La Ronge’s Piwapan Women’s Centre has been participating in the international 16 days of activism against gender-based violence campaign.
Friday is the last day of the movement which began on Nov. 25, and Piwapan staff wore yellow to raise awareness around suicide in the north.
Cherise Chrispen, a community support crisis intervention worker with Piwapan, said they decided to advocate against gender-based violence as well as other forms of violence that are seen in the community.
“It’s a big international campaign and it really focused on the violence that women, transgender and other vulnerable groups (face) but it’s very focused on gender,” she said. “So we took that and we kind of made it our own by not just focusing on gender-based violence, and focusing on anti-violence and really trying to draw some awareness to the types of violence that we see in this area.”
Chrispen said their goal was to raise awareness to these various types of abuse that people experience. To do this, everyone at Piwapan wore certain colours on certain days of the campaign and posted on their Facebook page what each colour meant.
“We have this agreement that we wanted to wear the colour but then we had to tell other people why we were wearing the colour (to) really generate the conversation.”
Chrispen said one of the forms of violence they advocated against was Elder abuse. On that day, they wore grey.
“With the Elders, I was talking about the home-takeovers where you have younger family members coming in who are maybe involved in gangs and drugs, and actually the Elder still lives in the household but is basically living in a home that’s been taken over by other people that are not necessarily living safe, healthy lifestyles.”
On Dec. 6, the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, Piwapan workers wore red and held a private vigil, which they are releasing videos of for the public to watch.
Other forms of violence that the Centre gave awareness to were against children and against men.
(PHOTO: Piwapan staff wore different colours on different days to raise awareness around multiple forms of violence. During the campaign, they also held a vigil and partnered with NorthSask Special Needs to create awareness on violence against disabled individuals. Photo courtesy of Cherise Chrispen and Piwapan Women’s Centre.)