The Southwest Region VAW Coordinating Committee (SWRCC) developed Snapshot in 2018 to help educate and engage the public and politicians in their home communities. Violence against women is not an isolated or individual problem. It is a complex social issue that impacts all citizens, and often for generations. Snapshot paints a bigger picture with statistics and stories of what is happening as a direct result of overlapping social and economic inequities. The tools have been developed and are available for any coordinating committee that wants to participate. VAWCCs can customize Snapshot to reflect their community. There is no deadline.
Use Snapshot to help the broader public understand that our success as a society should not be measured by the wealth of the few, but by how well the most socially and economically disadvantaged citizens are doing. Elected officials need to be well-informed about the pressures in their communities to keep people safe.
We want to build a bigger wave of public attention to the epidemic of femicide and violence against women, children and gender-diverse people.
The tools:
Snapshot is designed to:
- Create a snappy tool that can be used to engage and inform all levels of government about local pressures, complexity of issues and the importance of coordination and collaboration across the system. VAW committees hold an important focus on GBV-VAW in local communities
- Spark deeper discussions at VAWCCs about the collective impact of GBV-VAW on our communities
- Look at the health and wellbeing of the whole community - challenge siloed thinking
- Push up the message that GBV is a non-partisan big cost issue that impacts all Ontarians – the GBV-VAW sector is not a ‘special interest’ group
- Draw attention to the epidemic – 52 femicides in 2022, one preventable death every week
- Support the call for new investments in prevention - all levels of government. We will never move upstream without them. Communities are drowning in the crisis.
*See Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses: Femicide Reports and also the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability.
