Tag: sex work

2019 Bi-Monthly Update Series: January/February

New on Clicklaw

To keep you informed, here are some highlights of changes and updates made to Clicklaw in January and February:

Jan-Feb | Mar-Apr | May-Jun | Jul-Aug | Sep-Oct | Nov-Dec

Multi-lingual Phone Line for Employment Standards
by BC Employment Standards Branch

This multi-lingual phone line for the Employment Standards Branch offers real-time information about employment rights in more than 130 languages. Employment information will be available for both workers looking to understand their rights and employers wanting to understand their legal obligations. Translators will stay with the caller on the phone to help them get to the information they need. This service is available as a trial to March 31, 2019.

Disability Alliance BC

Legal Services Society

People’s Law School

Dial-A-Law is now a service of People’s Law School. It features free information on the law in British Columbia in over 130 topic areas. The information is reviewed by lawyers and updated regularly. Dial-A-Law was previously operated by the Canadian Bar Association, BC Branch. A few of the scripts are:

Tenant Survival Guide
by Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre (TRAC)

New, revised edition. Available on Clicklaw Wikibooks. Compared to a PDF, the Wikibook is easier to read on screen, fully searchable, and hyperlinked to key forms and resources. It can also be downloaded as an EPUB – a popular e-book standard – and read on an e-reader, tablet or mobile device. This plain-language guide offers tenants a basic understanding of residential tenancy law in BC. It is designed to educate readers on their rights and responsibilities, and help prevent or resolve any problems they may encounter during their tenancy.

Legal Clinic for Sex Workers
by PACE Society

In partnership with the Law Students’ Legal Advice Program and Law Students for Decriminalization & Harm Reduction, we provide free legal advice and representation for sex workers who cannot afford a lawyer. This is a drop-in pilot project currently operating every second Wednesday from January 16th – March 13th 2019 from 5:30 – 7:30 pm.

Pension Division Review Project
by British Columbia Law Institute

This project will make recommendations to reform the law of pension division on spousal breakdown under part 6 of the Family Law Act. Pensions are a complex type of property to divide fairly between spouses, so the law applying to pension division must be regularly reviewed and kept up to date. This project also allows BCLI to build on past work involving pension division.

Health Care Consent, Aging and Dementia: Mapping Law and Practice in BC
by Canadian Centre for Elder Law

The Canadian Centre for Elder Law (“CCEL”), in collaboration with the Alzheimer Society of British Columbia (“The Society”), is embarking on a project which examines the law, policy and practice of consent to health care in the context of aging and dementia. This 16-month project funded by the Law Foundation of British Columbia will involve extensive comparative legal research on informed consent and interrelated areas of the law, as well as community and key stakeholder consultation. The work will be informed by an expert interdisciplinary advisory committee and will culminate in a report identifying areas for law and practice reform and at least one plain language educational resource on health care consent rights.

2018 CEDAW Report Card
by West Coast LEAF

West Coast LEAF’s 10th annual CEDAW Report Card grades BC on nine issues impacting women’s human rights, including child protection, a new section this year. The Report Card assesses BC’s record in 2018 in relation to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

Stay informed:

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Visualizing Data for Legal Advocacy

Community posts

by Peter Kim, Communications & Digital Engagement Manager, Pivot Legal Society

Pivot Legal Society’s mission is to target and remove systemic barriers to justice for communities affected by poverty and social exclusion. We do this through strategic litigation, advocacy, and public education and outreach to empower those affected by homelessness, police violence, people engaged in sex work, and individuals who use substances.

Winning the court of public opinion

As a legal advocacy organization, our most pressing battles to advance the rights of disenfranchised communities are fought in the courtrooms of law; but in today’s digital age, where the flow of information is never-ending, we strive for change in the court of public opinion as well. We do this through our use of data as a powerful visual tool to convey meaning in an accessible manner.

Making sense of data using interactive infographics

Our four campaign areas—sex work, drug policy, homelessness, and police accountability—are richly supported by data sets and research that remains, in large part, inaccessible from mainstream consumption. Pivot translates this information into a meaningful form to enhance its communications campaigns: interactive infographics.

Click on the image to view the interactive infograph
Click on the image to view the interactive infograph

We use data to tell a story, be it the dire urgency of the current overdose epidemic or ways in which police enforcement interferes with public health efforts. Interactive infographics deliver meaning instantly. Where a paragraph of words struggles to convey its message in minutes, a graph or chart can effortlessly deliver meaning within seconds.

 

Click on the image to view the interactive infographic
Click on the image to view the interactive infographic

This is significant because of the way in which people consume information in the social media age. Words alone often fail to register because of shortened attention spans and a propensity to rapidly scroll on our smartphones. We have become an audience spoiled by choice and quantity. Infographics are that visual aid to capture the interest of the easily distracted and draw them in.

 

Click on the image to interact with the graph on Pivot Legal Society's website
Click on the image to interact with the graph on Pivot Legal Society’s website

Increasing online engagement

We have seen a measurable impact in the way our visuals have engaged our online audience. This blog post on the scale of British Columbia’s overdose crisis and harm reduction efforts had an average “time on page” value of 6:38 seconds—an eternity by online standards.

Plotting a harm reduction map

Click on a location to learn more about the site. Zoom in and out to get a better view.

Pivot has created one of the first harm reduction maps of its kind in Canada, plotting the locations of all Health Canada-approved supervised consumption sites and many of the country’s overdose prevention sites. The content has received over 30,000 impressions so far and has been shared with other health service providers.

Using interactive infographics as a tool for legal advocacy

The innovative yet disruptive forces of the internet are forcing industries to evolve. The news media and brick and mortar retail are two such examples where adaptation isn’t an option, but rather an imperative for survival.

To a lesser degree, how we communicate and engage our community of supporters and the public more generally must also adapt to compete in the marketplace of information, already a crowded space where the strength of content alone isn’t enough. Interactive infographics are just one tool we use to give us the edge and help us achieve our strategic objectives to improve the lives of Canada’s most marginalized people.

Stay Informed with Pivot Legal Society:

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