Status of Women committee  I think that would help.

Status of Women committee  That's a really big question. I've been doing this for over a decade, and I did my Ph.D. on young people's engagement with digital culture. We really believed in the whole digital native myth, and thought that young people were going to lead the way. We thought they were doing their own thing but that they were inherently adept.

Status of Women committee  I think it could be a matter of levelling out their knowledge around digital literacy and digital gender issues. Sometimes when I go into an area with at-risk youth and they have good education and are really aware, it's amazing what their perspectives are and their position is.

Status of Women committee  Sometimes it's in the school system or sometimes it's in a really good youth centre that young people will choose to go to. The organization I work with is approached by schools, youth centres, or community organizations, usually when they have a problem to address, and usually when they need programming.

Status of Women committee  The cyber-violence project we have funding for from Status of Women Canada is for ages 15 to 25, but the organization I work with works with people from ages six to 96.

Status of Women committee  Just in my everyday work, this is my experience. I've noticed more schools and youth centres facing issues of young girls being groomed and lured online, young girls in vulnerable positions. I recently went to speak to a high school, and two students, young women, enrolled in the high school with the sole intention of grooming and luring other students out of the high school.

Status of Women committee  I do have people who are working on that. There's a computer science professor at McGill University who has a conditional grant, and he's working on creating algorithms around hate speech. I think we have to be really careful, because sometimes algorithms and the affordances of design get us into situations that we're now trying to get out of.

Status of Women committee  The most obvious one is probably MediaSmarts, which does great work providing digital literacy initiatives. There's an eGirls project, eGirls in democracy, I think, at the University of Ottawa. I think the people from those research groups have already spoken to you. I work with Technoculture, Art and Games, which is a research organization that looks at the gaming industry and that kind of thing, out of Concordia University—

Status of Women committee  No. Actually, I don't have the answer to that.

Status of Women committee  It's so new and it's so emerging that I feel when I go into schools—and we're working with a college right now that wants to become a thought leader in this area—it's such a struggle to just even name it, to get people to acknowledge it, to come up with definitions. I can't say that there's one that comes to mind that would be a leader in that area.

Status of Women committee  In my opinion, it depends. I think we need research, because we have to draw lines. We're often asking young people what they want from us, what policy they want. They're on the front lines. They're really smart, and they have a lot of knowledge. When I go into research, I often ask, “What can we do to help you?

Status of Women committee  I would say that on the ground in community organizations when I talk to youth, they often think it's normal and acceptable. I think it's about just getting the word out there to denormalize cyber-violence. This is not everyday behaviour. This is not just growing up online. We have to explain to them that this is not normal.

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. When I talk to youth, I hear that young girls would love to see that happen. They believe that theoretically, but on the ground that's not the way their lives play out. They're torn between thinking that theoretically they should feel this way and not being able to act this way because of slut shaming, revenge porn, and all of these things.

Status of Women committee  For the cyber-violence project that Status of Women Canada has just funded, everyone had to submit a needs assessment, and we all did a lot of research on that project. The findings and recommendations from those projects were on a website that Status of Women Canada created, and I think it gives a lot of information, because it's really new research from community organizations.

Status of Women committee  Yes, it's the most recent, on-the-ground, in Canada, and across the country national research.