What “Going Public” feels like four months on Each time that someone tells me that they have read my book and that it was a meaningful experience for them and made them think about things they hadn’t thought about before — each and every time, I feel my story is…

In less than a week from now, my new book Going Public: A Survivor’s Journey from Grief to Action will be released. My experiences of sexual abuse and violence really will be…well, public. As the date approaches, I have a lot of emotions, but they all centre around one critical…

The pandemic has changed how we think about most of our social interactions and our relationship to others. We have risen to the challenge of supporting one another and being “with” one another across social distance of 2 metres and much, much further (two of my kids live in other…

In January the minister who sexually abused me as a teenager was convicted of four counts of “indecent assault” (as the legislation in the UK called it at that time; today this would be legally classified as rape). These were “specimen charges” — the abuse went on for a year…

Written by Dr. Julie Macfarlane, Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Law, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. I want to update readers on my experience with my employer, the University of Windsor, which had refused to defend me in a “defamation” lawsuit brought by a former colleague who was terminated…

Written by Dr. Julie Macfarlane, Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Law, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, and sexual assault and abuse survivor. Private Grief to Personal Advocacy: Confronting Sexual Violence is also the title of Dr. Macfarlane’s new book to be published by Between the Lines. …

I have been thinking a lot lately about the vulnerability of survivors and advocates for survivors of sexual violence. On us falls the emotional and practical labour of confronting sexual misconduct in our universities, where a recent Ontario survey reported that 63% of students are sexually harassed. …

I continue to be the subject of a defamation law suit (in Trinidad) and my employer (the University of Windsor) continues to refuse to defend me for giving a truthful professional reference about a faculty member fired for sexual and other misconduct. I want to use this blog to highlight…

The first time I heard the term “institutional betrayal” was when I started working with self-represented litigants. They described to me how their experience of trying to navigate the legal system alone — having already expended all their available resources on legal help, or never able to afford $350 upwards…