SIAC was formed in 2016 to address gaps in community knowledge, services and supports for victims of domestic violence and strangulation.
Primary Goals and Strategies:
1. Increase victim safety
- Through consistent strangulation identification and response.
- Through victim awareness of risks, individual safety plans and supports.
2. Increase offender accountability
- Through improved investigation and evidence gathering, use of appropriate criminal charges, prosecution, and programming.
3. Raise awareness and educate
- The community stakeholders and those working with victims on the prevalence of strangulation in domestic violence and the risks associated with strangulation.
4. Advocate to effect formal systems change
- To develop local and provincial policies and standard data collection
- To support create a consistent community response to strangulation identification
5. Build a Community of Practice by fostering interagency and cross-discipline connections and partnerships
This will be accomplished in phases:
Phase 1 Community Engagement
- Identify key stakeholder groups and create an engagement plan to discuss the negative physical and psychological impacts of strangulation on the victim and the alignment of SIAC to their programs and services
- Implement an outreach strategy to create awareness of the work of SIAC and foster buy-in for a coordinated community response to strangulation.
- Begin to build a Community of Practice of supporting organizations
- Undertake data collection as it relates to Domestic Violence and Strangulation
Phase 2 Specialized Training
- Secure funding to train committee members and key community stakeholders
- Train SIAC members and key stakeholders through the Advanced Course on Strangulation Prevention by The Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention (TISP).
- The TISP model is to train multidisciplinary community teams in all aspects of strangulation prevention including current research, medical assessment, and recommendations, criminal investigations, community education and engagement, etc. and then have the team development goals and strategies to meet the needs specific to their community.
Phase 3 Building Edmonton’s Response
- Goal setting and strategizing to further develop the Edmonton response
- Continue to build a Community of Practice of supporting organizations
- Designing of an evaluation framework
- Develop more local experts through training of community advocates including police, medical personnel, children’s services workers, social workers, corrections, etc.
- This training could be either targeted to specific groups and their needs (policing, medical/nursing, shelters, community programs, etc.) or a more general training such as the one already offered in our community.
- The training could be led by community experts or by bringing TISP faculty to Edmonton for a one-day training
- Developing materials and marketing tools (brochures, posters) to support community education: victims, family members, media (journalists, TV, electronic news, etc.), and the community at large
- Develop tools and programming to support
- addressing the physical and psychological injuries experienced by victims and children exposed to DV and strangulation
- response and programming for offenders.
- Develop standardized data collection on the prevalence of strangulation to inform our community response.
- Advocate for systems changes that supports the consistent identification and response to strangulation in relation to domestic violence.
- Establish Edmonton as a centre for excellence in Strangulation Prevention
Phase 4 Advocate for Formal Systems Change
- Establish Edmonton as a centre for excellence in Strangulation Prevention
- Secure funding for the recruitment of a SIAC coordinator and to run a one year pilot
- Advocate for and support efforts that promote systems (i.e a specific offence for strangulation and national data collection) to advance the consistent identification and response to strangulation in relation to domestic violence within Edmonton, within the Region and Nationally.