Good morning. My name is Karine Gagnon, and I am the organizational support and development coordinator for the Réseau des Centres d'aide aux victimes d'actes criminels, or the CAVAC Network. I am accompanied by my colleague Jackie Huet, director general of CAVAC in the Estrie region. Thank you for having us today.

The CAVAC Network's mission is to bring together all the CAVACs in the province of Quebec and to promote the needs of victims of crime, their loved ones and witnesses of such events. Our mission is also to seek out and share best practices in victimology intervention, to facilitate their harmonization, to make them known and to promote the expertise of CAVACs in this area, as well as to support the deployment of services.

Our network includes the province's 17 CAVACs, whose mission is to provide services to all victims of crime, regardless of their sex, age, gender identity and when the event occurred. These services, free of charge and confidential, are offered to everyone, whether or not the person has reported what they experienced to the authorities.

Today, we want to talk to you about certain services and specific teams that are put in place in our network to support people who are victims of gender-based violence—in other words, sexual violence and domestic violence.

When it comes to sexual violence, we act particularly in the area of sexual exploitation. We have a sexual exploitation response team of five workers across five regions of Quebec where the phenomenon is more frequent than elsewhere—in the Outaouais, Laval, Montérégie, Montreal and the Quebec City region. This response team works very actively and proactively with victims of this type of violence. It also works closely with police services that are dedicated to the fight against procuring, among other things. The teams located in these five regions also work in collaboration with each of the 17 CAVACs, which have sexual violence liaison and response officers.

These resources were put in place within the CAVACs in the wake of the #MeToo movement so that there would be at least one worker assigned to this type of victim who would, among other things, be able to follow up with victims in the five targeted regions. These people would not live in those regions, but they would like to return to their original region of residence.

As a result, there is really collaborative work and outreach to help victims get out of that environment and support them in terms of the consequences of their experience.

I will now yield the floor to my colleague Ms. Huet, who will talk to you specifically about the specialized court, the role of our liaison socio-judicial workers, as well as rapid response units in high-risk situations in the province.