Study Background, Rationale, and Summary
“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 was to examine how schools and school systems can respond to GBSV at professional, pedagogical and policy levels.
It had 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 recognized 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 was 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 designed a methodology that intentionally brought together a feminist Research Collective (RC) of 5 educators (e.g., classroom teachers, student support teachers, educational administrators, B.Ed. students) who recognized 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 engaged 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.
Engaging in this phase of research created a baseline of the larger context and perceived issues from educators in the province of Manitoba, it also contributed 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 recruited 10 educators from across the province of Manitoba to engage in semi-structured, open-ended, 60 – 75-minute qualitative interviews (March 2025 to June 2025). The interviews were conducted on Zoom, which provided equitable access to participating in this study for rural and northern educators.
The interview questions were designed to explore educators’ experiences, reservations, and hopes for teaching about GBSV and supporting student survivors in their school contexts. Educators were asked to identify places in the curriculum or in their divisional policies where they felt particularly supported or uncertain about how to proceed in teaching about sexual violence or offering student supports. Our research team analyzed the data and shared key findings, themes, and/or quotes with the Research Collective in the second phase of the research.
To meet the second objective, we analyzed 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 conducted 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.
PHASE 2. Engaging in Collective Critical Media Analysis for Curricular and Pedagogical Change
While this second phase of research also contributed to the first two objectives, it also focused 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.
In February and March 2026, we conducted four Research Collectives (RC). Within these RCs five public school teachers who currently teach, or have recently taught, in Manitoban high school settings met to discuss using popular media to frame discussions of GBSV and consent across a range of disciplines: English Language Arts, Social Studies (History, Geography, Global Issues, and/or First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Studies), Human Ecology, Law, Drama, and Physical/Health education. The Research Collective members had all participated in an individual interview in Phase 1 and consented to engage in four in-person, three hour evening sessions held weekly where we shared food and engaged in discussions exploring their perceptions and experiences of teaching about gender norms, consent, and/or GBSV. We engaged in processes of collective critical curriculum, policy, and media analysis. Since the end of the last RC meeting, our research team has engaged in multiple, recursive rounds of analysis of the data, and we are now working towards mobilizing insights from the RCs in multiple ways. The findings from this study are also informing our directions for future research studies.