A project by:
Welcome! The YWCA Montreal has created the Violence Free platform to support you in your sexual violence prevention, intervention, and awareness-raising efforts. As such, we hope to help ensure that everyone can work and study within educational settings that are free of sexual violence.
The mandate to prevent and respond to cases of sexual violence can often be complex. To facilitate the task, this platform offers a selection of resources carefully examined by the YWCA Montreal, designed to effectively equip intervention workers and help them save time.
Whether you are already an expert or just starting out in your role, we hope that these resources will be useful for your professional development, and for offering ready-made workshop activities to both students and staff at your educational institution.
While addressing many key issues related to sexual violence, these resources offer the groundwork for developing awareness-raising interventions relevant to your educational setting, as well as for offering suitable support to survivors of sexual violence.
As you explore the different themes and types of resources available, you will also discover essential content regarding issues experienced by specific communities. The Articles section further looks at a wide variety of topics and offers several suggestions for using the resources available on this platform within your daily work.
Our selection of resources considers:
"Navigating clearly classified resources allows us to save time, be more efficient in our work, and have quick access to accurate data. It truly takes a mental load off our mandate as intervention workers."
The Violence Free project was born with the arrival of Bill P-22.1, which aims to prevent and fight sexual violence within Quebec’s higher education institutions. Beyond the creation and consolidation of resources made available on this platform, the Violence Free project offers direct support for those hoping to improve their institution’s sexual violence policies and procedures.
To keep the platform relevant, we aim to continually add a diversity of content designed to help create a world free of gender-based violence. We invite you to browse the resources, share them with those in your community, and to work together for the same purpose!
Our youth projects and campaigns have also been widely recognized by our funders, our school and community partners, as well as by YWCA Canada. Over the years our youth initiatives have won various prizes and distinctions, such as three Thérèse Casgrain Equality Prizes, the Idéa Prize in advertising, the recognition as a peace promoting organization by the YMCA, and so forth.
Through our various youth projects, our multidisciplinary team addresses themes related to healthy relationships, consent, sexual and mental health, sexual exploitation and gender stereotypes. All our activities and workshops further adopt an intersectional approach that considers the diversity of lived experiences of our participants.
The synergy of our expertise* therefore allows us to bridge the gap between research and the reality on the ground, as well as remain alert to the needs of young Quebecers.
* social work, sexology, political science, psychology, education, cultural animation, and communication, among others.
The external resources we recommend cover a wide variety of topics surrounding sexual violence. In addition, this section includes tools specially developed by the YWCA Montreal to support intervention workers mandated to address sexual violence within higher education institutions.
Resources created by the YWCA Montreal are identified by a blue mark.
We’ve created a selection of tools and resources to help with your awareness-raising, prevention and intervention work in cases of sexual violence, and to support those involved in such situations.
Do you have any questions or comments? Do you have any resource suggestions for this platform? Contact our team!
