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3 EVA BC: Best Practices
Speaker: Tracey Porteous, Ending Violence Association of BC
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Video Transcript
Jennifer Jordan: Next, I would like to introduce Tracy Porteous, Executive Director, Ending Violence Association of BC, to present on best practices in SVM policies.
Jennifer Jordan: Hi.
Tracy Porteous: Does this one work? I think I’ll use this one. And this one works, too, right?
Robynne Devine: Yeah, they both work. [inaudible 00:00:36].
Tracy Porteous: I want it do that.
Robynne Devine: Oh, you want it to be on the thing, on the main [inaudible 00:00:00:42]?
Tracy Porteous: Yeah, I just want to put the films to start with.
News Reporter: It’s the third attack on campus in as many weeks.
Police Officer: This man did manage to get his hand up her skirt, and rip at some of her clothing under her skirt, and also punched her in the face.
Police Officer: Three counts of first degree murder.
News Reporter: 18-year-old [Vendice 00:01:05] was beaten to death on the train tracks beside the trail.
Crowd: (singing)
Tracy Porteous: That’s just a small clip from a film that we did a few years ago called Be More Than a Bystander: Break the Silence on Violence Against Women. It’s a campaign that we have with the BC Lions Football Club, but I’m not going to talk about that so much today. I just like to start with a grounding of where we’re at, and I think that gender-based violence is an all too stark reality. Many people this morning, students included, talked about this being an epidemic. We’ve never seen the amount of awareness that we see now on the issue of gender-based violence on campuses and outside of campuses, on the military, the RCMP, in every culture, in every community. And I think a lot has changed over the last year.
Tracy Porteous: This year marks my 38th year of being involved in the response in BC to sexual violence. And I can say that from my first person’s perspective, I’ve seen a lot of change. We still have miles to go unfortunately. But there’s a lot that’s changed in our province. And I think it’s important that we acknowledge that. And I think CJ alluded to this in terms of giving credit to anti-violence leaders that have brought forward requests for change and lobbied for change. And I think before those voices from the anti-violence programs came forward were the voices of survivors, and I think that’s a grounding that we must all hold dear in our hearts.
Tracy Porteous: Imagine the experiences of survivors in the ’60s and ’70s who were trying to find a place to come forward to talk about the sexual violence they experienced before there were sexual assault centers, before there were community-based victim assistance programs, before there was any kind of awareness about these issues in society. We now have under the EVA umbrella 150 programs in the province of BC who are all made up of subject matter experts in the area of sexual assault and other kinds of sexual violence that people experience.
Tracy Porteous: