Preventing violence against women and girls remains one of the biggest issues of our time.

The Communicating Equality project was designed to strengthen Canada’s efforts in the primary prevention of violence against women and girls (VAWG). VAWG is driven by gender inequalities in political and economic life, negative gender stereotyping, harmful masculinities, racism, sexism, and bystander attitudes and practices.

This project created public messaging that promotes greater understanding of, and action on, these drivers through gender transformative approaches to preventing VAWG. We drew upon the work of Our Watch in Australia and created resources for the Canadian context.

Through this process we engaged with:

  • Journalists and other communicators
  • Violence prevention organizations
  • Men’s health groups

Info Sheets and Guides:

  • Poster presentation (2024) – This poster provides an overview of the Communicating Equality project and all the resources created.

Toolkits:

An online Toolkit to support the development of gender transformative (GT) approaches to the primary prevention of violence against women and girls (2023):

  • See 5 resources describing promising GT initiatives for preventing VAWG in crucial contexts: in education, in the workplace, in sport, in the family and in faith-based contexts
  • See 2 discussion guides on 1) GT messaging overall and 2 GT messaging for organizations working with men and boys
  • One resource for the media and reporting on VAWG
  • Series of gender transformative prevention messages for social media

Reports:

Two summaries of the academic and grey literature on gender-transformative approaches to primary prevention of violence against women and girls (2023):

  • Summary of a Scoping Review of Academic Literature – English or French
  • Summary of a Scan of Grey Literature – English or French

Training:

  • Training module (2024) – Learn to create your own gender-transformative messages by exploring our training module

Find all these resources in French here. 

Visit the Communicating Equality website to learn more about this project: communicatingequality.ca