Who we are
The Sexual Violence Prevention and Response Office (SVPRO) supports all members of the University of Waterloo campus community who have experienced or been impacted by sexual violence. This includes all students, staff, faculty, and visitors on the main campus, satellite campuses, and affiliated and federated Waterloo Institutes and Colleges.
We're here for you
You can also connect with us at: svpro@uwaterloo.ca
What we do
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Provide support for those impacted by sexual violence.
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Provide consultations to campus members who have received a disclosure of sexual violence, or have questions about available supports or institutional response pathways.
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Deliver education, training, and awareness-raising initiatives.
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Work with individuals from a trauma-informed framework and seek to embed principles of trauma-informed care and response in policies and procedures.
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Engage current legislation, literature, research, and promising practices on sexual violence response and prevention.
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Consult with, and prioritize the lived experiences of those impacted by sexual violence.
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Evaluate and measure institutional interventions addressing campus sexual violence – engage in data collection and analysis, and utilize findings to identify trends, gaps, and recommendations for future directions.
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Build strong collaborations with campus partners, Kitchener-Waterloo community organizations, and provincial and federal networks of those addressing gender-based violence on campuses.
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Utilize a public-health approach to address sexual violence prevention, as a campus community.
We are guided by multiple approaches
Survivor-centered: empower survivors by prioritizing their rights, wishes, and well-being.
Trauma-informed: recognize the prevalence and pervasive impact of trauma on peoples' lives, promote survivors’ safety and recovery, and minimize harm from retraumatization.
Intersectional: recognize how social positionality along lines of race, Indigeneity, class, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship status, and other social locations inform experiences of power, oppression, and privilege.
Anti-oppressive: seek to acknowledge and dismantle intersectional systems of oppression that produce structural and everyday inequities.
Evidence-based: consult scholarship, grey literature, and institutional evaluation research to deliver effective service delivery and programming.
Interdisciplinary: utilize multiple fields of study, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies to inform sexual violence response and prevention.
Collaborative: emphasize collaboration across different campus and community groups to meaningfully advance the work of sexual violence response and prevention.
