PEARS stands for Prevention, Empowerment, Advocacy, Response, for Survivors.
The PEARS Project is a grassroots, trauma-informed coalition that provides support and resources to survivors of sexual violence across the University of Toronto. Founded and led by survivors, PEARS recognizes survivors as leaders in the field and the voices which need to be heard to implement policy change.

The University of Toronto created the Sexual Violence Prevention and Support Centre after Bill-132 Sexual Violence and Harassment Action Plan Act (Supporting Survivors and Challenging Sexual Violence and Harassment) was passed in 2016. A number of complaints have been raised surrounding the University of Toronto Sexual Violence Prevention and Support Centre (SVPSC), in regards to response time, practices and procedures, accessibility, and consistency. Examples of institutional betrayal highlight that students will not use the resource if they perceive the centre to be harmful or a barrier to support.

In order to better understand the space needed for improvement and the ways it is supporting the community and to enact the PEARS mandate, we wish to hear from those who have accessed the Centre. This is done in the form of an anonymous survey so community stakeholders' experiences will be the basis of proposed recommendations. The goal is to collect accurate data to gain a realistic, statistical picture of how sexual misconduct is handled by the SVPSC at the University of Toronto and the university’s inaction to support and protect survivors, and penalize perpetrators.
The research questions for this project adhere to survivor-centric principles, as such the work is survivor and student-driven, trauma-informed, anonymous, feminist-oriented, anti-colonial, and intersectional. As the primary stakeholders and users of the SVPSC, student-driven consultation and data collection are imperative for growing trust in this university service.
We also acknowledge that thinking about experiences of institutions dismissing incidents of sexual or gender-based violence can feel traumatizing and triggering. Included in our survey is a list of resources, and our team will undergo extensive peer support training in advance through The Dandelion Initiative.


A more in-depth understanding of this work and why we are doing it can be seen here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PcUE0XbGysvAqvAXUlamW0wFB1wRn9oyjSp2jQqVpJM/edit?usp=sharing