London city council unanimously supported a plan from Mayor Matt Brown and ANOVA to address sexual violence in the city by joining the UN Women Safe Cities program
The initiative focuses on the issue of sexual violence and harassment against women, specifically in public spaces.
The effort will be led by ANOVA, an organization that provides safe places, shelter, support, counselling, and resources for abused women.
“ANOVA is an organization with 80 years of experience and expertise in this area. One in three Canadian women will experience sexual assault in their lifetime. London is not immune to that,” said Mayor Matt Brown. “ANOVA has also answered over 1,000 calls on their sexual assault crisis line and has served over 750 individual survivors. From my perspective I feel very confident that this is the group to lead.”
Brown says ANOVA may be at the head of the initiative, but adds it’s a community effort.
“They’re not going to do it alone. There’s going to be many other community agencies working hand in hand as they move forward to be one of Canada’s first ‘safe cities.’ This is phenomenal work, and there’s a lot of work ahead. I’m sorry that we have to do this work in our community, but as a community, we’re going to stand together and make sure it gets done,” said Brown.
ANOVA will now create a steering committee of experts that will report back within a year with a list of recommendations to work toward obtaining a UN Safe Cities designation.
According to the UN Women’s website, the program aims to end violence against women and girls.
“It is the first-ever global program that develops, implements, and evaluates tools, policies and comprehensive approaches on the prevention of and response to sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence against women and girls across different settings,” the website stated.
The program spans more than 20 cities all over the world.
Winnipeg and Edmonton are the only other cities in the country to participate in the program.
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