SAIT starts program to strengthen support for victims of sexual violence

SAIT's partnership with CCASA it the organizations first collaboration with a post-secondary institution.

SAIT and Calgary Communities Against Sexual Abuse have created a new initiative to broaden awareness about sexual violence on campus and offer students counselling and support when they need it.

Representatives from both institutions made the announcement at SAIT Polytechnic on Tuesday and officials say the goals of the initiative are awareness, education and prevention.

CCASA will make its counsellors available to conduct training sessions for staff and students and they will also help establish a policy on sexual violence.

“This partnership gives us access to counsellors who specialize in sexual assault. It gives us expertise at crafting safe policy about assault. It gives us education sessions for employees and it gives further voice to this issue overall, not just for the SAIT community but for all Calgarians,” said SAIT’s VP of Academic, Brad Donaldson.

“One thing with the relationship with CCASA that we’re doing is we’re extending and augmenting our counselling services for students. So we already have a very effective counselling process here but we’re just extending that by bringing in the industry experts. We’re bringing a lot of knowledge and experience with an industry leader onto our campus so they’ve already begun to do education sessions to staff and the residents, to security staff, they will be doing sessions with our athletes and our athletic teams as well as to employees around campus,” said Michael Sondermann, SAIT's Associate Registrar.  “We’ve got a policy on sexual assault and sexual violence that’s in the works. It, I think in many ways, will be unique across Canada once it finally comes out so we’re utilizing them all across campus and our campus is really open to them to come with their expertise and their knowledge.

SAIT officials say they have been working for a while to put something in place to offer more support to victims of sexual assault and that the initiative was high on their list of priorities.

“There were a group of people that got together and probably earlier this year, late winter, early spring, and we sat around talking about some of the things that we could do to improve the life on campus and this was the number one thing that jumped out at us and we’ve been thinking for some time that this was an initiative that we needed to take,” said Sondermann.

Only a handful of campus sexual assaults are reported each year because in many cases people are afraid to come forward and SAIT and CCASA hope the new initiative will work to change that.

“We want to ensure our campus community has the support and resources needed to cope with assault,” said Donaldson. “These employees are here for students and are ready to listen. Offer resources and support.”

“One of the things that we learned in our research was an awful lot of people don’t report it simply because of the lack of certainty in the future about what happens,” said Sondermann. “One of the things we heard on campus is there’s not a lot of people prepared to have someone come forward and to say ‘hey, this has happened to me’ so how do you react? So we’re trying to give tools to both survivors and the people who’ll receive the disclosure about what to do when that happens.”

For more information and resources, visit the CCASA website HERE.