Having been a student, a staff member in student services, and an educator, I can say this plainly: I hate the business of higher education. It’s grim. Just yesterday, a friend called it “horrid.” And yet, I love learning. I learned deeply during my master’s degree at Wilfrid Laurier University, and I carry those lessons with me as I try to view the world through the lens of Social Justice and Community Engagement — the very name of my programme. I chose it because it insists the world can be changed with justice and love. How could I not love that?
Helen Keller once said, “Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am… I lived in a world that was a no-world.” She described her life before language as “nothingness.”
That hit me hard. And I didn’t learn that at university. My teacher was a Black man from the Bronx who clawed his way out of addiction, poverty, and hopelessness. He was over six feet tall, scars everywhere, his nose broken so many times I actually wondered if he’d escaped from prison and was hiding in Toronto. That’s what whiteness taught me to assume. Yet his eyes were gentle. His voice was full of love.
It’s astonishing what we learn when we tell our prejudices to shut the fuck up and listen.
Language is powerful. Not only for humans, but because I’m human, that’s where I’ll focus. The words we choose matter because we matter. Our words swirl through us the way oxygen does. All we are is energy — even the water inside us is energy. And, crucially, the words we use to describe violence shape how society perceives it.
Bear with me while I get a bit academicky — there’s a reason for it, and I promise it leads back to love.
Research shows this is really important. Sophie Hörl made a system that explains how people use words to hide or downplay sexual violence. She looked at how words and the way sentences are written in courtrooms and in public can make violent acts sound smaller or less real. By using vague language, the harm done gets hidden — what happened, how serious it was, and what the person who caused it meant all get muddled and confusing.
Brittany O’Shea shows, with actual research, that words like “abuse,” “assault,” and “violence” are not the same. The word you use changes how serious people think the act is, who gets blamed, and whether survivors get help. The difference between abuse and violence might seem small, but it can make a huge difference in real life.
Social justice work begins by rejecting the dominant discourse and seeking a counter-narrative. Sherene Razack’s idea of unmapping helped me learn not only to search for truths, but to find the right words for them.
To help me explain this, I’m going to draw from how words impact Indigenous communities. Unmapping rejects the white-washed version of North American history and exposes how our First Peoples were treated. It shows how white settlers crafted a story of their own innocence, denying their part in a system built to conquer and control Indigenous peoples, steal land, exploit labour, rape and murder. The historical record, as commonly told, was written by and for settlers.
Unmapping calls this out and refuses the watered-down phrase “dominant culture.” It demands accuracy: they were not just colonisers or settlers — they were invaders. That’s what happened. It’s what is still happening.
Razack’s resistance to accepting the coloniser’s “truth” aligns with the problem of whiteness: a category so dominant it becomes invisible to those inside it. The coloniser cannot see colonialism. As Kimberlé Crenshaw reminds us, “It’s hard to solve a problem if you cannot see the problem.”
White Christianity runs the world. It also has the power to stop the harm. Canada is built on those teachings. We swim in white supremacy like fish in water and don’t notice it. It’s like saying, “Stop breathing or you’ll inhale white supremacy.”
And it’s not just about race. It’s about anyone cast as “dangerous”: Indigenous, Black, Brown, Asian, Disabled, Gay, Trans, Muslim, poor, homeless, imprisoned — any group pushed to the margins. One day it could be people wearing the “wrong” clothes. Look at a Muslim woman wearing a hijab — a beautiful scarf — and the backlash she gets. White Christian women never wore material like that on their heads. Nuns do, yes, but is it because it’s black and not a stunning pink with gold stitching? Is that what fuels the hate? Us naughty Christians aren’t allowed to adorn ourselves in colour.
Hell, next it could even be people who hate strawberry ice cream. Someone, somewhere, will find a reason to target you.
So what does this have to do with ending child sexual violence? Everything.
Everything.
Because it’s the language we use.
We’re terrified of making people uncomfortable. Getting people into the room to discuss it is hard enough — now we’re meant to cushion their emotions too? I’m not speaking to children — I would never discuss this with them. I’m speaking to adults. So put on your big-boy pants and listen.
“Abuse” is vague — it could mean name-calling or it could mean pinning a child down and raping them.
“Assault” is equally broad — spitting in someone’s face or stabbing them with a fork both count.
These are my own lived experiences. I’m not theorising. The linguistic research backs it: how we describe these acts affects whether society takes them seriously and whether survivors get justice.
Another mentor of mine is Maria Barcelos, Executive Director at The Gatehouse in Toronto. I asked Maria for her thoughts on the words we use — abuse vs assault vs violence — and, based on her training and her years supporting people fighting to survive the aftermath of child sexual violence, what she thought about insisting on the term Child Sexual Violence.
Maria confirmed:
“Survivors hear the difference. They feel it. It validates their reality, their bodies, and their memories. And it forces the world to confront what it has long preferred to look away from — and continues to.”
So let’s start calling it what it is.
Let’s get uncomfortable.
Let’s unmap this shit storm.
Stop saying child sexual abuse or child sexual assault.
The correct term is child sexual violence.
Most people won’t hear the difference — but survivors do, down to the cellular level.
Join me in demanding that we use the term child sexual violence. Because until we call it what it is — and learn to tolerate our discomfort — the oldest war in human history, the war against children, will continue.
Let that swirl. Breathe it in.
Together we heal. Together we fight to end child sexual violence with justice and love.
References
Crenshaw, K. (2018, July 6). Why race is a verb | Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality and how to respond to Trumpism [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/kgK9p4ogCGY
Hörl, S. (n.d.). A linguistic taxonomy for rape euphemisms in courtroom and public discourse. Discourse & Society. https://journals.sagepub.com
Keller, H. (1908). The world I live in (Ch. 11, “Before the Soul Dawn”). Doubleday, Page & Company. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27683/27683-h/27683-h.htm
O’Shea, B. (2024). Rethinking sexual violence labels: Exploring the impact of terminology on perception, blame, and help-seeking. PMC. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/
Razack, S. H. (2000). Gendered racial violence and spatialized justice: The murder of Pamela George. Canadian Journal of Law & Society, 15(2), 91–130.