I was honoured to collaborate on this guide with Rameesha Qazi along with Digna, The Canadian Centre of Expertise on the Prevention of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in creating this new guide, “Supporting Survivors of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse: A how-to Guide for Creating Support Resources.” It can be accessed here.
This guide will give organizations tools they need to prepare to support survivors of sexual exploitation and abuse, and sexual violence, before an incident occurs. Our launch took place yesterday with over 65 international participants from organizations of various sizes, and it was inspiring to hear how these folks will be using and sharing this guide to make their organizations safer for survivors of sexual violence to come forward and receive support.
We developed this knowing that survivors may go to anyone in the organization, and wanted to develop a tool so that everyone in your organization has a grasp on what to do when someone comes forward with an allegation or seeking support following an act of sexual violence.
We wanted this guide to close the gap on implementing support policies and procedures particularly in different country contexts where you may be sending vulnerable staff or working with communities.
By using this guide, your organization will hopefully have a solid foundation for in-country support for survivors.
It is a free resource that we encourage you to use now. It has many potential uses. Most notably it can be used to help you and focal points create country-specific survivor support guides and resource lists for different country contexts in which you work. The guide also gives you crucial tips on how to operationalize survivor support, so it can be used as a tool to help with your gender equality or annual planning to embed survivor support work into your projects/teams and budgets. It also provides good guidance for those such as focal points or others on how to develop plans to support survivors, and also can be used as a good practice benchmark from which you can review your existing survivor support resources.
Drop me a line if you need support in your organization with sexual violence prevention, and survivor support policies!
