, open-ended, 60 – 75-minute qualitative interviews (Fall 2025 & Winter 2026). The interviews will be conducted on Zoom, which provides equitable access to participating in this study for rural and northern educators.
The interview questions will be designed to explore educators’ experiences, reservations, and hopes for teaching about GBSV and supporting student survivors in their school contexts. Educators will be asked to identify places in the curriculum or in their divisional policies where they feel particularly supported or uncertain about how to proceed in teaching about sexual violence or offering student supports. Our research team will analyze the data and share key findings, themes, and/or quotes with the Research Collective in the second phase of the research.
To meet the second objective, we will analyze how and where GBSV is (or is not) situated within curricular documents and divisional and/or provincial policies, and how educators perceive these documents as providing support and/or roadblocks for teaching about GBSV in K-12 schools. Our research team will conduct a document analysis of 1) current Manitoba Education curriculum frameworks; and 2) documentation available on Manitoba provincial governmental and school division websites that focus on supporting survivors of GBSV or preventing and/or eliminating GBSV.
Our research team will analyze the data and share key findings and themes through “Curricular Maps and Gaps for Teaching About GBSV” and “Policy Maps and Gaps for Supporting GBSV Survivors” documents that serve as policy briefs to share with educational leaders in the province and/or support for professional development conversations with educators in schools or wider community stakeholders. Again, the document analysis and knowledge mobilization maps will be shared with our Research Collective for further analysis and suggestions for revisions and enactment.
PHASE 2. Engaging in Collective Critical Media Analysis for Curricular and Pedagogical Change
While this second phase of research will also contribute to the first two objectives, it will also focus on the third objective to develop, refine, and enact pedagogical approaches using popular media to frame discussions of GBSV and consent in K-12 contexts. The Research Collective (RC) will meet five times in two years to engage in critical media analysis, to engage in full-day pedagogical, professional, and curricular workshops/focus groups about GBSV, and to plan how to share these ideas with students, colleagues, and the wider community.