March 8, 2023

Aftermetoo, the Canadian charity that grew out of the #MeToo movement, launches new site supporting people who are being sexually harassed at work in Canada

Five years after the #MeToo movement galvanized public attention to issues of gender-based violence, today on International Women’s Day the Canadian charity Aftermetoo launches a new site, www.aftermetoo.com, supporting people who are being sexually harassed at work in Canada.

“Aftermetoo is important and necessary, because despite decades of efforts to combat workplace sexual harassment in Canada, it is still far too common and ruins far too many lives,” said Aftermetoo board chair Freya Ravensbergen, the Canadian actor who co-founded Aftermetoo. “We aspire to one day entirely eliminate gender-based violence. Until that day, we need to do everything we can to support survivors.”

“This new site is a major achievement: the first of its kind in Canada,” said Aftermetoo managing director Sue Gardner. “Aftermetoo is a comprehensive and authoritative one-stop information shop, offering people everything they need to know about the laws related to sexual harassment in Canada, as well as how to protect their career, finances, and mental health from the damage that harassment so often causes.”

“TC,” said Deputy Minister of Labour Sandra Hassan. Employment and Social Development Canada is a major funder of the Aftermetoo project through its Workplace Harassment and Violence Prevention Fund program, along with the Ministry of Justice, through its Justice Partnership and Innovation Program.

To develop the site, Aftermetoo surveyed more than 2,000 sexual harassment survivors in Canada to find out what information they wanted and needed, and then recruited experts to provide it. Every article was drafted by experts, copy-edited and fact-checked, and reviewed again for accuracy. Dozens of sexual harassment researchers, lawyers, and mental health experts contributed their time and expertise to this process, many for free.

Aftermetoo is 100% Canadian content and fully bilingual. It contains 176 articles in English and French, totalling 620,000 words. The information on the site is customized by legal jurisdiction, with the site automatically providing the correct information for the user’s location.

The site also contains:

  • dozens of first-person accounts of harassment, enabling people to learn from the experiences of others
  • the first-ever national coordination with 211.org, offering custom-curated lists of links to community resources offering support with sexual harassment, provided by 211.org
  • a crowd-sourced database of media and popular culture—dozens of TV shows, movies, podcasts, games, books and quizzes—that survivors recommend to other people who are being harassed

Aftermetoo is proud to be funded by the Employment and Social Development Canada Workplace Harassment and Violence Prevention Fund, the Department of Justice Justice Partnership and Innovation Program, the Law Foundation of Ontario, and individual donations. Aftermetoo is grateful to its partners on this project:  the Canadian Women’s Foundation, Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic, APTN, and Western University’s Centre for Research into Violence Against Women and Children.

About Aftermetoo:

In 2017, millions of people around the world starting using the #MeToo hashtag to talk about their experiences of gender-based violence. The #MeToo movement galvanized attention worldwide. In Canada, a small group of women in the performing arts didn’t want to let that energy dissipate, so they founded Aftermetoo, a registered Canadian charity, to create an enduring institution opposing sexual violence in this country. Aftermetoo’s goal is to create workplaces where people can go to work and not get sexually harassed. That’s it. We create the tools to achieve this. Contact: Alex Panousis at ​​[email protected]