Walk A Mile in her Shoes has brought new emotional significance to the saying “You can’t really understand another person’s experience until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.” Walk A Mile In Her Shoes, benefitting the White Ribbon Campaign, is an opportunity for men to take a stand against the emotional, physical and sexual abuse of women. For the past five years, Toronto men have strut down the runway of Yonge Street, assisting them to better understand the world from a woman’s perspective. The campaign emphasizes that gender based violence not only affects women, but affects the men that care for them. Since 2009, Walk A Mile In Her Shoes has raised $400 000 to end violence against women.
The archetypal “ideal sexual assault victim” has plagued many justice systems around the world. Often, this image functions as a tool that disqualifies women’s accounts of sexual violence. In Melanie Randall’s article “Sexual Assault Law, Credibility, and ‘Ideal Victims’: Consent, Resistance and Victim Blaming” from the Canadian Journal of Women and Law 22.2 (2010), she identifies the key issues with the law’s distorted response to victims of rape. Furthermore, she draws attention to society’s tendency to blame the victims of sexual abuse instead of the perpetrator. Events, such as Walk a Mile in Her Shoes, aim to make men a part of the solution instead of the problem, improving the response and prevention efforts of sexual assault in today’s society.
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