Learning is Healing: “When we know better, we do better”—Saskatchewan Sexual Violence Education Init

A literature review and environmental scan helped to identify the content and context of existing sexual violence education programming, outline present inequities, as well as the extent of current efforts to address the forms of ignorance that maintain them. [...] The Need for a Common Comprehensive Sexual Health Education Program The literature review confirmed that comprehensive curricula in school- based sexual health education programs are associated with both the promotion of healthy relationships and the prevention of sexual and intimate partner violence. [...] When participants across communities were asked to consider the needs of preschool, primary, secondary, post-secondary, employment, and retirement life stages, together with the needs of specific minoritized groups, they produced profiles of needs and expectations that helped the team to construct a customizable sexual violence educational framework, a key goal of this project. [...] While targeted groups experience the deepest harms, the cultivation of callousness among the privileged and the downtrodden is an enduring form of self- and mutual harm that diminishes the humanity of all parties complicit with or directly involved in the reproduction of violence. [...] FRAMING NEXT STEPS Our thanks On behalf of the Sexual Assault Services of Saskatchewan and the Community University Institute for Social Research, we want to thank all 228 participants across 18 Saskatchewan communities that engaged in the study titled: Preventing and Addressing Sexual Violence and the Gendered Impacts of COVID-19 through Education and Awareness.