Forums
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2025 Virtual Forum
This two-day Virtual Forum will take place on February 4, 2025 and February 5, 2025 from 1:00 to 4:00 pm Eastern Time.
This Learning Network Virtual Forum will explore how alternative justice practices can enhance prevention, practices, and responses within the gender-based violence (GBV) movement and sector. Forum speakers include community and organizational leaders, practitioners, researchers, and advocates working across sectors to end violence, ensure accountability and build safer, more equitable communities.
Alternative justice practices, rooted in the knowledge, traditions and care practices of Indigenous, Black, and racialized communities, include not only restorative and transformative justice, but also a range of diverse culturally grounded and community-based approaches. In the context of GBV, these practices play a crucial role in community responses, emphasizing empowerment, healing, relationships and accountability, while shifting away from punitive carceral models of justice. While alternative justice practices have, at times, been adapted or repurposed within mainstream systems, this Forum will aim to explore how these practices are deeply rooted in diverse cultural traditions and their role in challenging historical and ongoing colonial structures of power, as well as resisting broader systems and institutions of power.
Anchored in its roots, alternative justice practices offer restorative and transformative potential to prevent, respond to, and address GBV, which often stems from colonial power structures. It is important to consider reimagining how we approach justice, grounding our work in decolonized practices, with the goal of creating a more just, healing, and transformative system for addressing GBV.
This Virtual Forum will provide an opportunity to learn more about alternative justice practices within the context of GBV work in Canada. Diverse speakers will focus on the history and core principles of alternative justice practices and share the strategies, challenges and opportunities for advancing them within the GBV sector and movement. Speakers also will highlight existing and emerging alternative justice models to GBV that centre Indigenous, Black and racialized communities, offering practical tools and approaches that can be integrated into your everyday work supporting survivors, communities, and those who have done harm.
Individuals supporting those who experience GBV and working with those who have done harm will benefit from this Forum. Participants will also receive a Certificate of Participation for their Professional Development Portfolio.
Learning Objectives:
By attending this Forum, participants will enhance their:
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Understanding of the history and core principles of alternative justice practices and their role in challenging colonial structures of power
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Awareness about alternative justice models and processes to end violence within diverse contexts including lessons learned, concerns, and challenges
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Application of culturally responsive and trauma- and violence-informed responses for supporting survivors and working with those who have done harm
Stay tuned for updates, including speakers and the program schedule, coming soon here and via our mailing list!
All our resources are open-access and can be shared (e.g., linked, downloaded and sent) or cited with credit. If you would like to adapt and/or edit, translate, or embed/upload our content on your website/training materials (e.g., Webinar video), please email us at gbvln@uwo.ca so that we can work together to do so.
