Sexual Assault Awareness Week 2025

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PEI Rape & Sexual Assault Centre organizes Sexual Assault Awareness Week each September with a goal to gather survivors and allies of all genders in community, creating spaces of support, healing, and learning. Each year we choose a theme that we believe meets the current moment for survivors and their communities. This year, for Sexual Assault Awareness Week's 5th anniversary, we have chosen the theme of "tech-facilitated sexual violence".

Within this theme, we hope to start and grow community conversations that focus on the trends we see in tech-facilitated sexual violence, focusing on the ways we can keep each other safe, while also providing education opportunities for those who work in the gender-based violence field, educators, parents, and more. At the same time, we also hope to create space for the empowerment, healing, and connection that online relationships can bring, from social media advocacy to online intimacy.

See below for some highlights of what you can expect this year:

March and share a meal with us at Take Back the Night, meet a new friend at book club, discuss ideas and concerns in closed-space discussion groups, or join us for a variety of other in-person events in Charlottetown and Summerside.

Community-Building

This year we have focused on adding more virtual events to our schedule, with education-focused sessions that you can join us for on your lunch break or in the evening. We also hope to share 'Calls to Action' in our promotions, and encourage allies to get involved!

At-Home Action

We are working with community partners to create new educational materials and merch that will be available at our in-person events, and will be sharing resources online to encourage continued learning on tech-facilitated sexual violence.

Resources & More

What is Tech-Facilitated Sexual Violence?

There are many other ways that technology can be used to facilitate gender-based and sexual violence, including defamation/doxing, online grooming, impersonation, and many forms of hate speech. Technology-facilitated sexual violence can also be something that begins digitally and then moves into the physical world.

Like other forms of gender-based violence, tech-facilitated sexual violence disproportionately affects some communities more than others, with members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community and Black and Indigenous women most frequently being targeted.

Technology-facilitated sexual violence can refer to a variety of behaviors, including (but not limited to):

Online Sexual Harassment:
- contacting someone online and pressuring them for a sexual interaction either digitally or 'IRL'
- engaging in online hate speech (eg: 'manosphere' content)
- spreading sexual lies or sharing sexual truths online about someone via social media
- making online/text threats or jokes about sexually assaulting someone
Image-Based Abuse:
- non-consensual distribution of intimate and/or sexual images
- creation of 'deepfake' pornography by altering images, videos, or audios using artificial intelligence
- documenting or streaming acts of sexual violence
Cyberstalking:
- using technology/social media to track someone's activities or location, or to make them feel constantly watched and afraid
Digital Manipulation & Coercion:
- sexploitation (profiting from non-consensually distributed intimate images, purchasing sexual abuse content)
- sextortion (threatening to send a sexual image or video of a person to other people if the person doesn't pay them or provide more sexual content - can also look like deadnaming or outting)

Schedule of Events

Our full schedule and registration details for events will be posted in late August. Follow us on social media to be the first to know:

Get Involved

Our team is happy to consult with anyone who has ideas, concerns, or questions about our programming.
Please reach out to us via email and we will respond as soon as we are able:

Sexual Assault Awareness Week: rachel@peirsac.org
Take Back the Night: takebackthenightpei@gmail.com

Volunteer applications will be posted here in late August.

Thank you to everyone who makes this work possible!

Sexual Assault Awareness Week aims to be for and by community. Each year, programming is organized by PEI Sexual Assault Centre based on feedback and suggestions from the previous year, and guided by members of the Sexual Assault Prevention Advisory Group, a working group under the Premier's Action Committee on Family Violence Prevention.

Thank you to our Sexual Assault Awareness Week 2025 sponsors*, especially PEI's Interministerial Women's Secretariat who provides annual funding for this project:

Thank you also to those who have partnered with us on events throughout the week:

*If your organization is interested in partnering on or sponsoring a Sexual Assault Awareness Week event, please reach out to our Community Project Coordinator at rachel@peirsac.org. Sponsor and event partner logos will be featured on our website as well as in print and digital communications.