Status of Women committee  In terms of what we could do specifically, it would be to invest some more dollars towards sexual assault supports, knowing that, statistically, the rates of sexual violence are significant.

Status of Women committee  That's a great question, and it's something that sits really heavily with all of us. We know we need to be serving those girls. I will say that we do have a limited Public Safety grant, through the federal government, to focus a little bit more on human trafficking and sexual v

Status of Women committee  Yes. We work really closely with a lot of our community partners, so if people need counselling, they come to us or we refer out. Then we do a lot of meeting people where they're at. Jordanne specifically does a lot of accompaniment of individuals who are navigating the legal sys

Status of Women committee  That's a great question. I think it's something that's so important. If we think about the mental health of those of us who are the people serving the clients, that needs to be at the forefront. Unfortunately, with so much uncertainty in terms of budgets and things like that, pe

Status of Women committee  That's a great question. Thank you. I think the biggest piece is prevention education at a really young age. Right now, for example, we at the centre are getting to minor hockey associations to start that training right at the age of six. We're also working with coaches and pare

Status of Women committee  The prevention education team at our centre—and across most of the sexual assault centres—is always looking at current research and trying to implement those changes and be a part of some of those implementations. We're consistently looking for new ideas, for how we can make this

Status of Women committee  Yes, it's certainly a risk factor. We see many clients who come to us because of sexual assault that was perpetrated on them through social media or through texting photos and things like that. It's certainly a huge concern, and as we as a community get more technology, it contin

Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  A big focus that we have at the centre is prevention education. Again, there are sort of two parts to our services. One is providing counselling services and case management to survivors. The other is prevention education. Really, we do things like bystander intervention and we t

Status of Women committee  Yes. Similar to what Debbie and Jaime stated, we need to educate people on the effects of misogyny and the patriarchy, making sure that those things are kind of at the forefront because, again, when we look at it, every single person is affected by sexual violence. If we're livi

Status of Women committee  Absolutely not. If we look at just the sexual assault centres in Ontario, many of our centres haven't seen an increase in funding since the 1990s. With the #MeToo movement, for example, we saw rates of people requesting our services heighten, but we haven't been able to figure ou

Status of Women committee  Right now, with the way we're funded, out of our core funding, that includes only four staff. I can pay only four staff under the core model. However, with a bunch of grants we chase—we are always asking for money and doing all these things—we have more than that. Right now we

Status of Women committee  Yes, I think there are two folds to the #MeToo movement. One would be that women feel empowered. We can now come out and say that we're survivors of sexual violence. However, the other thing to think about is how triggering it is for individuals to hear about everyone's experienc

Status of Women committee  Thank you so much for inviting us today. My name is Brittany McMillan. I'm the executive director at the Kawartha Sexual Assault Centre, which is one of the many sexual assault centres in Ontario. Our core funding comes from the provincial government through the Ministry of Chil