What You Can Do

There are specific things we can all do to help prevent and eliminate sexual and domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking. Below are suggestions specific to who you are, your demographics and your employment field and position. Thank you so much for joining us in our mission to prevent and eliminate sexual and domestic violence.

• Educators
• Faith Leaders
• Health and Social Service Providers
• Law Enforcement Officers
• Men
• Parents
• Policy Makers
• Reporters and News Media
• Women
• Youth
• Youth-Focused Community Leaders

Everyone can also:

• Donate to your local program, state coalition, or a national organization directly.
• Donate and benefit an organization by choosing the organization as the organization you benefit when shopping on AmazonSmile.com or at Dillons or Kroger grocery store.
• Contact your local program to see if the program’s staff might need volunteers or donated items.
• Read about sexual and domestic violence, prevention, stalking, and more on our website to increase your knowledge and awareness.

• Learn about evidence-based materials that are right for your school both in the classroom and after school.
• Advocate for resources for evidence-based materials based on gender equity.
• Seek professional development and training for implementing healthy relationship education in a safe school environment.
• Learn about peer mentoring programs and after school programs that promote healthy relationships and respect.
• Develop a safe school and a concurrent school plan that includes victim-supportive interventions.
• Support and implement school policies that address building healthy and respectful relationships.
• Encourage youth to take leadership roles and treat the youth you know with respect.

• Encourage the congregation to work for peace.
• Pray and speak for peace and respect in your congregation and in your community. Establish a norm of nonviolence.
• Mentor youth to promote respect.
• Teach a healthy relationship curriculum to youth and adults in your congregation.
• Find and teach passages in your book of faith that exemplify respectful relationships.
• Provide forums and opportunities for youth to speak up about ending violence and promoting respect.
• Actively work with community collaborations and ecumenical councils to end domestic, teen dating, and sexual violence.

• Encourage and provide resources to parents to discuss healthy relationships with their children.
• Connect youth to community members and programs that address nonviolence and promote respect.
• Advocate for evidence-based primary prevention programming in schools and communities.
• Participate in community collaborations to work towards ending relationship violence.
• Be familiar with or start your local SANE program.

• Encourage bystander and early intervention, and build prevention partners.
• Let youth and other community members know how to prevent violence before it ever starts.
• Be an effective bystander for community members and colleagues to help prevent sexual and domestic violence.
• Participate in community planning and safe school planning.
• Be a positive role model.
• Build relationships with youth in your community.
• Enhance the role of the school resource officer to include school-based sexual and domestic violence prevention initiatives and programming.
• Support a work culture and personal lifestyle that promotes respect and safety.
• Enforce legal consequences for perpetration.
• Ensure that your department has effective enforcement policies to address perpetration with consistent implementation and response by all officers.

• Build and promote relationships based on respect, equity, and equality.
• Have the strength to ask for help.
• Be a respectful role model for younger men and women.
• In your intimate and professional relationships, share decision making and power.
• Bring together male and female allies in your community to develop community-based solutions.
• Respect diversity and the rights of those around you.
• Advocate for federal, state, local and organizational policy change to increase equality and accountability.
• Be an effective bystander by always responding to disrespectful comments as though the target of the comment was your mom, sister, daughter, or wife.
• Create a safe and respectful environment by refraining from the use of degrading references, jokes, gestures and comments.
• Do not patronize businesses that promote gender inequity or degrade women.

• Ensure that the middle school and high school in your community is teaching a curriculum about promoting healthy relationships.
• Never assume children’s relationships are free of sexual or domestic violence. Ask questions.
• Know about healthy relationship skills and practice often with your children.
• Role model healthy relationships and encourage open communication.
• Join community efforts working to prevent violence in your community.
• Advocate for policy and programs that stop violence before it starts.

• Visit and interact with your local prevention and intervention sexual and domestic violence programs and service providers to learn more about the issues, and local prevention efforts.
• Initiate and support policy decision-making based on promising and evidence-based prevention practices in collaboration with community partners.
• Prioritize resources for teen dating violence, domestic violence, and sexual violence prevention.
• Endorse initiatives that create a peer culture for youth that promotes respect.
• Support legislation that ensures healthy relationships and social and emotional learning based on gender equity.
• Hold a town hall meeting on preventing sexual and domestic violence among your constituency.

• Identify myths that typically surround sexual and domestic violence, and be sure not to unintentionally promote them.
• Let your community know what resources are available. Be sure to include information on your local service provider.
• Be sure that sources include advocates and experts.
• Push authorities for solutions – what has shown to be effective means of addressing and preventing these crimes? Are we doing those things here? If not, why?
• Be precise in descriptions of sexual and domestic violence, while protecting victim identity.
• Look beyond criminal justice. What happens to a family when sexual and/or domestic violence happens? What happens a year later? What happens to schools, religious congregations, or other community institutions? How do these consequences help us understand sexual and domestic violence, and what to do about it?
• Pursue stories that examine the social, cultural, political, and economic aspects of sexual and domestic violence.
• Visit KCSDV’s Newsroom and KCSDV’s sign-up for news alerts.

• Become involved in efforts to prevent sexual and domestic violence and encourage others to do the same.
• Talk with your sons about healthy masculinity and what it means to be a strong man in a healthy relationship.
• Mentor young women to support them in professional development.
• Do not tolerate disrespect and violence within your family and community. Be an effective bystander by always responding to disrespectful comments.
• Talk with your children about gender stereotypes of women and men (e.g., on television, in songs, toys for boys and girls). Help your children understand what an equitable and respectful relationship looks like.
• Support leadership development among girls and women.
• Support policies that promote equal pay for equal work and other forms of economic justice for girls and women.
• Advocate for federal, state, local and organizational policy change to increase equality and accountability.

• Learn what a respectful romantic relationship is.
• Treat others with respect.
• Strengthen your leadership skills.
• Stand up against disrespect and violence in your school and community.
• Ask a teacher to help you create a club or group to promote respect in relationships.
• Get help if there is abuse or violence in your family. Talk to a trusted adult.
• Talk to your friends about respect.

• Define what youth leadership looks like in your organization.
• Encourage and support youth to take leadership roles in promoting healthy relationships and healthy communities.
• Treat youth with respect and show them that they are valued.
• Talk with youth about respecting women and girls in their own culture and other cultures in the community.
• Listen to youth and provide resources for help.
• Integrate relationship teachable moments into your group, work, or congregation.
• Work on projects with youth that develop leadership skills to promote healthy relationships.
• Discuss relationships openly with youth and other adults.
• Do not tolerate disrespect and violence within the community.

Last Updated on Jul 23, 2020