Unmasking Violence: Campus Sexual and Gender-Based Violence During COVID-19

Bringing together diverse perspectives from researchers, practitioners, and student activists, this book is a critical feminist reflection on how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted gender-based violence on post-secondary campuses, and the challenges and creative solutions that emerged in response. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing social inequities and produced a ‘shadow pandemic’ of gender-based violence, including on post-secondary campuses where rates of gender-based violence are already exceptionally high. The shadow pandemic came at a time when post-secondary institutions were already facing unprecedented pressure to respond to gender-based violence—and sexual violence in particular—on campus. Drawing on insights from researchers, practitioners, and student activists from across North America and the United Kingdom, and grounded in an anti-oppressive, feminist abolitionist, intersectional feminist framework, this book reflects on the ways that the pandemic impacted gender-based violence on campus and highlights the generative methods, both conceptually and practically, that those in the field are using to respond. The insights in each chapter provide lessons from the pandemic that inform how we can reject a "return to normal" and, instead, imagine new possibilities for more just campuses and worlds moving forward.