Page 4548 - Week 12 - Thursday, 26 October 2017
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
prevent violence against women, individually, in the workplace and organisationally. The event was a collaboration between community, government, business and media agencies.
In February 2012, the Canberra Rape Crisis Centre, with funding from the ACT Government, commenced the Prevention of Violence on Campus program. The program included resources designed to address the causes and consequences of sexual violence. The development of the program was informed by local student focus groups and by the findings of the National Union of Students’ Talk About It survey.
The ACT Government developed the Women’s Safety Audits Toolkit to assist organisations to identify and address women's personal safety issues when planning public events. The Audits continue to be used and will be promoted for use at ACT Government events as an action under the ACT Women’s Plan 2016-26, First Action Plan 2017-19.
The ACT Government provided seed funding for the development of a primary prevention, anti-violence, respectful relationships program. Respect, Communicate, Choose, for 8–12 year olds, builds the knowledge and skills of young people to support the development of relationships based on respect, equality and safety. The funding enabled the YWCA of Canberra to develop a program manual for educators and trainers and an information resource booklet about respectful relationships for 8–12 year olds.
Current
Gender equality and community awareness
Promoting gender equality and raising community awareness of the importance of the issue underpins the ACT Government’s approach to prevention of violence against women, including domestic, family and sexual violence. This aligns with the best international evidence.
Prevention work is ultimately about attitudinal and cultural change, which means it is long term and intergenerational. It also requires a multi-faceted approach to effect change across all parts of our community.
As part of the ACT Women’s Plan 2016-26, the Office for Women is working to embed gender analysis in ACT Government decision-making processes. Under the First Action Plan 2017-19 the ACT Government has committed to researching and developing Gender Impact Statements for use across Directorates. This will be complemented by a review of past training modules on Gender Impact Statements to develop recommendations for implementation.
To engage the community more broadly in a conversation about gender equality and ending violence against women, the ACT Government supports the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence. This is an international campaign seeking to galvanise action to end violence against women and girls. It runs from 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, to 10 December, Human Rights Day, to highlight that violence against women is a human rights abuse.
In 2016, the ACT Government participated in the 16 Days campaign, including through a social media campaign and other community activities. High profile champions of gender equality provided support to the campaign and messages distributed through social media. The ACT Government will again participate in the campaign in 2017.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video