SACHA and the Equity Inclusion Office are full into training volunteers and staff to get ready for Welcome Week at McMaster University.
In April, we led an hour long workshop on taking action to end rape culture. Check our highlights from our presentation two years ago. Yesterday, we completed seven of the twenty workshops that we are facilitating this week. We focused on McMaster’s Sexual Violence Response Protocol. You can read the protocol here and take a peek at highlights from the presentation here.
Today we worked with the 57 Maroons, that represent McMaster’s Students Union.
We led a short 90 minute intro to preventing sexual violence at mass gatherings with Bystander Intervention techniques.
Last year was the first time they got bystander training and the shift away from worries and fears to folks sharing strategies that they know have worked was measurable.
These are strategies that we need to learn, relearn, and practice.
How are you – as a participant or as an organizer – working to end sexual violence at mass gatherings?
If you see something sketchy happening at the bar, concert, or festival, SACHA is here to chat about ideas on how to help 24 hours a day – 905.525.4162.
We have some follow up links for today’s participants:
- Learning: To get ready to prevent sexual violence first folks need to understand that sexual violence is complex and nuanced and also work daily to unlearn all the rape myths that our culture upholds.
- We heart this video about bears (and also why ending sexual violence is everyone’s responsibility):
- The Neighbours, Friends and Families campaign has great resources on how to tell if someone is in an abusive relationship, how to tell if that relationship might be lethal, safety planning, and how to talk to abusive men.
- Jay Smooth does a great job of talking about focusing on someone’s impact and behaviour versus focusing on their intent in this INCREDIBLE video:
We’ve gotta take a nap because we’ve got twelve more presentations this week!
