Canadian Women’s Foundation launches course on how to respond to distress gesture

One year since a hand signal was created as a way for victims of abuse to discreetly ask for help, the Canadian Women’s Foundation has found few are well prepared to respond.

The foundation has now launched a free course to teach people how to support someone facing gender-based violence.

The Signal for Help was invented by the Canadian Women’s Foundation as a way for people trapped inside violent homes during the coronavirus lockdown to silently indicate over a video call that they are at risk of abuse. It has been credited for possibly saving the life of a missing girl travelling through Kentucky.

The hand gesture involves tucking your thumb to your palm and covering it with the rest of your fingers.

“We’ve seen at least six cases of the signal for help being used in situations of violence against women in particular,” said Andrea Gunraj, Vice President of Public Engagement at the foundation.

But a recent survey by the foundation flagged that only one in six people in Canada are very confident that they would know what to say or do.

“If it’s in a public situation, you don’t know that person, you just see it in a window, you just see it in a moving vehicle, chances are that person is in immediate danger and the best thing to do is call emergency services,” Gunraj told CityNews in an interview. “But more often I think that it would happen in a Zoom call, it would happen with somebody that you know.”

That’s where the course comes in. It consists of six modules exploring how to reach out and communicate safely to the person experiencing abuse. There are opportunities to practice your responses in different scenarios and learn how to reframe your words away from judgement.

The course takes about one hour to complete, but is designed so that you take it at your own pace and pick and choose which topics you want to know more about.

“It’s designed to be really quick to give you information that you can use immediately,” explained Gunraj. “We already have 40,000 people signed up in Canada, I want to see that go to 100,000 and beyond.”

The launch of the course coincides with the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women. While the pandemic has been linked to a spike in domestic violence, the trend has continued since lockdowns lifted.

According to the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability, 173 women and girls were violently killed mostly by men in Canada in 2021. Nearly half were killed in their own home.

“Sixty-four per cent of people in Canada say they know a woman who’s been abused,” said Gunraj. “Clearly we have a role to play.”

To take the course, you can visit the foundation’s website.