Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, honourable members.
It's a pleasure and an honour to be here today, to be invited to share a bit about promising practices from our work with men to prevent violence against women.
I'm delighted to be here among others who are doing similar work. I want to acknowledge the work of the committee and of the organizations represented here today. ln fact, we would not be doing work to prevent violence against women with men if it were not for the leadership of organizations like these.
The program MANifest change is hosted in the Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women. OCTEVAW is composed of front-line agencies that support women experiencing violence—that's victim services, women's shelters, Children's Aid, the local Elizabeth Fry Society. The work that we do with boys and men happens alongside the work of those people who are caring for and supporting women experiencing abuse, alongside the work of those offering opportunities for rehabilitation to men who have used violence, and alongside policing and criminal justice responses. It's part of this larger fabric.
As a coalition of agencies doing this kind of work, our value-added is the prevention piece. Our members are focusing on response, and there is enormous need; they are overwhelmed. It wasn't surprising for me to hear that you see 100% increase in service delivery every year. That's the case in Ottawa as well. But ultimately, we want to see an end to violence against women. Again, you brought up what does that mean, what does that look like? It could look like many things. What I'm going to do today is describe some promising practices that come out of OCTEVAW's MANifest change project, which aims to prevent violence before it even starts, or encourages men to get involved in intervening in violence when it's in the early stages.
MANifest change begins with the evidence that gender inequities are real, that gender-based violence happens in a framework of gender inequity, and that women suffer disproportionately from that violence. We recognize that as men, we ourselves experience high levels of violence, often as boys and often at the hands of other men, and that violence can be transmitted and reproduced in our relationships with women and others. We know that most violence against women is committed by men. However, the majority of men do not directly commit violence against women. What do we do with this large group of men who are well intentioned but don't know what to do?
This is where MANifest change comes in. Those of us who don't use violence directly, we are taught to look the other way for a friend, to keep our head down at work when we suspect harassment is happening, or laugh along with rape jokes in the locker room, whether or not we believe those things. For many men, they value respect and non-violence towards women. Those are the men that MANifest change seeks to engage. So what does that look like?
We launched this campaign last fall. It's only four months old. We got the conversation going with a series of 30-second video spots.
So in the interest of the cinema—