Team of sex assault victim support centres to oversee OHL's consent training to help with 'accountability'

A centralized team will now help Ontario Hockey League (OHL) squads enrol in the right mandatory consent and healthy masculinity training and ensure it's completed, under a new agreement between a coalition of sex assault victim support centres and the league.

CBC spoke to parties involved in this move nearly a week after the Hockey Canada criminal trial in London ended with not guilty findings.

The OHL made gender-based violence and consent training mandatory for all major junior teams about a decade ago. The league's Onside Program was developed for junior hockey teams by two sexual assault support centres in the province, with curriculum delivered to each team at the local level, by members of the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres (OCRCC).

Karley Doucette is manager of education and communications at the Sexual Assault Support Centre of Waterloo Region, which is part of the team of victim support centres that'll help oversee the Onside program. 

Previously, Doucette said, completion of the training wasn't tracked and about half of the 20 major junior hockey teams didn't actually participate every year or took different training not developed for OHL teams.  

"There have been gaps in accountability and there hasn't been any centralized oversight, so it's been impossible to ensure consistency and quality across the league," Doucette said. 

The two-hour Onside program was developed in 2008, with the OHL making it mandatory in 2016. The curriculum was distributed to OCRCC members, and each team was expected to connect with local centres, which would proceed to deliver the sessions every fall before the start of the junior hockey season. 

In recent years, however, some teams and resource-stretched sexual assault