That's a good segue into what I want to talk about. Because we're trying to effect social change, we try to be preventative. Unfortunately, we don't always have the time to do that.
One of the programs that we've just started is a pilot project called “Changing Male Conversations”. It's funded by the United Way of Pictou County, so it's not part of our regular funding. It was designed to engage young men in discussions around specific topics that are necessary for a young man to develop positive relationships and attitudes about women. It seeks to deal with issues on a more social level, particularly now, when technology and social media create unlimited access to information but also to images and attitudes about women that are very disturbing.
We discussed this with community service providers, we gathered research, and we designed a program for a group of young men over a period of time. We saw some community collaboration.
We also went into the schools and started talking to the young men in a social setting, and we built in an evaluation process. Our focus was primarily on positive engagement with the young men in providing information and inviting them into conversations and discussions about what typically would be considered male locker-room talk or “boys will be boys” kinds of topics. We started engaging them. We picked grade 7s and grade 11s to work with over a period of a year.
For instance, some of the topics would cover what consent is, what sexual assault is, what sexual violence is, what respect looks like in a healthy relationship, how an addiction to pornography occurs, what the effects of the addiction are, what the effects of intergenerational violence are, why there is so much male violence in society, what a male can do if he doesn't want to be violent, and how a male can respond to violent situations. Those aren't all the topics that are covered, but they're a good majority of them.
The feedback from the kids has been really phenomenal so far, and the grade 7s blew us out of the water with their openness about the conversations. We're still in the middle of that project.
I see that my one minute is up, so let me say that in terms of some of our main stumbling blocks, funding obviously has been one. We are provincially funded for two staff; however, in order to get the job done, we have to divide that into three part-time staff in order to have the extra body to at least cover the groups and to get some of the other work done.
A current problem we have, particularly with the justice system, is that crown attorneys, legal aid lawyers, judges, justices, and correctional services workers quite often will make plea bargains for men that assault women. For instance, they'll say that if the men attend, say, six sessions of the New Leaf program, they'll stay the sentence. Unfortunately for us, that undermines what we do. We believe that change needs to be longer-term, so that undermines the ability we have to work with the men and create meaningful change.
The other thing is that we don't have time to do more projects like the Changing Male Conversations project. Those preventative ones are really important to us if we're going to make a change in this, so it's about funding and time.
The other thing I wanted to add is that we now have a website. It's www.newleafpictoucounty.ca. We put the “pictoucounty” in because I think there's the NewLeaf airline now, and we were getting too many hits from people wanting to fly somewhere.