Instagram posts about suspicious red van sparks Toronto police warning

TORONTO -

A series of social media posts in Toronto warned that a man or a group of men in a red van were harassing and attacking women.

Police are now issuing a warning of their own after a woman who says she was followed for an hour at about 12:30 a.m. Friday morning a short drive away at Bloor and St. Clarens came forward to police.

"She went for a walk, and she was walking a dog, for about an hour, and throughout the walk the van kept making appearances wherever she went," Constable David Hopkinson told CTV News Toronto.

"She spoke to an officer, we took it seriously, and we're warning people of this, asking people to check their dashcam footage, talking to people in the area," he said.

One of the posts, on Twitter and Instagram, described a second-hand account of an incident where a group of four men pulled a woman inside a red van near Dundas and Bathurst.

Another post had a picture, claiming to show the van itself. 

Hopkinson said Toronto police didn’t receive any reports of a kidnapping but pored over their occurrence reports to find a possible match when they saw the kidnapping warnings online.

When the new report of a woman being followed by an "older red van" came in, that’s when police made their public warning, Hopkinson said.

The warning is in a tradition started in Toronto itself, after a woman known as ‘Jane Doe’ was sexually assaulted in the 1980s by a man police knew was on the loose — but didn’t warn the public about, said Ryerson University’s Farrah Khan.

"There has been great advocacy by survivors of sexual assault in Toronto," she said, adding that the responsibility to make a community safer rests with everyone.

"People have a right to know what’s happening. It's not that we want to alarm people, but they need to make informed decisions," she said.

Alicia Wright, who lives near Dundas and Bathurst, said she saw the warnings on social media.

"Every so often you get something on Instagram and it blows up," she said. But she said she resisted being afraid, instead choosing to push for social programs that could make change by giving any would-be assailants a better purpose.

"There's always going to be individuals making anti-social moves. I don't want to respond by becoming personally more fearful of walking around my neighbourhood," she said.

Khan said there are examples of programs that men can take to become more aware of how to approach women, including a Zoom webinar called "Curiosity Labs: Flirting and Sexting" that looks to give men a new way to approach women and ditch the sexist narratives they may have been taught.

"It gives men an opportunity to rewrite the scripts they've been living with their whole lives. We feed men these sexual scripts and this is a great way to find out how to change," Khan said.