Everyone, everywhere, absolutely needs to be aware of how trauma impacts, how we don't want to retraumatize by implementing policies in a way that is not appropriate. The policies will, hopefully, take you one step further, but you need to make sure that all the frameworks are properly applied to the procedures so as to not retraumatize people, lose trust or lose really important politicians, women who could be at the front.
You talk about different sectors. That's actually part of the work we have been doing at WomanACT. We have been going out and knocking on different doors from different sectors that are, as I'm going to call them, the “non-social services sector”, just for lack of.... I don't want to go into it specifically, but yes, especially for male-dominated workplaces, we need to start having conversations about this problem that we all have.
The statistics are there. It's very clear that there is a problem that continues to exist. We can only hope to eliminate it if we work in different areas of the spectrum. Legislation, the work that you do, is very important, but other areas of work are as crucial and critical.
I'm going to end by speaking about something that we talk about a lot at our end. It's called “climate assessments”. What that means is that when we knock on different sectors' doors.... Sometimes they actually come and knock at our door and say, “Hmm, we think we have an issue here.” We say, “Okay. How do you know?” They say, “Well, there was this complaint.” We say, “Okay, what else do you know? What else is happening in your organization?” Then we propose undertaking climate assessments. Why is that? It's because that will give a better sense of what and how big the issue is, and interventions can be tailored that are more applicable to that particular sector. That means, for example, what language do they use?
You talk about the military. You know, there are these rules of engagement that they talk about. How does that intersect or in any way align to anti-oppressive training? Maybe it doesn't—maybe not at all—but I think that it is important to start having those conversations. What are the areas where we could actually align, to some extent, to recognize that there is an issue here?
For us, for people like me who work in this sector, it's about women dying every day in Canada in the context of gender-based violence and IPV and women experiencing workplace harassment.