SlutWalk Toronto began in 2011 following Toronto Police Constable Michael Sanguinetti’s comments to a group of students at a York University crime prevention forum following a series of harassment cases.  He told the class, “women show avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized”. A small group of students attending this talk mobilized specifically against victim blaming and slut shaming reflected both in theses comments in in the way Toronto Police Officers addressed complaints of sexual violence. Following its inaugural action, SlutWalk Toronto inspired a number of solidarity actions and community-led responses to rape culture in 200+ cities worldwide.

It’s important that SlutWalk Toronto is accountable to its roots.
Initial mobilizing and outrage centered very real forms of victim blaming and slut shaming, but only within the context of a university classroom. The reality of sexual violence and victimization is that those disproportionately targeted face multiple and intersecting forms of oppression on the basis of race, class, gender, orientation, status, occupation and disability. We cannot be part of a movement to end gender-based violence without acknowledging these experiences and the targeted, systemic forms of victimization and discrimination our cities most vulnerable communities face. The initial organizing of SlutWalk events featured fierce discussions of a feminism that went silent around the politics of race and the connections between rape culture, violence and colonialism.

For these reasons a number of incredibly thoughtful critiques of SlutWalk actions have arisen. Questions around what it means to reclaim terms like "slut", what SlutWalk means for feminist organizing, and how the use and application of the term "slut" impacts Black women differently due to histories of violence, slavery and colonization. We encourage you to read this open letter from Black women and organizations doing advocacy work specific to Black women here. 

There are several ongoing discussions around the use of the term “Slut” and what it means to “reclaim” this word – rather who can meaningfully reclaim this word free from further criminalization and stigmatization, and how SlutWalk organizing is accountable to communities with a stake in pushing back against gender-based violence.

If efforts to reclaim the term “slut” do not engage with these histories of violence, colonization and dehumanization, and what it means for  Black and Indigenous People of Colour (BIPOC) to be labelled with the term, white cis-gender women’s sexual agency and bodies again become the center of a much more complex conversation.

For SlutWalk2017 we are partnering with Maggie’s: Toronto Sex Workers Action Project and Silence is Violence Toronto, two organizations centering the movement for sex workers rights in their struggle against rape culture and anti-violence work. These organizations and our community advisory committee are approaching SlutWalk 2017 as an opportunity to complicate discussions of gender-based violence by centering local activists fighting for BIPOC and migrant sex workers rights. The meaning behind terms such as “slut”, “ho”, and “whore” when applied to sex workers – particularly when used as terms to degrade or shame SP’s – is central to the question of reclamation - who can reclaim these words and whether or not there is value in these efforts. 

Our collective mission this August is to create an action that is both accountable to our history and shaped by community deeply invested in ending gender-based violence through organizing that centers systemic forms of discrimination.

Following our August action, our community advisory committee has elected to continue mapping out a year of programming in collaboration with grassroots collectives in the city to bridge connections between the movement to end gender-based violence and organizations focusing on issues such as anti-Black racism and police violence, migrant justice, sex workers rights, anti-poverty coalitions and other grassroots collectives in Toronto for which anti-violence work is intrinsically linked to liberation. 

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