Just to summarize the last point, we looked at how vulnerable young people seek help for their mental health. Really, stigma and self-stigma continue to be strong barriers. We feel that young women exposed to or experiencing cyber-violence would have increased feelings of self-stigma and stigma in terms of seeking help for that issue.
We're just beginning to understand the experience and effects of cyber-violence. Mental health professionals, however, are coming face to face with the effects of this in their work with young people. To make sure clinical practice is rooted in each experience, there should be support for researchers and professional bodies to continue to develop their understanding of the clinical implications of cyber-violence, and to develop practice guidelines regarding this issue.
Young women who have experienced violence and cyber-violence need access to both evidence-based debriefing techniques as well as ongoing therapy, but they rarely have access to what they need. There is an urgent need for access to mental health services for all Canadians in a mental health crisis. This is a story that anyone can tell if they've tried to access mental health services.
Public services are limited, wait times are extraordinary, and private services are expensive and limited as well. For vulnerable young people, mending without a primary consistent caregiver, the challenge of accessing services often means going without.
I'm a mental health advocate, and I've also worked for decades in government at the provincial and federal levels.
I'm also the parent of a child with significant mental health needs, and I fight every day of the week to access the services that he needs. I often wonder what happens to young people who don't have that person who can play that role in their life. That's the case for many of the people we think of in our network, so we can all imagine that they slip through the cracks. They're not getting the mental health services they need.
We also want to highlight to the committee the challenge to think beyond schools for education about cyber-bullying and violence. The participants before us also spoke to that need as well. For many young people, school-based education and programs are a great start. They will reach the majority of young people, and we would emphasize they need to be youth-led to be most effective.
For vulnerable young people, they often have a tenuous connection to the formal health school system or aren't in school at all, so community-based services play a more crucial role in their lives. They provide everything from shelter, food, housing, to programs like drop-in support, peer support, and art and recreation therapies. Imagine what you would need to know, or how you would react if you have 15 minutes with a young person at a drop-in group setting. There's no guarantee they're coming back the next day or the next week, and they disclose their experiences with cyber-violence to you.
How can you respond? How can you respond in a way that supports a young person and their mental health, but at the same time against a backdrop of the young person being concerned about housing, food, access to employment, and access to education?
This is what we ask the youth workers to do on a daily basis. Youth workers often have a privileged and trusted position with vulnerable young people, and will receive disclosures of violence and cyber-violence, but often have little recourse to respond or don't know how to respond. At the same time, organizations that provide those types of services often have their own policies that would penalize young people if they were found to be perpetrators of cyber-violence. Obviously, what would work better in the first place would be to prevent cyber-violence for these types of situations.
We had a look with our members in terms of what types of programs they offer in terms of prevention in addressing cyber-violence. Although we haven't been able to do an exhaustive review, it seems that most of the time it's on an ad-hoc basis, so most organizations don't have their own in-house programs, and they seek the support of other organizations who have programs and bring them in.
As we think about this issue in Canada, we need to think about how to address the most vulnerable young people where they're at, which is often with community-based services, and how we can support community organizations to have the resources they need to address the issue.
We aren't justice experts, but we would like to raise some of our concerns in conversations around sanctioning unacceptable sexual online behaviour. Some cyber-bullying and violence policies have the potential to drive the behaviour underground. The previous participants noted that youth are reluctant to or won't report problems, because they feel they've been in violation of a cyber-bullying or cyber-violence policy, or their concerned about losing their access online.
We're also concerned about vulnerable young people, such as racialized young people, and their connection with the education and justice system.
A final plea is from our researchers in our network for adequate funding to continue to gather information about this trend, so that we can respond with appropriate policies and programs.
I'd like to turn it to Alicia now.